"What we need is a design," they told the painter, and he stared out at the emptiness of a void and didn't know what he could possibly do. He was just one angel, why would they do that to him? He had nothing but the symphony and himself, and the symphony was silent.

He returned to the small space in Heaven he had for privacy and wept, helpless, caught in between terror and the void. He was nothing, he was useless, a small mercurian with hands that couldn't master anything and a mind that wouldn't stay still long enough to provide them with - a design.

Shuddering, he closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his palms to the lids, until sparks flared behind them and he thought, I could paint that. Even if I can do nothing else, I can paint that.

He took a canvas, and his paints, and a brush, and he painted the entire canvas black. And then in it, he put a spark, splashed a light onto the board. It wasn't enough, but that was it for that canvas so he put it aside, picked another, expanded the light - it was all in expansion, he decided, and pulled out more canvasses. He couldn't capture motion through art, damn it, but he had an image of it growing behind his eyelids and painted that, painted heat and pressure and motion and darkness at the edges, compression, a sphere, an atmosphere, water. From water came plants, from plants came life, yes, that was it, and he painted and painted and three millenia later he looked up to the serious faces of the other archangels.

"I think I'm done," he said, and Yves smiled, offered the painter a hand up.

He took a name with Yves' fingers, Eli, for he was the Creator.

"But I didn't do anything," he protested, and Yves tapped Eli's forehead.

"You are everything," Yves said, and Eli let them take his canvasses away to work on it, to bring it from imagination to reality.

"What do I do now?"

"Everything," Yves said, and handed him a fresh canvas.