25.4

 

At first, Roisin feels nothing. Just like at the doctor’s when she goes to have her inoculations against COVID or the latest virulent epidemic sweeping the country (and despite most of the diseases being immigrants from America, where the rise of Anti-Vaccers has put medicine back by more than a century, she has never contracted anything) she doesn’t even feel the prick of the needle, or in this case, knowledge. She isn’t even aware of any increase in her memory – she’s not suddenly an expert on history or biology, and her vision isn’t overwhelmed by a thousand lines of green-tinted machine code scrolling endlessly past her optic nerve, she just feels a strange, crystalline stillness — as though her mind has been left in the freezer compartment overnight and has emerged wrapped in frost.

The mantle of Knowledge sits inside her like a silent partner investing in a business for the tax write-off. It radiates clarity, but her emotions are lollygagging, slow to catch up, like a body not realising it has been wounded until the adrenaline of the battle has worn off.

She stands very still. Though the Nephilim’s hand remains on her back, steady and warm, anchoring her to the physical world.

Astaroth watches her with the patience of someone who has seen countless beings break under far less. He taps his fingers on the air as if it were a polished wooden table – perhaps it is, in timeline, but despite his fingers touching only a blank space, she can still hear them drumming.  Rat-a-tat-TAT. Rat-a-tat-TAT.

Steve stares at her as though she’s slipping through his fingers.

Roisin inhales. Three days ago, it feels like, she was a little girl with the whole world in front of her; now she is something else, and it is she who is in front of the whole world. And the breath shatters her.

Grief hits her like a wave breaking over her ribs and filling every cavity with sand and the crumbled exoskeletons of molluscs. Not grief for the mantle she once carried  -- losing Famine was too recent an action for her to have regret over it. Nor is it grief for her humanity, for she never really managed to integrate into a peer group and being a loner always kind of suited her. What breaks her is grief for the life she tried to build. No matter how futile she was told her ambition was, she truly believed she could be an artist of renown; taking a podium with the greatest names in modern art history; Hockney, Warhol, Rothko, Pollock. She truly believed she had what it took to be one of them. Now she will never be an artist. She has a destiny that precludes the solitary existence of an artist and the comfort of creating something out of pencil, charcoal and paint.

She realises, with a hollow ache, that she will never again have the freedom to be alone.She will always be watched by the Nephilim, by the Angels, by the Fallen Lords, and by the World.

She presses a hand to her chest, fingers trembling. “I didn’t want this,” she whispers, and the words are thin, fragile, almost childlike.

But like the mantle within her, she has knowledge; knowledge that what has been done can never be undone and with this knowledge comes fear and, ironically, what she fears is the knowledge itself, because it is not the knowledge of human history, or the knowledge of the mathematics that underlie the forms of the universe, but the mantle gives her the power to hold a mirror up to whatever she sees. The light and the dark, the truth and the lies, the words and the thoughts. It has granted her the ability to see, yes, but she sees too much. She sees the Nephilim’s dual nature — the angelic and the human halves straining against each other like the clutch plates of a car with a learner driver at the wheel. She sees Astaroth’s intentions — seemingly simple but layered and interwoven like tapeworms migrating through a stomach. She sees Steve’s fear — bright and trembling, threaded with love and desperation and the belief she’s the love of his life, reborn, and his terror of losing her. Worst of all, she sees herself. She sees the shape she is becoming; the Fifth, the Mediator, The Justice, and it terrifies her because she knows she has always known this. Justice fits her because she has always been the Judge, She has always been able to see the duality in everyone, from the desire of her piano teacher for her to learn against the despair that she was hopeless, to the honeyed promises of a pre-election politician with his fingers crossed behind his back.

Justice fits her too well.

Her breath catches a sob. “I don’t know how to be this.”

The Nephilim’s awareness brushes hers, warm and steady. “You are already this. You have always been.”