The mortal cells in Pandora were made of the same black, semi translucent yet too dark to see through crystal as the rest of the prison, and even with the light at the prison's heart so weak, the room was well lit. The toilet and basin in the back of the cell were made of the crystal as well, although the bed frame was made of iron, the chair of wood, and the mattress was so soft and comfortable it could only be made of unicorn hair and Pegasus feathers. Pegasus’? Pegasi? It was soft.

  I’d decided to hide out here instead of continuing to sit in the mess hall. Three hours after my sudden appearance there (three hours of waiting for monsters and enduring sideways stares), an angelic messenger had shown up. Just casually opening the door and strolling into the hall to chat to us, wearing the same suit I’d seen on Ignostiel*.

  *Daniel neglects to mention that I wore it better.

  The gajillion or so angels that had been sweeping the halls and grounds of the prison had finished and had confirmed there were no nightmarish hordes charging the mess hall in a mad stampede. They probably hadn’t heard it was surf and turf day. After the holy messenger left (Albertus*, I think was his name), a dozen or so of the guards slowly trickled out, some to their rarely used rooms in the barracks, others just to get out of the stuffy room. I tolerated the glares and conspiratorial mutterings for as long as I could, before I left. I let Maisie know where I was going, and made my way into the all but empty fortress. I figured after the sweep it had just received, it was going to be a safer spot to avoid social interactions than the barracks or the common rooms.

  *Yes. I wore it better.

  I’d looked through Maisie’s directory and found the cell of a mortal Count named Edmond. His crimes listed simply said ‘Revenge to an absurd degree’. I discovered the glorious mattress and promptly went to sleep. EVen after a day of sleeping I was still exhausted. Waiting for imminent death must take it out of you, even when you’d already tried death on for size. Several hours later I woke, discovered a fuzzy green tennis ball, and began throwing it against the wall. After a few moments I realised what was wrong with the game. So, with many grunts of effort, I moved the bed from the middle of the small cell to the back wall with the toilet and placed the chair on top of it. I then sat in the now open space with my back against the wall, and began to throw the tennis ball at the opposite wall with one hand, then catching it with the other. Perfect.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there, but I remember thinking of home. I hadn’t done that a lot since I died. Thinking not where I lived in Cardiff city, but my old family home where I’d grown up, at first, with my Grandfather, then later with my Mother after he passed. In a tiny little village in Wales with nothing in it but a couple of hundred people who all know each other. There was also a post office, so they could send letters to the few who left to live elsewhere. I don’t know why all of a sudden I missed that place, God knows who lives there now. I had no living family other than my mum and she was in full time care, but the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to go and visit whenever I wanted to... When someone close to you dies, you can turn to others for support. When you are the one who died, it’s complicated.

  An elderly guard with iron grey hair, whose name I didn’t know, popped her head in after a few hours. Her face broke into a wide grin, enhancing the many smile-lines when she saw what I’d been sitting there doing. She let me know ‘management’ were meeting with all the guards in the auditorium in two hours. She tried to scowl when I used the phrase ‘Jesus is coming, look busy’, but the light in her eyes betrayed her amusement. I told her I didn’t know where the auditorium was, and she said that there wasn’t one. It was being built for the meeting.

  She left the cell, and I continued to play wall-ball with myself for another hour or so, winning thirty-seven games but losing twice that. Still, even a game that riveting couldn’t keep me entertained for long enough to justify missing the meeting. So I stood, stretched and returned some feeling to my lower extremities. I left the cell and the prison behind me, and found most of the guards milling around aimlessly in the courtyard.

  I had no intention of mixing with them, so hung around the entrance to Pandora, a way off from the crowd. A few of them still glanced over at me, their eyes still chock full of suspicion for the new guy who must’ve let the monsters loose. Turns out school lunchtime cliques are a thing in the afterlife too. Super! I saw Lance and the Jocks huddled in the centre of the masses, many of them eyeing me like a chess club kid with a pocketful of lunch money. The courtyard itself was now lit by a dozen or so floodlights that hovered unsupported in the sky. I didn’t know at the time, but those lights were each an angel high above us, surrounding the courtyard and its mortal souls should any of the prisoners return. Guardian angels guarding the guards.

  Over the next hour, the rest of the guard joined the courtyard clump, trickling in from the mess and the barracks. I stayed near the main door of Pandora, where a black crystal portcullis stood open. As soon as the last guard left the barracks and entered the courtyard, there was an overwhelming flash of brilliant, bright white light, and when our visions cleared, all two hundred of us found ourselves standing on a raised dais, in front of a chalkboard in a lecture hall auditorium*. Rows and rows of cinema style seats extended up and away from us, with no visible exits to the room.

  To work around Daniel’s [REDACTED], the auditorium had to be built around everyone in those few moments. The observations and resulting conclusion found during his sleep in the Pandora cells can be read in the full report. See: Daniel Issac Mason of Wales.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  We all spent an instant looking among ourselves like particularly cramped and curious meerkats, before Lance took the initiative and claimed a seat in the centre of the front row of chairs. His ‘crew’ (equally tall and dangerous looking men with extremely square faces and very little neck) followed suit a second later. The rest of us began filing up the stairs and before long we all had a seat facing the board. I aimed for a spot in the back row, far away from the others, but since there seemed to be only as many seats as there were guards, those around me soon filled up as well. I saw hesitation in the steps of the guards who took seats near me. It didn’t go unnoticed that those were the final seats that were filled, like I was a ticking bomb, or a dog that could go rabid, or a ticking bomb strapped to a dog that could go rabid.

  A gentle buzz filled the room as the guards began to chatter amongst themselves. It was hard not to eavesdrop, but nothing said was particularly interesting; just a lot of talk about having a few days off while this gets sorted out. Others were worried about their tenure as guards, that they were going to be sent to have their souls weighed early. One day of unsuccessful guarding wouldn’t tip the scales a lot in my favour, so I sent happy thoughts towards that not being the case.

  Above the chalkboard, reality cracked and broke.

  I… It… Imagine someone with no skill at pumpkin carving, or knife holding, tried their best to carve a lightning bolt in the vegetable. Now imagine that person had never seen a lighting bolt. What they had seen however was the bottom of a bottle of vodka before making the attempt. That shape, maybe ten feet tall and four feet at its widest, floated twenty feet above the dias. Behind and around the shape, the wall of the auditorium looked as it had. No change. But the rip in the fabric of space was as dark as obsidian. It came with no sound, no noise as the universe broke. Just fractured reality.

  From my vantage at the back, I watched a wave pass through the room as people noticed, like a teacher at the front of a class of children had just pressed a finger to their lips. I watched as every guard in the room saw the scar in the universe, cut off their conversation, and stared. Then came a light. A light so intense, so bright, so deific, that I closed my eyes in fear of damaging them. You know when you’ve just woken up, and someone turns a light on in your bedroom, or pulls open the curtains to a sunny day. Your eyes are closed, but your lids aren’t quite thick enough. I’m unsure why I did it, gut instinct that I wasn’t here to be hurt or something else, but I hesitantly peaked through my eyelashes.

  My eyes didn’t burn from their sockets. In fact, what I had feared would be a blinding, painful light, instead was as calm and relaxing as a nightlight to a child. It seemed to reach through my retinas to my brain, where it offered my fight or flight reflex a cup of warm tea and a massage, while a voice in my head told me to “Be not afraid.”

  Only, it didn’t say it in my voice.

  It was a soft spoken baritone, and the sound of it was serenity, and melted chocolate, and of that thing you were worrying about turned out to be nothing at all. I heard it in my mind, without it going through my ears first. Damn convenient that. As I looked around I saw that the others in the room had the same look of surprise I felt on my face at hearing the disembodied words. And there was only one suspect for their source.

  On the dais now stood a statuesque bearded man, with no hair on his head, a scar running from his right eye to the corner of his right lip, and the sort of eyes that astronomers got awards for studying. Solar systems and nebulas seemed to swim around in the sclera, while the iris remained as dark as the other angels I’ve met. He wore a suit in a similar style to the other angels, though while theirs seemed to be the suits one wore at the office, his was the suit James Bond would be wearing while fighting a hundred office workers who were trying to blow up the moon*.

  I hate that Daniel has made me understand these references. He is not accusing the angelic staff of trying to destroy Luna.

  “I must apologise for the risk here,” the man said in their ethereal voice. For those of you I have not yet met, I am Raphael. Archangel, and Warden of the Pandora Citadel.”

  With one swift movement, I saw Lance rise from his chair and go to one knee before the form of the archangel. A beat later his followers mirrored him. It was easy for them to do it in the front row. As I looked around I saw a few others that were awkwardly trying to go to one knee. Without much space between the rows of seats, most were hitting the people sitting in front of them in the back of the head as they did so.

  “That is not necessary. Please take your seats. We have time but not enough.” They did, quickly and without hesitation. Raphael slowly arced his gaze over the room. There was a great deal of awkward shifting and more than a few sharp intakes of breath as he did so. I didn’t understand why until the being turned its stare onto me. That one instant of eye contact felt like it was turning me inside out, as though the angel had reached into me, looked for something to play with, and upon finding nothing, trashed the place. I let out all the air in my lungs after his gaze passed me, and heard a similar reaction from the man who sat next to me. After completing his sweep, the archangel smiled at the assembled men and women before him. The smile lit up the room. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean it literally lit up the room, the whole place brightened, as though someone had taken the dimmer switch and dialled it up to eleven.

  “I am here to inform you on what has happened. I’ll answer some questions, and then give you your duties.” Raphael said, sitting down on a plain wooden stool that hadn’t been there a second before. “Pay attention, guardians of Pandora. Listen while I tell you how we were infiltrated, and how the mortal world we all love has been made vulnerable to a new armageddon.”

  Raphael knew how to get a room’s attention. No one moved. No one breathed. You could hear a pin drop a slightly smaller pin. Pandora had held creatures of legend, story, and nightmare. Everything from ancient gods to faery horrors, from things beyond my imagination to almost simple things like vampires and werewolves, spirits and spectres. Staring at the man sitting on a stool swinging his left leg absentmindedly, I could believe that this archangel was not only as dangerous as the inmates, but that he was the power that had imprisoned many of them. An energy radiated from him that felt like the air around Pandora before the escape. He was energy on the scale that was usually described in words such as eternal, absolute… and apocalyptic.

  The sound of a throat being cleared echoed through the chamber, and then the archangel began to tell us what he knew.

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