by S. L. Naeole
“You see? Even if you had somehow succeeded in delaying us, you would never have succeeded in delaying his fate. Only we control that.”
I shook my head, tears forming and falling from my eyes as I fought the blur that distorted everything. “No. You won’t hurt him. I won’t let you.”
“Ahh…but you can’t stop him from hurting others.” This was said so sweetly I almost didn’t catch it.
But then I saw Robert’s attention turn to something else; or someone else as time returned to normal. Two figures were moving towards him, their faces filled with concern, their thoughts unrelenting in their wish to help him.
Graham and Stacy, her face still somewhat distorted though her body had returned to normal; both had their hands held up in supplication; their voices were calm and subtle.
“Easy, Robert. Easy,” Stacy told him. “It’s us, your friends, remember? Stacy? Graham?”
“Yeah. I’m your brother-in-law; we’re buds!” Graham added.
Stacy’s movements grew more stealthy, her limbs lengthening to prepare for anything. Her eyes darted to Lark’s, who stood behind her brother, her arms and her wings ready to react at a single thought. And, it seemed, Robert thought it.
Lark moved, her wings closing over her brother like a cape, her face disappearing behind the wall of white and the erasure of black. I limped forward, the words in my throat being stolen away by the laughter that boomed behind me.
“It is too late. It is all too late! You can stop nothing!” Uriel mused.
The struggling form of Lark and her shuttered wings were just a few feet away from me; I could almost smell the powdery scent of the white feathers that fluttered from the struggle taking place beneath them. And then a piercing, bone shattering scream broke out. Lark’s wings flew open in a burst of feathers and light. She fell backwards as one wing hung limply to her side, bent and broken, while the other…
The other wing lay on the ground, separate from her body which now bore a charred stump. She clutched at the stump with a mangled hand, her eyes seeing what ours did. She cried out, her thoughts almost as loud as her voice to get away, but Graham had already seen enough, and Stacy could not disobey her own nature.
Together, the two of them sprang towards Robert angrily.
I saw his face, saw the dark sneer form on his lips, and knew that this was not going to end well.
“No!”
No!
Momentum is often thought of as something physical; but it also something emotional. You feel it within you, like a battering ram that is pushing forward towards its destination. It does not want to stop, doesn’t know how to stop, until it bursts down the doors that were never meant to be closed.
That is what brought me to this place, where the lives of my friends and the soul of the person I loved the most mattered more than the promise I’d made to myself. There was no compromise, no time for consideration or thought. Every increment of time was precious and could not be wasted. And, I suppose, even if I had wanted to hesitate…I couldn’t.
Because momentum is destiny. You can do nothing to stop it, nothing to avoid it. You simply struggle to ignore it, force yourself to endure the pain that is the delaying of it until your feet and your conscience give in and you find yourself hurtling towards the end of the world.
And this was my destiny. It had been from the very beginning.
I moved past Graham with awkward speed, seeing his confused expression and hearing his gasps of fear. I pushed him aside as I bit through the pain that shot through my body with every jerk of my broken leg. His body gave like water to my dedicated intrusion and I shoved even harder, watching him fall to the ground in muted shock. There was no time to apologize or explain; he would just have to understand that this was for the best.
Stacy’s face was frozen in outrage as she watched me pass her by. The length of her jaw had not returned to normal, and she still bore a slight reddish hue around the dark brown of her eyes, but I knew her thoughts, knew her voice, and it was to her that I mouthed a farewell to. I had just enough strength in me to throw her back as she reached for my arm.
Momentum is what kept Robert moving as well, his own fate tied to mine. His mouth was open in a roar, a dark cave of what had once been filled with kind words now only filled with rage. There was no room in him for love any longer; Raphael had made sure that Robert would not recognize me when he sped up the effects of the Innominate.
It took everything I had not to break down as I took in the shadowed remains of the angel who’d shown me how to accept who I was and what I was. This was for him as much as it was for me. I said nothing, thought nothing as finally we collided.
My hands reached out to him, hopelessly wanting once more to touch the unmoving spot beneath his chest, a final reminder of what he had given up for me. His wings, once beautiful, glossy arcs of ebony feathers, were now daggers that he drove straight towards me.
And into me.
The crushing, crunching sound of flesh and bone seemed to signal a halt to everything else around us. Everything that had eyes and could see had locked onto me, and not even the sound of breathing could be heard over my own pained gasps.
I looked down, my hands gripping onto the blackened spines that jutted through my chest and abdomen. I reached behind me and felt the tips poking through, the stickiness of blood running down my back and soaking my clothes. I coughed involuntarily, and watched as red foam spilled past my lips, dripping onto the black and deepening in color.
“Grace?”
My head lifted at the sound of Robert’s voice. I felt a jolt and then a slow, wet pull as his wings retreated, disappearing into his back that grew lighter with each passing second. A gush of warmth spilled out of me, flowing quickly and purposefully down my body and onto the ground.
Robert’s eyes had already cleared, his face now marked with the webbing that I was so familiar with as his voice regained the emotion that I believed had died.
“Oh God, Grace—what have I done?” he cried out as I collapsed into his arms. His hands moved to cover the holes that his wings had left, but there were too many. “I’m going to heal you.”
I tried to shake my head, finding myself only capable of moving it just a fraction. No. Don’t.
“What? You can’t ask me not to.”
A heavy, pressing weight seemed to have found one side of my chest, while a pulsing, drowning crush seemed to appear on the other. Look…look at your hands.
His eyes dropped quickly to see that black no longer showed through the blood that covered them. “That means nothing to me. I don’t care about myself, Grace; I only care about you. You should have done the same! You promised me that you would live, remember? You promised us. My God, you’re-”
Weakly, I raised my fingers to his lips. Shh. There was no fighting this. I was stupid to think that I knew better.
His eyes grew glassy, his voice cracked. “You can’t leave me, Grace. You can’t. You promised you wouldn’t…”
My fingers dragged down his chin and finally found the spot I had been looking for. The silence, the unmoving flesh beneath the soiled and bloodied shirt he wore had always been a strange comfort just as it had always been a stinging reminder of what love demanded as payment. I had never had a problem paying that price. It was well worth it.
Breathing suddenly became an impossibility; my body convulsed as my lungs collapsed under the weight of so much damage to them. My heart stuttered and skipped, tumbling in the open cavity that was my chest and I did nothing to will it to fight. Instead, I only struggled to keep my eyes open and my vision clear long enough to look into the silver rings that encircled the endless love that had always existed in his eyes and found, through the numbness, the pain, the fire, the ice, life, and death, the strength to say…
Goodbye…
AVI
I am born. Is this what man experiences at birth as well; this sudden and strange need to feel the light on one’s flesh and the sweet air in one’s ch
est? Is this what life is? It is no wonder that I feel a need to hold on to it with both hands and cling to it like a star clings to the sky.
A scratching sound whispered to my right, and I looked between the leaves and branches of bushes that tried to hide its secrets behind them. Humans! Human children! They are beautiful in their preciousness. What is it that makes them so sweet to look at? I felt a yearning to touch them, and without thought they came to me, eager to do the same.
I hurried to their sweet sides and gathered them in my arms, feeling the warmth beneath their skin like a dawn that I had yet to experience. This was happiness; I was certain of it. To smell their sweetness and hear their breaths-
“Why are you not breathing?” I asked when I felt their stillness.
“My babies!” a shriek sounded.
Death. Humans know it the moment it arrives. And it has touched them—I have touched them.
“They are not moving! They are not breathing! What did you do to them?” their mother demanded to know.
“I…I believe I have ended their lives.”
“Ended? Ended?”
She was as horrified as she was confused, but she knew that end did not mean anything different than when it is used to speak of animals.
“I did not mean to do it, and they did not suffer.”
“Suffer?” This word seemed to spark a fire within her, and she began to weep tears, thick like jewels.
“I am…I am sorry,” I said in supplication. “I did not know that this would happen. I only wanted to hug them.”
“You…you ended them! You killed them!” The mother’s cries were like thorns in my chest, pricks that spread through my body, burning, feeding until it formed a circle of fire at my back.
I cried out, hearing for the first time my own pain. This task that I had been born for, this unyielding need to fulfill cannot be mine. Nothing this destructive to one’s soul could be a blessing. It was unbearable, unforgiveable. And it was consuming. It ate at me, destroying faith and renewing it as my divine body was rendered to pieces, two dark protrusions emerging from my torn flesh like arms that reached towards the sky.
We are here, new one. We are here to guide you.
How strange and brilliant a sound, those words that filled my tortured mind. Is this what it means to be joined in thought?
“We have confirmation that she can think—can she speak?”
“If by speak you mean open my mouth, then yes, I can,” I replied.
I saw them, the four who came before me. They watched me curiously while keeping their thoughts quiet, sharing them only with each other. Was I so different? Was I so unique?
“You are everything that is different,” said one whose face was so gloriously dour, I will never allow it to leave my memory.
“Then different is exactly what I want to be,” I said firmly.
“We cannot call you that, for that is not your name. You are to be called-”
“Avi, I know. It sings in my veins,” I finished for him, my eyes focusing on the frightened mother who hid once more in the bushes, unwilling to leave so long as the bodies of her children remained.
“I am Gabriel.”
The others surrounded him, their faces each bearing looks that ranged from pleased to bored.
Gabriel turned to them and held out his hands in introduction. “This is Michael, Raphael and Uriel. We are the first four, the inner circle, the-”
“I get it. You are the leaders and I am to be the tail on the beast.”
The one named Uriel laughed, a strange sound that I’m certain would not resemble any laugh I would hear again. “You are different in ways that defy the very makeup of our kind. If there can be a word to describe you, it would be…obstinate.”
“Yes. That is it,” agreed the one named Michael. “Obstinate would be a perfect word, judging by her thoughts and her actions.”
“What about defiant? Or selfish?” asked the one named Uriel.
“Selfish?”
“Yes,” Raphael said with authority. “You’ve taken the lives of these children, but you’ve left their mother to suffer.”
He turned to the woman and spoke to her quietly. She grew angry, violent, but he did not seem fazed by her reactions. He whispered to her gently that her sacrifices were not wasted, and that she would never fear the same fate as her children.
Raphael took her in his arms, his voice calming her. “You are the first of your kind to be blessed this way. It is an honor that we will never forget.”
She was the first wing-bringer and so, the first turned. She was the mother to loss and to creation and I owed her everything.
“You owe her nothing,” Raphael said, dropping the woman’s limp body on the ground. “She has been repaid; immortality will be hers forever. That is more than can be said for the rest of the world. You have a duty to fulfill. Your calling is to end the reign of immortal men. Why do you delay answering it?”
“How can this be what I am meant to do? Look at these faces,” I demanded, dropping to my knees to cradle the dead children at my feet.
“Children grow up to be faceless. You have seen this—you were born with this knowledge. A child’s death does not erase this fact.”
“Leave her be, Raphael,” Gabriel ordered. “She has seen what we’ve seen, yes, but until she experiences the sins of man herself, she will never understand.”
“Then let her start understanding now,” Raphael announced.
My body shook with understanding and obedience. This…calling, as Uriel described it, now took over the song that sang in me. Man must learn to fear death, it said, the words finding a rhythm that pulsed with the strange thumping in my chest.
“A reminder,” Michael said with melancholy at my thoughts, “of what it means to exist. You are the first of us to have one. Consider it a gift.”
“You do not have them?” I asked, amazed at this news that had not been revealed to me.
“There was never a need; we are not man’s keepers,” Gabriel said with a haughty sniff.
I brought my hand to my chest, feeling the strength of each beat. A fluttering began above my head, a sound that I was unfamiliar with even as each wave caused my body to push back and forth.
“Black…I should have known.”
I looked up at Gabriel’s comment and saw that his eyes were drawn to what flapped behind me. “I have black wings,” I said in awe.
“They are glorious.”
“But why?”
“Because you are meant to do the most sinful of acts—so sinful in fact that we are incapable of doing it—and we must never be allowed to forget just how different from us you truly are.”
“As if her being female would simply slip past our thoughts,” Michael quipped.
Uriel groaned. “Enough—we have an eternity to discuss the differences between us. Mankind cannot wait. Their eyes need to be opened and we finally have a way of doing that.”
***
I do not wish to be a mother. There are others that can bear children; why must it be me? Why can’t God simply create more angels if there aren’t enough of us?
Gabriel looked at me with sadness in his eyes. There will be no more angels created by God; not after the flood. He has left us to our own end.
The ocean water was warm against my feet as I bathed them in their blue waves. We had come to bask in the beauty of the sea before the winter came over the earth once more and my calling pulled me away from the serenity that was simple comfort.
The numbers make no sense then. We are allowed only one child. If we are ever to experience another flood, we will have too few left to have any effect on this world. Humanity needs us.
The water fizzed as Gabriel placed his hands beneath its surface. “Humanity needs you. It does not need me or any of the others. We’ve long since outlived our purpose here.”
“Is it safe to speak so freely?” I asked, surprised by his voice.
“What is there to keep secret? Who is the
re to fear? We are the first four. Well…five. There is only one way to remove us from power and since neither I, nor the others feel so inclined, we are able to speak as we wish.”
“But you don’t,” I reminded. “You tell me things you do not share with the others.”
“That is because you are different, my dear. There will come a time when you will find in us a reason to be distrustful and I want you to know that you can always, always trust me.”
“That trust might be tested one day,” I said softly.
“As all trust is,” he returned. “But mine will never fail you.”
***
We have a strange friendship, you and I, Ameila. It is too similar to those that the humans share.
Ameila was holding her son to her chest, his dark hair sitting atop his tiny head like a cloud of midnight. There was an ache in me as I looked at him, and at her. There was such affection between them that I was a stranger to.
When it comes to friendship, there has never been one for me except with you. You should know our kind holds no compassion for each other.
I laughed at her words and nodded in agreement. We are enigmas to our kind. Gabriel seems to think that what you and I share is unnatural.
Of course the old lion would think that while ignoring his friendship with you. He has never been one to accept and acknowledge his own hypocrisy. But the others have followed your lead, or have you failed to notice the changes in my father’s behavior as of late?
At this I nodded. Perhaps it is because he is now a grandfather?
Ameila’s smile faded. He does not accept N’Uriel as his own. I did not expect him to. He has, however, become quite attentive to me. I believe that when the time comes for me to find a mate and bear a child in the usual manner that he will be a most doting grandfather.
My lips pursed in distaste for her words. That is unfair to N’Uriel.
Unfair or not, it is the way of it. But it comes with a price—you and I both know this. We do not have children to encourage interaction with their grandparents; we have children to change the world.