Chapter 21.1

 

From outside the room, from down the hall, from the bedroom at the front of the house, came the sound of ripping paper. The flat shook again — not from impact, not from sound, but from recognition. They rippled like the water in a glass disturbed by the footsteps of an approaching dinosaur. Something inside them shifted, slow and heavy, like a sleeper turning toward a voice.

Roisin glanced toward the door, half expecting another portal to open and a dozen angels to come through, but there was nothing, just an uneasy feeling of something about to break.

It was a feeling that reminded her of an episode in her past. One winter, when she was small and her dad still lived with them, he took her to the park, where most of the lake had frozen over. Heedless of the warnings posted on the railings, he helped her onto the ice, encouraging her to skate as much as she was able in her wellington boots, and do slip-and-slides from the thick ice at the edges. She remembered the last one where he’d given her a push to get started and she’d heard a singing noise, like mermaids under the ice, and she’d glided all the way from one side to the next, spotting fishes beneath the ice in the still-flowing middle of the ice. A man on a white horse had stopped their fun and given her dad a stern talking to.  They’d gone to a coffee shop afterward, and she’d had a hot chocolate with marshmallows and sprinkles.

She had the same feeling now as she had when she’d skated over ice so thin that it was still moving with the flow of the current. It was the feeling of being watched over, of being safe. When she talked about her afternoon at tea, her mum told her it had been God watching her. Or maybe Mary, Roisin couldn’t remember now. In hindsight it was probably Mary, since they had a big statue of her in the hall that her mum blessed herself in front of every day.

Maybe it hadn’t been God watching over her at all, but an angel. An angel on a horse.

She felt the hollow inside Paul surge and he screamed. The mantle snapped toward her like a whip and she ducked before she realised it wasn’t yet a physical movement.

She is halfway through the motion of stepping back — halfway through the decision to reject the mantle, to let the hunger consume Paul rather than rise inside her — when something shifts in the flat.

It hits her like a second heartbeat. Another pulse — not hollow like the horse, not ancient like the mantle, but awake and physical. A presence she had forgotten she’d drawn, forgotten she’d imagined, forgotten she’d given shape to.

Her breath catches. The pull is gentle at first, almost curious, like fingertips brushing the back of her mind. Then it sharpens, becomes deliberate, becomes a call, not to her but to the horse. She turns, slowly, the air in the flat seemingly as thick as the treacle in a Wonderland well.

In the shadows of the doorway stands a figure. A real-life, three-dimensional, living being. The charcoal lines she drew — the skeletal figure, the elongated limbs, the hollowed eyes — are no longer flat. They are three-dimensional; an animation from a dozen horror films, printed out in three dimensions from charcoal and emulsion paint.

The skeleton stands still at first, a quiet architecture of bone, pale and empty, each rib a curved question mark. Then something changes—not a jolt, but a gathering. A faint warmth seeps into the hollows, as if the air itself has decided to remember what once lived there.

From the centre outward, renewal begins. Within the ribcage, translucent shapes bloom like mist condensing into form. Organs take their places one by one: a heart knitting itself from soft tissue, beginning to pulse with a slow, deliberate certainty; lungs unfurling like pale shells, expanding and contracting as if testing the idea of breath. Veins and arteries branch outward, fine as inked lines on parchment, carrying colour where there was only emptiness.

Muscle follows, wrapping the bones in purposeful layers. Tendons lace themselves across joints, drawing femur to hip, humerus to shoulder, transforming loose articulation into strength. The skull, once a fixed grin, gains depth as jaw muscles form and neck thickens, allowing the head to lift with intent rather than surrender to gravity. Each movement now has weight behind it.

As flesh gathers, the figure does not merely fill out—it grows. The spine elongates vertebra by vertebra, lifting the body higher from the ground. Legs stretch, bones lengthening smoothly, proportion shifting beyond human norms. With every heartbeat, the body gains height, rising past door-frame scale, past the memory of ordinary stature. At three metres tall, it stands like a living monument, balanced and immense.

Skin finally seals it all together, flowing over muscle and bone, smoothing the seams of its making. Colour returns, not just to the surface but to the presence of the being itself. Where there was once a collection of parts, there is now coherence. Where there was silence, there is the subtle sound of breath and blood and weight settling into place.

The giant straightens fully. It is alive—not in a frantic or violent way, but with a deep, grounded vitality, as if it has grown not just a body, but the gravity to inhabit it.

A Nephilim.

One of the hidden one the Artist had hidden the world.

Except she had painted this one. Made it in her own image and brought it to life. And it is looking at her.

No — not at her.

At Paul.

At the horse inside him.