22.4

 

She steps closer without even being aware of her own movement. Her hand remains in contact with the Nephilim’s and her breath and heartrate have slowed to match the pulse she feels from him. The horse within is quiet, contained; resting like a sleeping cat in Sunday afternoon sunshine. She feels no pull from it, no demand that she take it within herself, only its calm contentedness radiating out like a softly-spoken mantra.

She feels herself rocked by more memories. Not a wave of sensation like a storm at sea assaulting a lighthouse, but the shallow bobbing of a hired rowboat like the ones on the lake in Laverstone park which they rented as high-schoolers to travel across to the constructed island in the centre, a haven for birds and randy teenagers alike. She encounters the sensation of being the hollow circle she once embodied, keeping the other aspects safe from the results of their walking through the world, and the balance she once kept, following Cain from the Garden into the lands populated by misfits and inhumans, forged not from Adam’s line but from some inferior breed of mortals discarded as unworthy by the Creator.

The fracture she left in the world when she became human; leaving a shift in power and wealth that her absence allowed to get out of control, where the world was split into those that have and those who die providing for them. Western culture and east, the success of the former standing on the lacerated backs of the latter and resenting the concept of equality.  She feels that world now, gathered up like a bag of pennies inside a wet football sock, ready to slam into the monopolies that patriarchs engineered and guided at the expense of the poor. Without Famine, the world teeters on collapse, not from the threatened prophesies of their Return but from sheer disrespect to the planet around them.

Roisin’s throat tightens. “I’m not Famine anymore.”

She hears the response in a series of images; clear thoughts she has had herself of late. A quiet, patient truth. She was neither Famine nor Human and had little capacity for pity or compassion. She was not whole, but neither was she lost. There were paths of opportunity waiting for her to choose where to tread. She could take the mantle back, become the bridge the Nephilim wanted or she could turn away from it all and learn the achievements and disappointments of being fully human. As if she hadn’t already had enough of the latter.

In her mind, the Nephilim holds out clutch of straws: the old game of who might pick the shortest, but she is the only participant and the straws are all an equal length. Her mantle, her memory, her shape, her place among the Quarters.

Roisin’s eyes sting. Here is the alternate to becoming the Bridge. To become that which she thought she was. A mortal child, shouting impotently at the inequality of a world being burned slowly to ashes. To reject the angel inside her and live the simple life she had affected until now, devoid of the battles of Heaven raging around her and subject to the same currents she would otherwise be directing. A mortal being, forever aware of the Void between world but forevermore barred from it.

It is Hobson’s choice she is being offered. To fight for the world she has only now discovered or forever be excluded from it, the figure inside a snow globe being shaken about while the winds of eternity swirl around her.