21.5

 Roisin’s breath hitches in her throat. Stops. Continues. The Nephilim is not asking for her, it is asking on behalf of the mantle it now carries.

Will she claim it for herself? Will she become the rider she was destined to be? Born to be?

Roisin feels something shift inside her, a perspective she thought was long buried from years of being ostracised during her school years, from her father leaving, from her brother dying, from her mum’s insistence of rolling through her life accepting all change as if it was normal to do so, numb to the affects it was having on her mental health, or her daughter’s.

The perspective she finds is not the huger of Famine, or the urgent need of the Rider, nor yet the desire of the Artist to open the seeds and let chaos be unleashed. Instead, it is the perspective of Family she didn’t have when growing up. She feels a kinship with the Nephilim – and the horse – she never had with her human family. She feels she belongs with them. She feels seen as her own authentic self. Not as the child of a single parent. Not as an errant daughter or a talented but directionless artist. Not even as a vulnerable woman who hides from the world in a flat with too many secrets but seen as what she was; what she could be again. Famine.

The Nephilim’s awareness wraps around her like a memory she didn’t know she’d lost. Neither threatening nor demanding merely recognising her, and with that thought, a realisation hits her: The Nephilim remembers her as the Horseman she once was; as the angel she once was, as the divine being she was before the seals were even forged, and wrapped in this realisation comes the knowledge she’d lost while buried in a human body. She is not alone. She has never been alone. She is one part of a foursome of celestial beings who are not her brothers, or sisters, or fellow angels, but are a part of a single whole. The Horsemen are a construct broken down into elements so that a single, mad prophet could comprehend the enormity of the universe without his mind being forever torn away from the flesh that birthed it. She is a part of a design older than Heaven’s laws.

The Nephilim’s presence presses closer. It doesn’t want to claim her or harm her. It wants to welcome her, just as a new employee to a company  is welcomed by an colleague they haven’t seen in more than a decade, except this span of time measures in the eons rather than a single lifetime.

Roisin’s reaction is not the terror she was expecting but a quiet, impossible awe and her first thought is ‘you remember me.”

The Nephilim tilts its head in acknowledgement and the air in the room tightens. The others can’t see their connection, though the slow sigh of the Artist indicated that he is aware of the connection, at least, though Roisin senses he is holding back joining in for fear of overwhelming them both.

Paul, still shaking on the floor, looks up at her with wide, terrified eyes as she steps forward, and Steve once more stands protectively over him. Where only hours – minutes? – ago he was defending her as an ally, now he sees her as a threat at least as dangerous as the terrors they have already faced. The Assistant is still next to Paul on the floor, more afraid of the Nephilim than she was of the Artist, and she does not yet comprehend how afraid she should be of Roisin.

But Roisin steps past them all. The Nephilim’s awareness is still touching hers, and in that contact, she feels something she has not felt since she became human: the shape of her true self. Not the hunger, or the fury or the need of the mantle, but the shape of her; the identity beneath Roisin; beneath Famine, beneath the Horseman and it is stranger, deeper, and more familiar than anything she has ever known.

 The room recedes from her conscious thought. She is still aware of Steve’s sharp inhale, Paul’s ragged breathing, the trembling of the assistant and the Artist’s quiet satisfaction, just as she’s aware of every tiny spot of life within the microcosm of the ancient carpet, the street outside and  the bustle of the city, but they become background noise, like the sounds she heard when she sank her head underwater in her mother's bathroom.