Author's Notes:  See chapter one for disclaimer and explanation.

Okay, Chris, no offense, but if you don't accept my explanation that Damian is a secondary character and I stuck him in to give an idea of some of what's going on around Artesia and Lazarus, I'd appreciate if you didn't keep asking why I put him in there.  I'm not gonna give any other explanation for it.  Besides, if you had just waited for this epilogue, you'd see that I most certainly was planning on saying a few words about his destiny as the bane of Mankind.

The Sacred and the Profane By Annie-chan Epilogue:  Eternity

AD 2526, the Battlefield of Armageddon.

Silence.  A ghostly calm settled over everything, a sharp contrast to the momentous battle that had recently taken place here.  The word "epic" was too weak to describe it.

Lazarus stood in the middle of the battlefield, the only living soul on Earth at the moment.  Heaven had won, as prophesied, and Hell had been sealed away while all souls had been sent to their home for eternity, be it everlasting salvation or unending damnation.  Right now, it was the small interim between victory and the dissolving of the barriers between Heaven and Earth when a new Earth will be created and God shall dwell there forever with His angels and the righteous.  He had given His angels a period to recover before they undertook that task.  Many were fully exhausted from the onslaught of the Apocalypse.

Lazarus stood there, as silent as the utter destruction around him.  All this would be cleared away when the new Earth was created, but for now, it stood as testimony to the massive struggle between good and evil for supremacy.  All settlements, from the most remote farmhouse to the biggest and densest city lay in complete ruin.  If Lazarus didn't know what was soon coming, he would have been disheartened by such a picture.

In front of him lay a body.  The body was deathly still and silent, twisted and mutilated on the ground in a gruesome display of death.  The creature had fallen hard, and had fought madly the entire way down.  It was Damian, the Devil's son, the foretold Antichrist.

The angel took two steps forward and knelt down next to Damian's remains, reaching out and placing a hand on his hair.  Two golden eyes stared dully at him, devoid of any spark of life.  Before he had warped into his true shape for the Apocalypse, anyone who looked upon him would have thought him nothing more than a normal young man in his twenties.  Yes, he was uncommonly beautiful, and yes, his mother swore up and down that she had never had sex before she became pregnant with him, but he displayed no signs that he was in any way abnormal.

Even your entrance into this world was cruel, Lazarus mused.  True to his word, the Devil had selected a virgin to bear his child, and he had implanted the unborn child with Damian's soul through an immaculate conception.  It was a mockery of the Holy Virgin's mothering of the Christ oh so many years ago.  The cruel part, however, was that the Devil had chosen the only daughter of a very zealous Christian couple.  They had expected their daughter to keep her virginity until her marriage bed, and had stressed over and over to her the value of retaining her virtue and resisting the temptations of the flesh.  The girl herself had sworn to do so, even without her parents' urgings, for she was as upright as they in her beliefs.  When she became pregnant, her parents had immediately branded her a whore, and didn't believe her desperate entreaties that she had never let a man touch her in her life.  They had disowned her, and the last seven months of her life, as the pregnancy was discovered at the two-month mark, were spent in a homeless shelter for women and children.  Only fourteen when he was born, her body had been too undeveloped to handle the birthing process.  Her flesh had torn, and she bled to death slowly and painfully.  Lazarus was sure the Devil was well pleased with such an unfortunate series of events.

Placed in an orphanage and adopted at age ten, the boy had grown up "normal", with average school grades and an interest in sports and cars.  No one had any indication that he was unnatural and anomalous.

Until his twenty-sixth birthday, however.

On that day, the demon in him decided it was time to wake, and what followed was a period of the worst slaughter, suffering, and hardship the human race had ever encountered.

Almost out of habit, as he had encountered countless dead bodies in the previous months, Lazarus passed his hand over Damian's dead eyes, closing the eyelids.  His eyes were undamaged, but the rest of his body was in ruin.  He had fought like a mad beast, and nothing short of nearly tearing him apart would stop him.  Before finally uttering his dying shriek and lying still, he had caused substantial damage to his opponent, the Archangel Michael.  Michael had taken it upon himself to throw down the Devil's own, but not even he could avoid the grievous injuries Damian had so gleefully dished out.

"What are you feeling now, Damian?" Lazarus whispered to the corpse.  "What are you and your father going through?"  It was well known that the Devil and all his followers were locked into Hell and would be subjected to eternal torment, but it wasn't specified what torment that was.  Was it physical torture, akin to what damned souls endured?  Or, was it the hell of being forever powerless and alone, forced to stew in their own disappointment and self-loathing?  Whatever it was, Lazarus would have been in the same predicament if he hadn't found and fell in love with Artesia.

Artesia…she was right behind him.  He jumped in surprise as her arms surrounded him and squeezed him tight.

"Lazarus," she murmured into his ear, "don't dwell on the past.  Come home."  She herself had not participated in the fighting, remaining behind in Heaven to deal with the rush of souls as the entire human race met its mortal end.  Lazarus, though, had endured the worst of it, thrown right in the thick of it by unlucky chance.  For the first time in more than five centuries, he was glad he had spent time as a demon.  It gave him the guts and the heart to fight just as viciously and heartlessly as his opponents.  He had actually frightened some of the other angels, as he looked like one of them, but razed through opponents like one of the enemies.

He stood up at Artesia's gentle coaxing, but his eyes remained on Damian's corpse for a few minutes longer.  "I know he was evil, and I know his father was evil, but my heart still aches," he said softly.  "Lucifer was unimaginably beautiful and good in every respect, and every angel in Heaven looked to him for wisdom and guidance.  His rebellion and fall was the worst and bitterest disaster to ever happen…"  He was speaking as if to himself, and tears of anger and dismay shimmered in his jade eyes.

"No words are powerful enough to express it…I know," Artesia replied.  She reached up and touched his cheek gently.  "But, don't think about that, Love.  He made the choice to stray.  Nothing could have been done to stop it."

Lazarus nodded and looked up at the veiled sun, clouded by the smoke of the burning world.  Artesia found her eyes running over him, looking over his appearance.  He looked very different than how he looked when she first saw him.  He had started out very fair and pale, but when she saw him first, he was all darkness.  Now, however, he looked very much like his original self, save for some noticeable differences.  Faint darkness was still visible in his eyes, hair, skin, and feathers, but he had requested that God not completely erase the signs of his allegiance to the Devil.  He said that he had made a grave mistake, and that all other beings in Heaven should be able to see the evidence of it.  It was the same principle behind a scarlet letter, letting others know that he wasn't perfect.  Artesia didn't see why he couldn't put it completely behind him, but he wouldn't answer her questions, saying it was between him and God.

His sea green eyes turned to her, and he took her hand.  "I think it's time to go," he said softly.

"Yes," she responded, and they disappeared from the dire ruins, returning home where Elishah, Michael, Gabriel, and all the others were still waiting.

Eternity had begun.

Owari

Author's Notes:  You know what?  I should have changed the update date from the weekend to Monday a long time ago.  More than half the chapters of this story were posted on a Monday, I'll bet.  Sorry. -_-;;  Anyway, that's the end of "The Sacred and the Profane", my first original story to be posted on the Internet.  I hope you all enjoyed it, and I hope that the ending isn't unsatisfactory.  I admit that I got a little discouraged at some points, as I thought it wasn't becoming a very good story, but your encouragement though reviews and emails really helped.  Thank you so much for your support in this; I really appreciate it.  Sorry again about the theological incorrectness, but I wasn't shooting for a religious text.  It's religious fiction.  Now, let me know what you think of this story either in a review or an email to [email protected], onegai shimasu!

Oh!  Today (March 3, 2003) is my nineteenth birthday! Yee!