"The earth looks beautiful tonight," Their voice is gentler than I would expect it to be. They look resplendent as usual- those golden wings, that hallowed frame. I pale in comparison yet they're here grovelling at my feet as I watch the earth through the windows of my house. Their lips don't move. They don't have to, this bubble of vacuum wouldn't allow the sound to reach him even if they did. Instead, their voice, low and grandiose, floods my mind. And my voice does theirs. 

"It does." I hum refusing to glance at them lest their holiness scorch my eyes. An asteroid bounces off of the roof, chipping most of the roof's panelling away. More and more asteroids strike my house these days as its orbit goes off kilter and wanders beyond Jupiter. Another one of God's punishments, I'm sure. Another attempt at either getting rid of me or getting me to go back. Back to him. Back with them.

"God is enraged," They blurt out as if I don't already know, "Angrier than I've ever seen him." 

Their voice sounds distant even though they stand right beside me. From the corner of my eye, I can see them rubbing their feet on the carpet I've made from the skin of many space-worms. Long wiry creatures, it took me a while to make the plush cover for my flooring. I would've made curtains too if God didn't tire of me killing his pet killers. 

"Of course he is," I scoff. 

Anger. Of course God is angry. Anger is the one word we've all associated with God since he made us. Beware Of God's Wrath. They used to say, their voice three times deeper and face scrunched in an imitation of God. 

Of course that was before God broke their spirit. Now, I can't see their face through their halo's shine. Only the empty eye sockets that lay beneath the thorny halo. 

Anger is an old old thing. But enraged is new, a foreign emotion in our land of eternity. 

"About the worshippers?" Voicing my question, I turn to face them but settle for staring at the nebula stained walls, their face too much for me to look at. 

In the distant cosmos, I hear the humans praying. Most pray to me these days instead of God preferring tangibility over the unknown. Ever since their satellites found my home floating slowly through the galaxies knitting itself together after striking debris, God had been delegated to the bottom of their priority lists. 

When the humans found my humble abode drifting aimlessly, they'd rejoiced. My existence had given their life meaning beyond anything I could comprehend. If I existed: it meant that more like me existed, and if my existence was sustained in the uninhabitable cosmos then either I was God or my kind had passed the great filter and reached the highest forms of civilization.

Both of those assumptions had brought devastation to those creatures. If I was God then their religious mandates had all been disproved, and I was not God, then the great filter would surely doom them.

I wonder if they knew God like I do, saw them like I see them standing still in my room, and lived like I do, would humanity's paradoxes make more sense?

Would they continue their overbearing attempts to be more than they are? To sustain their kind's survival through the great leap?

If they knew god, would their little hearts beat with horror or adoration?

God knows. I can almost taste his answer on the tip of my tongue. His sombre smile as he'd tell me to wait and watch as a planet tore itself apart and another knitted itself together.

I swallow around the desert in my throat, and force myself to look at them. Their anxious feathers ruffle sending tufts of winds through the room. An ache makes itself known behind my eyes. My house is without any light of its own. Their presence here has made it terribly enlightened.

"Yes but he says he will forgive you and-" They wince, I think perhaps the weight of the lie is heavy on their tongue, "-and you will be welcomed back into his service by all of us with open arms. God wants you to return home."

"I am in my home," I smile at them, a genuine smile. The animosity I share with God does not extend to them, and in spite of how much they've suffered because of me, they still love me. Why else would this being of divinity, God's trusted soldier, come begging at my doorstep when they could drag a sinner like me by the hair and present me at God's feet in the time it takes a star to blink out.

Outside, dust, stars, and specks of matter wind and unwind themselves to form thousands of galaxies. Each one spelling out 'Come home' in all the languages I've learnt in my trillion years.

"Please just come back. I'll take your punishment this time as well, you know he loves you, right? He loves you and he'll never hurt you. Please." 

"Don't beg me. It's beneath you." I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and a wave of anger flashes over their face.

"Fuck you!" An odd act of rebellion it is, to break out of their housebroken shell, their docile nature. Surprising yet I can understand, sometimes I forget that they were once young too. And very different.

"Fuck you for being so selfish, and fuck you for leaving." 

"Well fuck you for staying." My voice floats through the space of our minds with a detached stillness. In contrast, they jump away from me as if the distance between us is charged with a solar storm.

Two space worms wrapped in a mating coil flutter out of the Andromeda galaxy. Their long wiry maws clasped around each other's neck, a bubble of laughter bursts in my chest but I bury it deep beneath. They only once in their long lived spans and yet, that lone mating is more violent than anything. Their sharp jagged maws clasped around each other's throats in a mockery of a love bite. If they survive this, then they'll wander close to my home in search of food. I kill them before their long wiry bodies can come closer than half a lightyear's distance. 

I think of the worms, and I think of them and God, and myself. And all those creatures milling around on infinite earth like planets, and the inconsequential nature of everything causes the bubbles of laughter to spiral through.

They look at me with incredulity and the closest thing to hate they can muster when it comes to me.

" You're a selfish coward. Hiding here like a damned hermit when you know how I suffer, how we all suffer. You could stop it all yet you choose to hole yourself up in here... I should've taken you back the moment you left."

The threat fills the distance between us but neither of us act. Their body shakes as if someone has toppled them off of their gravitational axis. They can't even convince themselves to believe the words they say. 

I take a few steps forward and silence their rambling with my hands on their cheek. The closest I've been to them since I left, and the first time I've touched them. Their holiness burns my skin causing blisters to appear on my skin. We would have heard the cracking sound if anything beyond our voices could traverse the vacuum.

"It's okay, Gabriel. You've done your best. You can leave now." I kiss their forehead, ignoring the way my lips char, and pretend not to see the tears in their eyes.

Their toes have dug in so deep into my carpet that I'm sure they're leaving a permanent indent in the shape of their feet behind. Their claim left frozen on my solitary planet. 

They flinch away as if I'm not the one who is burning. Without another word, they turn away and step beyond the threshold of my sorry excuse of a door. Letting the cosmos drift them away to the nearest black hole so that they can reunite with God.

The door closes, locking me away in my dark universe of silence. 

Everything in my house looks the same yet it feels violated. Their feet imprinted onto my carpet, their light mixed in with the nebulas on the wall, and their voice slowly drifting out of my mind. If I try hard, I'll forget what they sound like in less than a lightyear.

Before they visited, I'd forgotten how fast time passes by when it does not exist.

I turn towards the window to stare at the earth again. To resume my self-claimed duty as its observer. Only to find my vision obstructed with the now separated coil of lovers, their throats bleeding yet alive. I find myself staring into the long wiry maws of death itself. 

I had forgotten how quickly lightyears could pass when God commanded them to.