A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 179: Chapter 179: The Angel of Longing I

Alice knelt in the Hall of Petitions, and the marble beneath her knees was polished so smooth it looked like still water.

Gold light fell from no sun she could name. It simply existed, the way breath existed, the way the pillars around her existed, each one carved floor to ceiling with the names of worlds she would never see with her own eyes. Rows of angels knelt in silence on either side of her, backs straight, wings folded, hands open and waiting.

Prayer threads drifted through the air above them all, thin as glass and glowing faint gold, each one carrying something a person on some distant world had been too ashamed or too broken to say out loud.

Alice reached up and let one settle into her palm.

One more night with my husband. Just one. I won’t ask for anything else.

A widow, somewhere. Alice didn’t know her face. She never did. She only knew the shape of the want, and she carried it the way she carried all of them — up, through the pillars, past the judgment courts she was never permitted to enter, toward wherever such things were decided by someone wiser than her.

Other angels let the threads pass through their hands and felt nothing.

Alice felt every one of them.

Her fingers slowed on the widow’s thread before she made herself release it upward. Her wings dipped, just slightly, and stayed dipped a moment longer than duty required. Her throat tightened, though she had no breath to catch and no air to lose.

A child wanting her mother to come home.

A dying soldier begging forgiveness he didn’t believe he deserved.

A young woman praying to be loved without being owned by the love.

A king asking for peace while terrified that peace would look like weakness.

She carried them all upward, one after another, and she was not angry. Not yet. She was only confused — confused that she had been made with hands sensitive enough to feel every one of these wants, and then told, plainly and often, that feeling them was as far as her duty went.

Heaven, beyond the Hall, was beautiful in the way a well-run kingdom is beautiful.

Silver bridges arched between towers of white stone. In the gardens, younger angels practiced their duties under patient instruction, wings still growing into their full span. Warrior angels and death-angels passed along the outer roads without glancing at petition angels like Alice, the way a general does not glance at the clerks who file his orders.

She did not resent it. She told herself she did not resent it.

She simply noticed it, the same way she noticed everything.

The first time she broke, it was small.

A dying man on some far world prayed to see his wife once more before the end — not to speak to her, not to touch her, only to feel, for one moment, the shape of her hand in his the way he remembered it.

Alice was meant to carry the prayer upward and let it be judged like any other.

Instead, she bent the dream. Just enough. Just for a breath. She gave him the weight of a hand he would never actually feel again, and he closed his eyes and died smiling, and for one long moment Alice felt something she didn’t have a word for yet, warm and complete and right.

Then the fear came in behind it.

A higher angel found her before the feeling had faded.

He was not cruel about it. That was what made it worse. His voice stayed even, certain, the voice of someone who had never once needed to doubt himself.

”Longing is not yours to satisfy.”

Alice lowered her head and accepted the correction, the way she had been made to accept correction.

Then why was I made to hear it at all?

She did not say it aloud. She only thought it, and the thought did not leave.

The cracks did not come all at once. That was the truth of it, later, when she tried to remember how it had happened. They came slowly, one prayer at a time, over what might have been years or might have been longer — she had stopped being certain time meant the same thing to her that it once had.

Starving children on a world with no name she’d been given.

Lovers kept apart by laws neither of them had written.

Soldiers ordered to kill people they pitied more than they feared.

Queens sealed into marriages built for treaties, not love.

Servants praying only to be looked at like something human.

Heaven remained exactly as it had always been. Ordered. Perfect. Unmoved.

Alice began to understand that obedience only looked clean from far away.

Lucifer appeared during an ordinary ceremony, kneeling as correctly as anyone else in the hall.

She noticed him anyway.

Too calm. Too beautiful. Too aware of the room around him in a way none of the other angels seemed to be. He did not look rebellious. He looked, if anything, like the most devoted angel in the hall — which was exactly what made her keep glancing back at him.

He spoke to her afterward, when she’d lingered too long near the drifting threads.

”You listen longer than the others.”

”I only do my duty,” Alice said.

”Then why does duty leave you grieving?”

She had no answer for that. She told herself she simply hadn’t thought of one yet.

He returned more than once. Never with the same argument twice. Never asking her to rebel outright.

He gave language to a wound she had already been carrying and hadn’t known how to name.

”Love without choice is worship,” he told her once, on a bridge she couldn’t remember the name of.

”Desire without freedom is a cage,” he told her another time, in a garden where neither of them belonged.

”Father made longing,” he said once, quiet enough that only she could hear it, ”and then forbade the angels who carry it from ever easing it.”

Alice argued, at first. She had good arguments. She simply noticed, each time, that they came out of her a little weaker than the time before, because the prayers kept arriving, and the prayers kept hurting, and Heaven kept being unmoved by any of it.

She began answering more of them in secret.

Gently, at first. A dream given shape. A remembered voice restored for a moment. Courage lent to someone about to die alone.

Then one answer went wrong.

A prince dreamed of a woman he desired, and woke certain that Heaven itself had chosen her for him. He started a war to take her. Alice watched the war unfold from a distance she couldn’t close, watched what her gentleness had grown into once it left her hands, and felt something close to horror settle into her chest.

Lucifer did not comfort her the way she expected.

”The fault isn’t desire,” he said. ”The fault is a world that cages desire until it curdles into something violent.”

She wanted to reject it.

Part of her believed him anyway, because she had carried too many prayers that rotted under Heaven’s silence to argue with him honestly.

Azazel taught her the rest.

He was not the angel of death. He was something colder in a different way — the one who understood how beauty, voice, dream, and scent could all be sharpened until they cut.

He showed her a blade first.

”A sword makes the body kneel,” he said, turning it once in the light.

Then he set down a mirror. A gold ornament. A vial of perfume. A prayer thread gone faintly black at one end.

”Desire makes the soul kneel by itself.”

Alice looked at the blackened thread longer than she meant to. It disturbed her, because the method sat too close to her own duty — the same gift, aimed a different way.

She told herself she would only ever use it to comfort people better.

She kept crossing lines while calling it mercy, and the lie held together only because she never once said it out loud.

The final ceremony gathered all of Heaven into the central prayer court.

Marble stretched open beneath an endless gold sky. Prayer threads hung frozen overhead, thousands of them, unmoving for the first time Alice had ever seen. Angels knelt by rank — warriors at the outer ring, judgment angels near the throne-light, petition angels lowest of all, exactly where they had always knelt.

The command came clean and absolute.

Remain within assigned function. Do not answer prayers directly. Do not interfere with human will. Do not turn longing into action.

Lucifer remained standing.

A handful of others stood with him.

Alice’s knees began to bend from pure habit, obedience living in her body deeper than any decision she’d made about it.

Her hands shook against the white of her robe. Her wings lowered, ready to fold into the posture she had held ten thousand times before.

Then she remembered the dying man’s smile. The starving children. The prince’s war. Every prayer Heaven had made her carry and never once let her answer.

She stayed standing.