29.6

 

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 There is no sadness like the desire to be accepted for being what you are being suddenly withdrawn.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 Hasmed has narrowed the world to a single point: Her.

Roisin feels the mantle tighten around her, filling her mind with the knowledge of attack and defence; feints and parries. Now she understands why angels use swords instead of guns. They… enjoy is too human a concept – anticipate the experience of battle with a personal touch. The collection and absorption of a soul cannot be savoured at a distance.

Hasmed lifts his hand and the world around his fingers begins to unwrite. It doesn’t burn or disintegrate; it is merely taken away from the reality of existence. The pavement beneath his feet loses texture. The air around his arm loses colour. The space between them loses meaning, though he draws no closer, he just erases the concept of difference and the idea that Roisin can be an individual being outside his capacity to understand and control

Roisin takes a sharp breath through her nose as the mantle inside her flares, filling her the geometries of swordcraft and the mechanics of fulcrums and levers. Through the angel’s exclusion she can pinpoint the twin conglomerations of supporters and protestors; she can connect to the souls she felt withing them; the paedophile, the adulterer, the young man full of wrath.

Hasmed is already upon her, his attack a verdict on her worthiness. She may well be an addition to Creation, but where there is addition, there also exists subtraction. A tendril of void reaches toward her chest, not to touch or caress her, but the remove her from existence. She can feel the surprise when she steps away and allows it the slide harmlessly past her. She watched an old film on a Sunday afternoon, once, made long before computers when everything was performed with practical effects, or else painstakingly drawn onto single frames of actual film, where the protagonist face a mighty automaton, left to perform a duty long after the civilisation that built it had vanished. “I’ve got to kill you,” is say to the hero, “It’s my job.”

Once again Hasmed reminds her of a computerised construct following its source code, unable to deviate from its program. If Hasmed was a self-driving car, it would follow the map it had stored despite the bridge being washed away. His hand reaches toward her chest and the air between them thins to transparency. The world flickers. Roisin feels her outline blur — not her body, but her place in the world.

Her role. Her meaning. Her existence as the agent of Justice

Hasmed is not trying to kill her. He is trying to unmake her; to remove the Fifth from the architecture of Creation; to restore the world to the fourfold design Heaven intended.

Roisin gasps, clutching her chest as she feels herself slipping; not dying but being written out of existence. The concept is worse than death, and a part of her – the part that isn’t screaming with sheer terror at the thought of never having lived – is morbidly amused with the understanding that this is wate is meant by ‘a fate worse than death’ because at least death takes you somewhere; an afterlife of sorts, though whether it be Heaven or Hell or somewhere else entirely is a matter for theologians.

Her name flickers. Her purpose wavers. Her clarity fractures. Her conscience fades.

Hasmed’s voice echoes; the memory of a dream at the break of morning. “You are not ordained. You are not permitted. You were not written.”

His hand is inches from her heart and the world around his fingers is already gone.

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