Chapter 29.1

 

The hubbub of the crowd dies down as the movement on the podium is noticed. It is like a blanket has been cast over the whole intersection; as if snaw has fallen silently and suddenly and had deadened all sound like egg boxes on the walls of a teenager’s dad’s garage. The square goes silent.

As the crowds quiet the line of police lower their shields. A few of the younger officers break protocol to glance at the stage behind them. The gathered people have sensed something momentous is happening but can’t tell what because they have never been taught to see beyond the visible wavelength and no-one has ever managed to utilise an ultra-violet camera when an angel was present. A pressure wave rolls across the square like a shockwave of stillness. Voices falter. Hands freeze. Breaths catch. Faces turn toward the stage like daisies to the sun.

Roisin pushes past a pair of people who have halted right in front of her and stares across at the angel who has just arrived. Either it can function in two bodies at once or it was just using the speaker as a host, because both angel and speaker are moving independently of each other. She cannot tell if the political figurehead is aware of the presence of the angel or not, but like all good politicians he can see an opportunity when one presents itself and has seized upon the sudden silence as a chance to begin his speech. He holds up one fist in a grim mockery of the Black Power salute.

She does not listen to his hatemongering. Justice will come for him sooner or later, but he is of no more concern to her than a schoolteacher in Erdington who receives a parking ticket. She only has eyes on the angel, because the majestic being is not here for the crowd. It is here for her.

Hasmed steps out of the politician like a dryad from a tree. There is no descension from the heavens, no opening of the clouds and no fanfare of fire and trumpets. He merely steps out, unfolding wings the width of the stage and legs as tall as the politician it sprang from. Rosin is reminded of a nature documentary she once saw of a mayfly emerging from its nymph casing, or a tarantula extracting itself from an old exoskeleton.

It is a tall, thin figure of impossible stillness. Skin like polished bone. Eyes like empty wells. When its wings fold, they close so tightly they look like a spine ridge carved from the absence of light. Its face is fashioned in the likeness of humanity, or the other way round, except that instead of hair it has a series of dark spikes which appear to radiate from inside the skull and the face is exactly that: a skull, but with no lower jaw. Its towering form over the speaker suggest that it would loom over the Nephilim she summoned just at it looms over her.

It has no expression. No emotion. No malice. Just purpose.

If the crowd could see it, they would be screaming and trampling dozens in their frenzy to escape the area, but the crowd doesn’t scream or run. They don’t even understand that what they’re seeing is not a politician with a command of presence and the rhetoric to persuade others to his race-centric point of view but a destroying angel, older than the earth they stand upon. They simply feel the silence without knowing that Hasmed is a silence that erases.

Roisin’s heart beats a rhythm in double time. She though herself ill-prepared to go up against Mahariel but before this Leviathan she feels like David facing Goliath, only she wields a handful of dust instead of a sling

The mantle of Knowledge tightens around her like a second spine. It speaks to her in the language of knowledge; knowledge from personal interactions with this very same being. She knows better than to speak, for Hasmed will hear nothing of her arguments or pleas for it is not here to make a decision about her. The decision has already been made, and it is here to conduct its sole purpose.

Erasure from existence.

Roisin swallows the knot of fear threating to block her oesophagus, but Hasmed is already moving towards her. Nor fast or slow, just with inevitability, as if this encounter is written in the pages of a book it has read many times before, and there is never a change to the ending. Every step feels like another page of her biography being erased.. Every footfall feels like a memory being unmade. Every breath he takes feels the extinction of an endangered species somewhere in the world.