Casting out Demons, part I

It came down like this.

The two errant angels in Damascus were named Lillim and Fraith. Erratic in their prayer practice and habitually AWOL at various angelic ceremonies, these two inveterate truants had been sent to Damascus to “learn how to live the Faith, rather than just think about it,” as the Angelic Council put it.

The two were completely unprepared for Earth, a primitive backwater if ever there was one—for God’s sake, some of them even still worshipped B’aal!— and a dysfunctional one at that, what with the Daemon clans tinkering with it day and night to see what else they could break.

Lillim and Fraith’s background stories are too long for me to report here and now—maybe later and elsewhere— but despite their very flaky margins, they were tough; they had a reputation as real troopers, even among the Daemons, who did nothing but scoff at the technical skills of your average angel. The two had had become minor experts in the art of triage on earth, patching things up and saving situations by the seat of their angelic pants, using the most unconventional means.

During their tenure they’d developed a reputation for the efficient handling of extremely distasteful matters, among other things, exorcisms, which absolutely require one to be very quick on the wingtips. And in fact, on what was known afterwards among the locals as “the fateful day,” they were looking for a demon. Not an angelic Daemon but an actual demon demon—one of the those idly evil, incurably nasty creatures Satan created for amusement in his spare time. He sprinkled them about on earth like dark confetti, and they found plenty of souls to infect.

And so it went.