31.10

Roisin looks into Namaan’s eyes. It would be so good to draw him, paint him, sculpt him. Every piece of him is exquisite. He’d be the perfect human specimen, if he were only human. Can he choose his own form, as angels do? Or is this merely the fleshing-out of the skeleton she drew in charcoals and paint? His eyes drop to his chest, the exposed bones, the mantle she could have chosen, had she not been offered Knowledge. She looked back at Astaroth, shaking her head. “There should be no more Famine walking across the lands.”

“The world is out of balance and there will be famine as long as it is so, whether you ride the mantle or not.” Astaroth’s lips tighten. “But the Framework has been unwritten, the world is being unwritten, you can choose what you want to be.”

The flat is too small for what has just happened. The air hums with instability while the walls flicker at the edges, one moment joining with perfect corners and the next stretching to infinite parallel lines. The floor feels like it’s remembering how to be solid, gaps appearing and disappearing at random through the tattered carpet. Roisin sits on one of the more stable sections, which just happens to be where Astaroth is, or else is stable because he is there; her knees pulled to her chest; her breath thin and uneven. The absence of the mantle of Knowledge is a hollow ache behind her ribs — it feels like the never-ending desperation for an orgasm that is constantly just out of reach and your vulva hurts and your clitoris is red-raw from overstimulation.

The Nephilim kneels in front of her, his ribs splayed like the open hands of a religious offering; the mantle of Famine glowing within the reach of an outstretched hand like a living ember when the rest of the fire is cold ashes. It pulses faintly, as though it is recognising her as a part of itself; as though it is calling to her to rejoin with it, to become whole again.

Astaroth stands behind her, his arms folded, watching with a strange mixture of patience and expectation. He exudes a scent of ashes, musk and patchouli, which floods her olfactory sense and remind her of the green plains of the pre-colonised east.

Steve hovers near the hallway door, terrified and important, whilst Paul looks on from his seat, partly horrified and partly fascinated by the spectacle before him. There is nothing he can do to help; he is useless and human. The assistant sits cross-legged on the floor beside him, similarly useless and… whatever she is.

Roisin stares at the mantle as if it’s a vibrator with the perfect setting to satisfy her ache, which of course, it is, but the image of a plain full of collapsed tents and starving people, their bellies distended with falling organs, fills her vision and she shakes her head. “I can’t,” she whispers.

Namaan tilts his head slightly, leaning forward to be in easy reach of her hand. “You can. You always could. You and he are one flesh, one body, one mind.”

Roisin shakes her head again. “I’m not Famine anymore.”

Astaroth places a hand on her shoulder and she looks up at him as she might have looked at a father if she’d had one. “No. You’re not.” He crouches beside her, his voice low, with that perfect pitch your brain uses when you’re trying to persuade yourself to do something society as a whole frowns upon, like peeing against a wall on the way home from the pub or blowing out the contents of a blocked nostril into the gutter of the Cannock Road or setting fire to the garage of the local Reform UK council member. “And that is exactly why the mantle is dangerous.”

Roisin looks up sharply, her brows furrowing. “Dangerous to who?”

Astaroth smiles faintly. “To everyone else.”

Namaan squares his shoulders, which has the effect of thrusting his chest forward. Thos means that his splayed ribs are all but touching Roisin’s face. If she leaned forward now she could taste the mantle with her togue, and she already knows it will taste of her. The mantle lifts, its light spill across her face and sends her shadow across the gloom of the pre-dawn room.

It is not just hunger or scarcity or the suffering of those hit by poverty and the changing economics of a post-industrial world; it is definition for who she was; who she is, and who she could be. It is her role, her function, her cosmic orientation.