21.6

 

The only thing her attention is focused upon is the doorway, where the Nephilim stands, the giant who has used her drawing s a bridge between his prison and the mortal world, who minutes ago was a two-dimensional self-portrait of herself as a skeleton, then a living, animated skeleton moving solely under the will of the spirit driving it, then finally a flesh-and-blood creature fully a head and a half taller than she.

Its awareness presses against her mind like a hand through fabric, and Roisin feels the world narrow to a single point of gravity. She can no more resist its pull than a salmon could resist the call to the spawning grounds.

Her foot lifts. Her weight shifts. She steps forward and the air begins to thicken around her, memories filling the space between them. Not her memories, but the Nephilim’s brush against her like the sweet violets scent her grandmother used to wear.

She feels the desert wind across her cheeks as she travels through sands that have barely had time to be ground from the earth beneath; the cracked earth under a sky that has know too little rain for too many years; she sees the sky above her, pregnant with the stars just beyond the highest layers of air, where the wings of angels gleam and flash in reflected sunlight. She hears unshod hooves against the deep heartbeat of the earth, fresh from the hand of the Creator and seething with a myriad of possibilities.

The memories aren’t images. They aren’t the collection of tiny home movies stored of her grandparents, her childhood, her mother when everyone had left her. She feels them against her mind in the broad strokes of Impressionism, layered with the attached impasto of the glory of all Creation.

She takes a breath, filling her lungs with the sweet innocence of the world before it was corrupted by betrayal.

She takes another step and the Nephilim begins to turn toward her. An arm raises, the flesh still filling out and darkening; the muscles expanding and defining. Fully formed fingers uncurl from its palm and stretch, a languid reconstruction of Michelangelo’s ‘God Creating Adam,’ and an abstract part of wonders if he, too, had experienced the call of a Nephilim, of if her knowledge of art was influencing the way the Nephilim moved. He was born of her, in a manner of speaking, so why shouldn’t it share her memories, just as she was sharing his.

The open hand pulls on her with the lightest of touches, reminiscent of the pull of the Mantle but more an invitation than a compulsion. It is the welcoming hand of a loved one, the recognition of a parent for a child, the greeting of a distant relative, returning after a long absence. It remembers her not at Roisin, but of the being she was, the shape she wore before the world turned.

A third step and she can feel the mantle settling into the Nephilim like a hermit crab into a new shell. The hunger she carried for centuries, the emptiness that balanced abundance, the cold clarity of Famine is no longer her burden to carry, but it remembers her as a brother, a sister, a twin. It remembers her as a part of itself, separate but whole, and her she stumbles with the realisation that the horse is neither burden nor duty, but a living part of her she cannot abandon.

Distantly, as real and as imagined as the sound of Negev sands shifting among the bones of Abram’s people, Paul calls her name: “Roisin— don’t—” His voice is thin, shaking, terrified but feels as far away as her dead brother’s voice calling from the other side of a nightmare. She hears him, but the invitation from the Nephilim is stronger — not because it is forceful, but because it is true. She takes another step and feels the current of air as Steve raises a hand to stop her and the Artist blocks him from reaching her.

“Let her choose.” Pestilence’s voice is as soft as the roots of a fungus travelling through the cambium of a fallen tree and as familiar as the lullaby of a mother. His voice belongs to her, just as hers belongs to him and their siblings, and she can conjure War’s heavy, staccato laughter as easily as Death’s melancholy promise.

Roisin barely hears them. She takes another step across the ragged floor, and behind her are the silhouettes of her footsteps, etched light night clouds obscuring the stars with the deaths of the microscopic life her passing has starved.