Chapter 22.1

 

Steve is still in her way, so Roisin gently but firmly puts both hands on his shoulder and, despite his frame being larger than hers, picks him bodily up and turns through ninety degrees before setting him down again. When she turns back, she is face-to-face with the Nephilim, or at least, face-to-chest, since he is so much taller. Without Steve there, the Nephilim floods her senses like hot porridge on a cold morning.

Being this close to it feels like crossing a threshold she didn’t know she’d been standing on. The air thickens, her awareness of the others in the room dims and the world narrows to the space between her hand and the Nephilim’s.

Steve tries to pull her away from it, but his grip on her arm slides off like mercury in a hot saucepan. She only notices in her peripheral eyesight, because the Nephilim holds all her attention. Her body moves with the inevitability of a compass needle turning toward north as she lifts her hand to one made seemingly with charcoal and paper, not to take the mantle or reclaim the horse, but to answer the recognition it has for her and to connect with the world that once knew her as a part of the natural order.

This close, the smell of the Nephilim is almost overpowering, but it’s a familiar scent; one of charcoal on a fresh sheet of heavy paper, a newly-stretched canvas taking the first sweep of a primer-laden brush; the aroma of her old studio on the seventh floor of Tower of Art, when linseed oil and turpentine have seeped so far into the concrete flooring it has become a work of art in itself. It smells like Home, though not the actual home where she lived with her flatmates, or the house where she lived with her mother, but the concept of Home; where the heart is at peace and no matter where you roam, it belongs.

When their hands touch, it feels neither warm nor cold, but feels rather of the idea of warmth; of dappled sunshine through the branches of an apple tree in summer, where the bees pollinate the nearby cornflowers and bramble bushes and the ground beneath your body is soft and yielding. There is a Truth here, not just of her existence, but of the fairy tales of a woman constructed for the convenience of a man, and of a tree with fruits heavier than obedience.

A shock of familiarity runs through her — not memory, not power, but identity. The shape of herself reflected through a being that should not know her, yet does. She sees herself through his eyes: a lilliputian looking up into the knowledge of Infinity, beneath the chest of which beats the steady pulse of a mighty horse.

Roisin feels the echo of it in her bones, and for a moment — just a moment — she feels whole in a way she hasn’t since she became human. In his eyes she is neither Famine nor Roisin but something else; something between the two that is far older than a Biblical scholar would believe.

When their hands meet, Roisin doesn’t fall into the Nephilim’s mind but rather tilts into it. The closest she can describe it is like looking at a star through a glass of water; detailed and distorted and so far away the voids between worlds looks small in comparison, as if the world of the Nephilim does not fundamentally exist. She can recognise the windows in her bedroom-studio, looking out toward the rooftops of the terraced houses opposite, but the distance between here and there is a space that shouldn’t exist. There is lo light or dark; no landscape upon which to anchor one’s thoughts, just presence. A vast, quiet presence that feels like standing inside the echo of a cathedral built before sound existed.

And then she sees the shape of herself; a silhouette made of hunger and satiability; impossibility and inevitability: a figure on a pale horse where the horizon bends around her, whose tread crushes the souls of those beneath it and releases them from their mortal cages, from whom a single step can traverse a molecule or a mountain in a world that adjusts to her presence the way a body adjusts to breath.

But the silhouette is not whole. It is as fragmented as the souls she sees in the world, outlined like a constellation missing half its stars. She feels no sense of judgement from either Nephilim or horse, merely a presentation of the facts. This is what you were. This is what you are not. This is what you could be. She feels no pressure to claim the silhouette for herself, only the truth of it.