could ever forget.
Lucifer snarled, "My charges in my domain are my business. You have no place here."
"My place is where I choose to be, Lucifer—it has ever been thus. My business is what I say it is. And if you charge Agonostis with love of one of my children, I say my business is here."
"I'll drop that charge, then," Lucifer shouted. "I have enough others that I can sentence him to the deepest of misery for the rest of eternity."
God said, "Not so. There is no place in Hell for love. Anyone who loves truly will never be yours, Lucifer—and Agonostis loves truly."
"He doesn't love you." Agonostis could hear the sneer in the Archfiend's voice.
"No. He doesn't. But love is an emotion of hope and faith. If he does not love me now, that is of no matter. His soul is changed for the better, and may change further with time. He may come back to me someday. In the meantime, he is no longer yours."
An explosion of white light blinded Agonostis. The pain stopped, the screaming stopped, and he discovered that he could breathe again, and move his arms and legs. His knees buckled and he sobbed and fell to the ground—to a giving, spongy ground that felt like nothing he had ever touched before. His vision cleared. He was on a gray plain that was almost entirely featureless, though speckled in a few places with things of great beauty; Agonostis saw the steep banks of a rushing stream over to his right, and just a section of clear white water that rushed over huge, slick, moss-covered boulders with a delightful thunder. The stream began and ended in the nothingness of the gray plain, but the tiny section of it that existed was as lovely as anything the fallen angel had ever seen.
"This is Purgatory," God said. Agonostis looked around, but could not see God; his voice, though, was clearly audible. "Many souls find it a valuable place to work through the problems they could not deal with in life. The only things here are those things the soul creates for itself; things that have some deep significance. The creations fade after the soul has made its choice between Heaven and Hell, or has decided on one of the other ,