Chiaroscuro

  Roisin can feel her nipples harden again against a background noise of Astaroth laughing. “Brother,” he says, “Were you listening to our conversation?” Hasmed tilts his head to his right shoulder and rolls it around the back of his neck to the accompaniment of several vertebrae cracking as they move into alignment. He does the same with his chin to his chest, then rolls his shoulders, laces his fingers and stretches out his arms first to the front and then over his head. He stands on his left leg to bring the bring his right knee to his chest, then straightens it first to the front, and then vertically in a perfect standing second position, which does nothing but emphasise his penis which, to Roisin’s mind, is disappointingly small. “I would not, brother.” He repeats the motion with his other leg. “However, with your revelation that I have the ability to evolve and choose my own form, I will admit to plucking the image of the perfect human form from the thoughts of the Fifth.” ...

  Like Astaroth, he has also been burned, but he has suffered far more than his brother. Roisin remembers a photograph depicting the charred body of Thích Quảng Đức after his self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War, but unlike the Buddhist monk, Hasmed has already begun to recover. From the cracks and fissures all over his body comes what looks like the clear glue they used in school, and the seeping gel begins to regenerate the burned flesh. Tiny pieces of burnt skin peel off like ashes from a November bonfire exposing fresh, pink skin beneath. The bones of his torso and face whiten from their charred state millimetre by millimetre. Roisin steps forward, trembling but steadfast. “Hasmed.” His litany of words falls silent, but other than that there is no acknowledgement of her approach. Astaroth reaches out to touch her shoulder as he steps to one side to allow her passage. Hasmed still does not move. She touches his shoulder gently. His charred flesh is rough against her...

  Hasmed’s empty eye sockets develop a crack across the bridge between them. Microfractures craze across the rest of his skull and down into his shoulders and clavicles. His glitching is threatening to tear him apart. “You are an addition,” he says, voice fracturing. “You are a deviation from Creation. Yet Creation has allowed your arrival. There is no evolution and yet you have evolved.” The last word comes out warped, as though the concept itself is incompatible with his rigid thought processes. The void around him surges, then recoils, then surges again, pulsing like a disco light at the very end of the night when the music has long since stopped and the disc jockey is packing away his equipment. It feels like the last chance not to go home alone, but Roisin wants to go home alone. What is she even doing here when all she wanted to do was make a living as an artist? The crowd feels the disturbance happening a fraction of a wavelength away from them. Although the see nothing ...

  A hairline crack appears in the air behind Hasmed. Barely noticeable, especially not to the humans, for it comes without the sound of tearing or ripping it is nevertheless disturbing to the immortals, for it is a fracture in the concept of Creation. By its definition, Creation was the start of everything, and everything in it was pre-ordained from the start. Except The Fifth of Justice. Adding Justice to Creation was not unlike full bottle of Cola and expecting it to stay in the bottle after adding a Mento . Hasmed’s wings twitch — a stuttering, glitching movement, as though the absence they are made of is trying to fold in two directions at once. His voice emerges, hollow and distorted: “She… belongs.” The word belongs hits him like a sledgehammer against the Berlin Wall. His form flickers, blurring, sharpening, blurring again as the logical path of his thought doubles back on itself. Astaroth murmurs, almost gently; his face the picture of regret, as if Hasmed is a chi...

  Hasmed’s expression doesn’t change, but his voice deepens as if it is filled with the foul sediment at the bottom of a foetid lake. There is a hollow, resonant tone to it, and it contains more contempt for Roisin than a whole classful of fifteen-year-old girls. “She is a deviation from the architecture.” Astaroth tilts his head, smiles and pats the angel on the shoulder. Oddly, they are the same height, though whether Astaroth has grown taller or Hasmed shorter, she cannot tell. She is still almost as tall as the former but may as well be a lilliputian to the latter. He glances across at her, a smile teasing at the corners of his lips. “She is the evolution of the architecture.” Hasmed’s wings flare wider, the void surging from them like electric sparks from a Tesla coil. “She is not written.” Astaroth’s smile sharpens to the fine edge of a razor blade. “Neither was I.” The void shudders as Hasmed’s form flickers — not weakening, but conflicted , as though the architectur...

  Tendrils of the void crash against Roisin’s circle like high tide against a harbour wall, but Hasmed can accept that, for just this moment, the Fifth has a brief existence even if he won’t accept the validity of it. He steps forward until he is past the barrier, his wings of absence unfurled and his voice hollow and absolute: “You are not sustained by the framework. You are not anchored to any of the planes of existence. You are not permitted to be part of Creation.” The void follows him, spilling into the circle of ground that she’d marked out, another example of the invasion of a woman’s personal space. He extends his arms until his hands are either side of her skull and begins to close them together. Roisin tries to move out of the way, but tendrils of void essence curl around her ankles and legs, fixing her in place. She cannot avoid what comes next. Can she? His hands begin to close, the strength of the Angel of Destruction against the delicate bone of a young girl’s hea...

  There is no pavement beneath her feet, no sun under which to bask; no sound for her to speak. It is as if she has been removed from the world and placed in this… what? She’d call it a void, but she has seen the Void and this is not it. This is nothing. Nowhere. This is not the Void, but neither is it Heaven, or Hell, or, if Dante was right all along, Purgatory. This is no plane of existence that holds any meaning whatsoever. Her name flickers. Her purpose wavers. Her connection to the ground dissolves. She adjusts her sight, embracing the ability the mantle offers her to see through the infinite layers of Creation, and what she sees fills her with horror, Babies. Silent, immobile babies, Each placed head-to-toe with the next like bottles in a crate, except these weren’t inanimate. These were… once… living beings. She’d call them dead, but there were no souls here. She could not sense a single fragment. This is like the glimpse of the future shown though John Connor’s experien...

  Roisin’s knees buckle and she cries out – more in shock than pain, because seeing your own ribs exposed   because the flesh and muscle keeping them on the inside has vanished is traumatic for anyone. Inside her, the mantle is also screaming, and she wonders if part of it has vanished, too. She doesn’t feel any less knowledgeable – apart from the whole ‘missing part of her chest jobbie – but then, how could she tell she doesn’t know something if she doesn’t know she’s forgotten it? And suddenly she understands: Hasmed is not attacking her. Hasmed is attacking the Mantle, for if the mantle is gone, there is no threat of knowledge, and without knowledge the Angels can re-shape the truth. With the loss of the mantle Roisin will lose her role. Her meaning. Her right to exist as the Fifth. She forces herself upright to speak, but her voice is thin and shaky. She pushes through regardless. “I am not written,” she whispers. “But I do exist. I am real.” Hasmed’s hand pauses as ...

  The moment of stillness, at the zenith of joy at the concept of acceptance, collapses. There is no sadness like the desire to be accepted for being what you are being suddenly withdrawn. It’s not a new experience for Roisin, who was almost always the last one to be picked for anything involving teams, but it leaves her disappointed when Hasmed moves. He doesn’t move physically; she could allow for that. His height gives him bulk and reach but there’s a reason why a mongoose cat beat a snake in a fight and while Roisin would never describe herself as an athlete, the mantle gives her enough knowledge to anticipate the attack. The angel moves the way a void moves: by expanding. The air around him buckles, folding the daylight as if it was painted on paper and scrunched into a ball. The sound in the square folds inward like a star destroyer travelling through space in a silent film. The crowd doesn’t scream. They simply vanish from awareness — not erased, but excluded , as though...

  The sound of his wings unfolding is like a page being torn from a Bible. The cracks in the air around him cease their expansion, but they don’t heal, they merely hang there, as if waiting upon his instruction. Below his feet the pavement vanishes, erased from existence. There is nothing beneath it. No earth, no stone, no ancient Roman Wall. Not even the Void. There is just nothing, like it must have been in the Beginning, before the Word. Roisin is close enough to the angel that she can feel the void radiating from him. Close enough that her breath fogs in the cold of his presence. Close enough that the mantle inside her flares in self‑defence. She takes the half-step back again as the absence of ground spreads. The nearest protestor, a young man of around twenty, though for all she knows he could be fourteen or twenty-five, such is the fashion for identical haircuts and high-street chic among the younger males, spots the missing pavement and steps forward, his mobile phone h...

  The square has fallen silent. People are looking at each other, at the buildings, at the sky silent. It is the silence before panic, where everyone knows something is amiss, just not sure what. If this was a film, it would be the moment when the protagonist’s best friend and confidante glances at him as half his body slides away from the other half Roisin and Hasmed are both invisible to those without enhanced sight, so the crowd doesn’t understand what they’re witnessing, but they feel it the pressure of destiny pressing down on them like water onto a submarine; they feel the stillness, cold as a chef’s tears in a walk-in fridge, that has nothing to do with the weather. Roisin sends her conscious mind out into the crown, mentally identifying the gambler, the rapist, the paedophile, the unrepentant. She can taste the fragments of souls bubbling outwards. Reaping them would give her the strength she needs to defeat Hasmed in battle, but they could not be reconstituted like Ste...

  “Have I dragged you away from anything important?” Roisin speaks because right now, she can either speak or cower, and the latter option will do her no good whatsoever. “I do hope so.” Hasmed says nothing, and the silence stretches on long enough the Roisin feels the need to fill it. “You’re here because I interfered and stepped outside the role Heaven wrote for me.” Still nothing. Roisin takes a moment to scan the crowd. The politician is still speaking, but the rising volume of protestors is attempting to drown him out. She can still feel him, though, and it is his fear of difference, of other, is what drives him. He wants to be in a world he controls; a world within which he can set all the parameters. The world he dreams of bringing about would not be a good one for people like her… people like she used to be. There would be no room for free-thinkers and radicals, and precious little room for education among the masses. His security detail and mostly swords for hire, merc...

  Roisin forces herself to stand still. There is no point in running. She hasn’t even been Justice for an hour and already Heaven sends something to erase her from history. Why? All she wants to do save humanity. Why are they so intent in bringing about the apocalypse? Heaven is supposed to be on the side of mortals; are the angels really just deciding to harvest the souls for themselves? What about God’s will? God’s covenant? Her knees shake. Her hands tremble. Her heart hammers. But the mantle steadies her. It cannot give her the courage she needs to defend herself from Hasmed, but it can give her clarity. Watching the angel walk toward her with easy, seemingly carefree strides of several metres each, passing between and through the humans listening to the speaker, each one it comes into contact with shivers and coughs, as if Pestilence was passing through them, infecting each with something virulent and deadly. Looking deeper, through the illusion of his appearance, she can ...