The Throne

The Throne is Heaven’s sovereign authority, an institution whose influence shapes the angels’ struggle over allegiance and whose power can be challenged. Across millennia, its claim on Lucinda is tested against Lucifer’s competing pull; among the fallen angels, return to its fold also leaves a visible trace in their wings.

Authority and the Contest for Lucinda

Whenever Lucinda turned seventeen, a recurring contest began anew. For six millennia, the demons Cam, Roland, and Molly tried to sway her toward Lucifer, while the angels Arriane, Gabbe, and sometimes Annabelle worked to bring her back into Heaven’s fold. Neither side came close to winning her over. Yet these contests did not determine her deepest attachment: whenever Lucinda met Daniel, the two fell in love, and she died in a blaze of fire.

That pattern changed at Sword & Cross Reform School, when Daniel kissed Lucinda and she survived. The angels recognized that she would finally be allowed to choose. The shift makes the Throne’s authority significant not only as the power whose side the angels defend, but as part of a conflict in which Lucinda’s choice had long remained unresolved.

Allegiance Made Visible

The Throne’s reach is also rendered through the fallen angels’ wings. Before the Fall, angel wings were made of empyreal light, perfect and indistinguishable from one another. Since then, their appearance has come to express personality, mistakes, and impulses. Fallen angels who gave their allegiance to Lucifer bear golden wings; those who returned to Heaven’s fold carry a hint of silver through their wings’ fibers.

Lucinda’s wings were strikingly white, as were Daniel’s—the only other fallen angel said to have preserved that color. Against the gold of Lucifer’s followers and the silver marking return to Heaven, their unspoiled whiteness distinguishes them from the choices that define the others. The contrast makes allegiance legible without making Lucinda’s fate appear settled: after the kiss at Sword & Cross Reform School, she is at last permitted to choose.

The Throne and the Cost of Failure

The Throne’s order also frames the stakes of Cam’s attempt to reach Lilith. Lucifer tells Cam that if he fails, he must return permanently to Lucifer’s side behind the Wall of Darkness, with no more wandering through the galaxies and no more white in his wings. Cam weighs that fate against the opportunity to rewrite it, then thinks of Lilith and the despair she has endured for millennia. The threat places the Throne’s sphere of allegiance in sharp contrast with Lucifer’s demanded service: for Cam, failure means losing the possibility of a different fate and surrendering to an eternal place at Lucifer’s side.