Chapter 24.1

 

Fire dances through her veins, but for Roisin it doesn’t burn, for she is part of the element itself. Famine and Fire have walked hand-in-hand through the centuries, for where one treads, the other follows. When fire wipes out crops and livestock, and the habitats of the creatures hunters rely upon, Famine covers the land with a tattered blanket, causing the bodies of those left behind to self-consume under starvation. Pestilence often follows them both, bringing insects to clear away the corpses of animal and vegetable alike, and War leads them all into a glorious blossoming.

The flames don’t burn her, but they ignite memories of past glories. Seven years of famine during the reign of the pharaoh Djoser; millions of Chinese people dead in the second century BC; twenty thousand more when fire danced atop Mount Etna and lit the ancient world from one side to the other. She feels them as the thrills of past glories, and the promises of more to come. From her veins to her belly, and from her belly to those beautiful places only mortals can appreciate. Is she the first angel to experience this?

She closes her eyes as the flames lick upward, igniting the ecstasy of communion in every nerve and throwing her head upward, her neck elongated and open to the Divine. This is what talking to God feels like: a perpetual wave of orgasm, rippling through every synapse, fibre and muscle. Only now, as the horse begins its transfer across the white-hot synapses, does she realise why nuns devote themselves so wholly to God and why so few priests are able to maintain such contact and seek it in other, more mortally based practices.

And then nothing.

As fast as it began, she feels the horse withdraw, still holding onto her acceptance like a bill due to be paid. She opens her eyes once more to the void, though there are no angels here, ready to ambush her; only the everlasting emptiness of the dark, and she is alone.

She feels something from the physical world. Something wet on the face of her mortal body. More spittle from Steve shouting at her to come back? To reject the mantle for the remainder of eternity? No. The spittle left cold dots on her lips and cheek. These drops are warmer, like the memory of a brief life and the signing of parchment in… blood?

Maintaining a connection to the physical world, Roisin opens the eyes of her mortal frame and looks out through the windows of her soul. The Nephilim is still holding her hand, but it is shying away, shrinking from the touch. To her left is Steve, still, his mouth open and locked in a rictus of syllables. His eyes flicker madly from side to side, rapidly drying from an unblinking gaze. In his right hand he holds the cross he had exhausted earlier, though now it has been broken and sports a jagged, sharp break filmed with something dark. His left hand is held upright, a jagged cut oozing blood from his throat. She can see drops of it scattered across his clothes and, she realises, probably her as well.

Roisin experiences a profound and unsettling transformation as the boundaries of reality blur and dark forces stir. She feels an intense mixture of fear, power, and vulnerability as a new presence invades her consciousness. Not the horse, this time, but another mantle, one of equal but opposing power, glittering with cold fire and sparkling with all the knowledge of Heaven. While the new presence manifests, Roisin's senses sharpen and distort; shadows deepen, and whispers of forgotten secrets echo in her mind. The experience is overwhelming, reshaping her identity and forcing her to confront the cost of power and the price of allegiance to forces beyond human comprehension.

As she reaches for it through the void, the pain she endures is both physical and spiritual; a burning sensation that is the opposite of fire courses through her veins just as viscerally. An ancient, infernal energy awakens within her. Yet alongside this agony, there is a twisted ecstasy—a dark exhilaration that comes from touching forbidden knowledge and power. This duality leaves her torn, caught between the desire to resist and the temptation to embrace the mantle of darkness that has appeared from the void.