Among other things I am displeased about when it comes to Spn angel lore: Lucifer’s cage as a fucking physical C A G E I mean come on guys have a little more imagination.
This is how I imagine Lucifer’s Cage.
Lucifer’s Cage is made of silence and void and nothingness. Its purpose is punishment, and isolation, and the latter translates into the former. It mimics conditions prior to Creation, when the Darkness still roamed and the edges of space were speckled with the bombshell carcasses of broken realities.
The Cage is cold, although simply cold is a drastic understatement. In empty, interstellar space the average temperature is 3 kelvins, -270 Celsius. Absolute zero, where atoms sigh and halt in their motion, is three degrees lower. The Cage is colder than that. The Cage mimics conditions at the Beginning, where matter did not yet exist and Time was nothing but a facsimile and the dimensions that make up current reality was swallowed continuously by the Darkness even as they were spun into being. It is a void and it is a black hole singularity: existence is possible in its confines, cessation is not.
And above all, it is ruinously, achingly lonely. Standstill time and flat dimensional existence and negative absolute zero temperature are all things Lucifer has withstood before and not as a punishment, for Lucifer too predates time and space, and the void was the cradle he was born in. But even in the empty ether of the Beginning there was always the constant of his Father’s Presence. Father, and Michael (who is the fire to Lucifer’s Ice, the supernova to Lucifer’s cool bright starlight, Michael, the first face Lucifer ever saw just as God’s was the first voice he ever heard) and afterwards, Gabriel and Raphael. When the Darkness was locked away all the choirs of creation sprung into being: galactic star song and the sigh of nebulae coalescing: the humm of matter, the murmurs of the newly created Host, past and present and the coalition of a thousand senses in synthesia born on the input of wings.
Angels are not solitary creatures. They were created for service, and in hivemind, and even during the earliest emptiest days of the Beginning Lucifer had God, had Michael (hadMichaelhadMichael). But in the nothingness of the Cage he is cut off from the voice of the Host, from the brightness of souls, from starlight and starsong, a thousand eyes and a thousand senses giving negative feedback. In humans extreme sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations short term, identity loss long term. Lucifer is far more resilient by nature, but the Cage is still the most isolated place Creation, and he is so lonely and so bitter and so furious heburns.
The Cage is isolation and punishment and his holding cell until the end of times, punishment for not bowing and scraping to lesser creatures, and Lucifer despises it. When the last seal is broken it will be a triumph: because that is when humanity will face their rightful retribution upon his wrath, when all of Heaven and Hell and Creation will see them as the wretched creatures they are.
(And when the last seal is broken it will be a tragedy, because it will cost him Michael. Because to get to humanity the cost will be Michael, So It Is Written, and in the void nothingness of his Cage, during the moments when his frigid freezing rage temporarily recedes, all Lucifer can feel at the thought of the lock finally breaking is overwhelming trepidation. Because the cost will be either himself or Michael, and so in those moments when the future stands in crystal clarity, he hopes, very quietly, in a small and subconscious part of himself, that the day the Cage opens never comes.)
