21.4

 

The Nephilim opens its eyes.

Roisin expects them to be black pits, or blue like a native of ‘Dune,’ or golden and filled with the Light of God, but they are disappointingly human. Mundane, if anything. Hazel tending to brown, with normal, off-white sclera and black irises. He is bloody tall, though, several inches above the door frame, his wiry hair almost brushing the ceiling. She wonders if he’s claustrophobic, because she would be if her hair was brushing the ceiling. She should be afraid of it – not least because of its sheer size – but she isn’t. What rises in her instead is something older, stranger, and far more disorienting — a sensation she has no words for, because it is not a human reaction.

Instead, she feels a recognition. Not only because it has been formed of her own work, a part of her that she has only recently given representation to, but because she can sense it has similar tumultuous thoughts regarding the future. She feels a kinship, but not of blood; mor of a shared feeling of the dichotomy of being bound to not one existence, but two. It, too, knows the world of angels, probably better than she does, for it lived when they still walked freely upon the earth. Finally, she feels a memory of the Nephilim; not of anything she has lived, but the feeling that it is part of her life of experience in the same way as her father was, or her dead brother, or the teachers she knew as a child. It is the feeling of a door remembering the shape of the key that once fit it.

Roisin feels the horse settle inside it—quiet, contained, held by something strong enough to bear it and for the first time since the mantle stirred, the hunger in the room is not hers, but that of the Nephilim.

Her next breath is the first one she’s taken without the horse pulling at her. The hunger that has been pulling at her ribs since she first saw the paintings of the Nephilim – before she even knew they were Nephilim – has let go of its claim on her, and the absence hits her harder than the presence ever did.

The breath she takes is a ragged one of loss, because for the first time since she was human, she feels empty in a way that is no longer hunger but disconnection. It feels like the world keeps moving while something essential inside her has stopped. A second ago, everything was chaotic and terrible, just as it is now, but the terror was in the way that the tension on a sportsball pitch is shared by those watching the game, and now there is a hollowness where before there was need, begging to be embraced. The air feels thicker, as if she will have to push through it just to take another breath. Everywhere inside her are echoes of her need, and now the silence where the hunger resided has not been filled but excised completely. The quiet is the worst part. It isn’t peaceful; it’s loud with absence.

She will carry the memory of that hunger in ways she didn’t choose: a tightness in her chest, a dull ache behind her eyes, a constant sense that something is missing that can never be retrieved. losing the horse has left her hollower than when she had the hunger for it, and the loss spills out of her, uncontrollable and raw.

The horse is no longer hers. It has found a new vessel, one that can hold it; one that is not her, and the shock of that — the shock of being unlinked — is stranger than any terror she could have imagined.

The Nephilim’s presence touches her mind like a hand through water touches a centuries-old coin, washed up in the backwater of a trash-strewn tide. It doesn’t speak to her with words, or move with any discernible motion, but she feels it acknowledging an awareness of her; a slow, deliberate turning of attention, like a blue whale under the surface of the arctic sea becoming aware of the propellors of a whaling ship. The hazel eyes only tilt a fraction, but the real movement is below the surface — an awareness leaning closer, brushing against her mind with a simple question. Not a question in words, but in shape; a shape she once wore. The shape of Famine, one of the four Horseman of the Apocalypse.