and Hell. Who benefits from it? I have no knowledge of Hell. The pious never lived and ruled there until now . . . until you.”
“Where do you want me to start?” I ask him. “What happened yesterday creates today and influences tomorrow. To answer you fully, I’d have to backtrack into the past.”
M—considers. “I now know the truth of Lucifer’s fall, and how Gabriel’s brother, Michael, was your angelic father, and that Eve was Michael’s wife and your mother, when you lived among the angelfolk in Eliom, before your incarnations on Earth.
“I know that Adam, your other uncle, was Eve’s brother and not her spouse, and how Adam and Eve trespassed on Earth and were trapped there. And how the obedient angelfolk willingly joined the endless cycles of incarnations on Earth to rebalance the damaged genetic code altered by the hybrid offspring of Eve and Adam.
“I also understand now how Lucifer’s rebellion over this caused him, his family and his followers to be flung into Hell, and how you and your betrothed—Lucifer’s son, Bael—were separated for 35,000 years.
“Quatama also explained why Heaven allowed your reunion with Bael in 1971, that they wanted you to form this Alliance between his father’s dark realm and Heaven’s glorious light.
“What I haven’t learned is the aftermath, what led up to Lucifer’s release from Hell, and what circumstances allowed you to take his place. Is there really a reform movement in Hell, and can any of it be taken seriously? Can you succeed in this at all, and how could it possibly benefit our world?
“You must also enlighten me as to your plans for your mortal life, since you are Earth’s current Keeper, regarding the legacy you propose to give to the Earth as its Keeper.”
Sudden silence. Both Quatama and Yeshua still sit quietly, although Quatama has a mirthful look on his face. As if to say, and you thought I put you through your paces before!
Finally, I respond to M—’s daunting questionnaire. “You’re asking for a lot. Trying to tell it only from my personal viewpoint won’t let me express what other people, whose lives intertwined with mine, also experienced. May I tell it through their eyes as well, as they told me, but in their individual voices, as a storyteller would? I’ll try to be as detailed as I can.”
M—smiles at me thoughtfully. “Then pretend you are Scheherazade. Tell me the stories as she would. When all of the tales are told, perhaps we will greet our future with greater compassion and clearer understanding. Inshallah.”
“God willing,” I agree.
M—and I are to meet each night, here in the Garden. There I will spin each tale and weave each into a tapestry that will hopefully reveal a better fate for all of humanity and the good, green Earth we share.
May the ending bring healing to all that dwell upon it.
CHAPTER 2
What Went Before
January, 1977. Leigh Ann would always look back on that year as a major crossroad in her astral life, while her mortal life continued on its mundane way. She was twenty-nine-years-old, and her son Daniel, six. Her sister, Ginnie, was twenty-four, and their brother Rick (no longer called Fred by anyone, family or friend . . . he had achieved that goal) was nineteen. Their mother, Miriam Elfman, was forty-nine, and their father, Bill Elfman, was fifty-four. Their cat, Lucy Angelina, was about halfway through her sixth (human) year, although in cat years, she was older than Leigh Ann and probably much wiser. Her fur was black, as was her nose, and her eyes were a deep emerald. She was pampered by the family, put on the highest of feline pedestals, having in 1971 alerted the family to a smoldering fire in the basement before it could ignite the heater and blow up the house and endanger them.
They all still lived on Glenview Street in Northeast Philadelphia. Rick had just graduated from Northeast High School and was working part-time in Bill Elfman’s plumbing and heating business, while taking college courses in computer programming. Ginnie had received her nursing degree and was employed at Hahnemann Hospital, working a 4:00 P.M. to midnight shift. Leigh Ann had a new job, working for an accounting firm as a secretary. Daniel, bright but boisterous, was enrolled in the Paley Day Care Center, where he also attended kindergarten. Paley also had an arrangement with the nearby elementary school, Farrell, and Daniel would start first grade there in September.
This is how the year began in the everyday waking world of Leigh Ann Elfman, she and her family living their mortal lives, heading to where the future led them.
But after midnight, as her physical body slept, Leigh Ann continued her eternal existence as Leianna. She was torn by her love for two unique men, both immortal: her original betrothed, Bael, and her spirit guide, Terence Dearborn.
Bael had fallen with his father, Lucifer, into Hell and had become his second-in-command. Leianna’s plea, to be allowed to go with Bael, had been denied by their Creator. Instead, she incarnated on Earth along with other angelfolk compliant to their Creator’s Will, rebalancing mankind’s damaged DNA.
Leianna’s eternal mother, Eve, and Eve’s brother, Adam, had disrupted that genetic blueprint. They disobeyed the Creator and visited Earth in the early days of Cro-Magnon man, despite being told that the Creator’s new planet was forbidden to the angels.
The angels had been granted a distant glimpse of that young planet and, safely enclosed in celestial winds, were carried into space, well above the blue and green world, far enough away from its instability. The winds then returned them to Eliom, their own dimension with its village, its beautiful Garden, its prairie, woods and glistening shore. But Eve and Adam, believing they could quickly travel to and view the planet’s surface and swiftly return to the winds, alighted on Earth and underwent a strange metamorphosis. Their angelic clothes disintegrated, and their bodies changed cellularly from immortal to mortal flesh. They became hybrids, half-angelic, half-human, and were trapped on Earth until mortal death released them.
Captured by Cro-Magnon hunters, Eve became its leader’s second wife, and, as the clan grew, Adam formed his own clan. They bore and sired children with their mates. Those offspring, including Eve’s twins, Cahn and Ahbel, raised by Adam when she died in her last childbirth, introduced angelic DNA into Earth’s mortals, changing their genetic future.
After her mortal death, Eve returned to Eliom, to her angelic husband, Michael, and their daughter, Leianna. But the war in Heaven soon separated them all again.
Bael vowed to return from Hell to find Leianna and claim her as his wife. In 1971 they were reunited, unaware that Heaven had planned this as an alliance between Heaven and Hell, to end their opposition and work to heal humanity’s faults.
Hell would be reformed. Or so Leianna was told by her spirit master, Quatama. Five years had passed since Bael, his older brother Ashtoreth, Leianna, and Terence Dearborn, a dead British composer, who also loved Leigh Ann, had first agreed to act as ambassadors. But Hell’s rulers had steadily refused to accept the Alliance and Heaven’s goals.
This formidable challenge seemed more likely to fail than achieve the smallest measure of success. Lucifer had demanded that his first-born, Ashtoreth, and his second-born, Bael, come to their senses. He blamed Leianna’s eternal parents for his disgrace: Michael, for not siding with him in his rebellion, and Eve for submitting to God after Lucifer had risked everything to save her and the other Eliomese from the Creator’s manipulative and unrelenting control.
For five years now, Lucifer had ridiculed his sons’ fatuous claim that they were Hell’s ambassadors to Heaven. He tried to persuade them
