22.2

 

Then she sees the inner shape of the Nephilim. Not the part she’s standing in front of, the over-tall, flesh-and-blood figure with the beautiful eyes and a scent you could drown in. Beneath that exterior, beneath the creature sporting the paint-and-charcoal vitiligo skin; is an even more beauteous one composed of two disparate sets of DNA hammered together like tungsten and copper. One half of him is angelic, sharp and luminous, glowing with the inner light of Heaven’s first architecture and the other human; soft, warm and full of possibilities, yearning and free will. The two halves do not bond well; their edges are sewn together in a manner Frankenstein would have discarded as impractical. Despite this, they coexist. Outwardly they are as harmonious as keys on a piano but inwardly they bicker like two racoons with one slice of pizza.

Roisin can feel the tension as tight as a loaded crossbow. The Nephilim is always on the verge of tearing itself apart but never does. It is built to hold contradictions. It is the living equivalent of an aircraft carrier, part warship and part cargo delivery vehicle. This is why it can hold her mantle and does so with neither strain nor complaint. It has no fear of the Horse because the horse cannot break it.

The Shape of the Horse inside the Nephilim is not an animal in the true sense but a vehicle of her own spirit, pared away like the skin from an avocado, although in such a metaphor, she would be the outer peel and the horse would be the meat she used to contain. Within the horse resides the Hunger, the Balance and the Justice of Famine; a force that keeps the world from collapsing under its own abundance. In the horse resides the Balance of the Earth, and thus has it always been. Eden could only exist while much or the world outside its gates remained barren. Eden was the gravity well of original wealth, causing all of abundance to fall inside its star, but once that gravity well was flattened, by one of its attendant caretakers revealing its secret, Eden became doomed; a collapsing probability even Schrödinger would have felt uncomfortable about.

Now her horse rests inside the Nephilim like a sleeping star ready to go supernova. It does not call to her or need her like it did when it tried for fit inside Paul, but it remembers her, and in that remembrance she can feel a sharp needle of incompleteness, the memory of longing, the pang of regret.

And in that memory, she finds a flavour of something she cannot name. She runs her consciousness over it like a child’s tongue around a gobstopper. The taste is not that of longing, for she knows that bitterness too well and would recognise it in an instance. Neither is it loss, for she had had years of its acrid bite even before she fully understood why she felt so sad all the time after her father and brother went out of her life.

What she feels is completeness and it all but brings her to her knees.

The Nephilim remembers the Horseman. Not just her, as an individual, but the whole of the angel known as The Horsemen, before they were split into four separate parts, before they became monsters, before they became the heralds or the world’s death. It remembers them as the archangel Araksiel, the distributor of Balance

She sees the Four through the Horse’s memory as a complete being, each component part as disparate and as harmonious at the Nephilim himself. As Araksiel, they kept the world steady before Heaven wrote its laws, they shaped the world into its quarters: East, West, North and South; the Four Quarters who were made not to end the world, but to keep it in check, like a spinning top never coming to a stop at the end of a now-obscure film. She sees their symbol written in the book of the Creator: War as a mighty X cutting through chaos; Death as a reversed T to channel the souls of the world toward Heaven; Pestilence as the twin circles of Fruitfulness and Decay, each a part of the complete cycle and Famine, the hollow circle to enclose them all. Perfect and all-encompassing. Roisin can see herself as that circle. Dormant and incomplete, perhaps, but still part of the whole, still present, still recognised, still the one with a quarter-dominion of the world around her.

And still as necessary as Finish is to Start.