32.2
“Finding yourself is one thing.” Roisin thinks, as she
navigates a path through everything she can see, and that is almost everything.
“But how does one find oneself when one can see through the whole history of a
place? Fundamentally, she knows she is in the living room at the Dunston Road upstairs
flat in Wolverhampton, and she is twenty-four years old. She is also aware that she is at the bottom of the sea, in the midst of a
forest of larch and oak, in the middle of a field in the pouring rain, and in
the bedchamber of a young boy of around nine years old, with the stink of a
nearby sewer and the air quality of Beijing in July. It takes her several
thousand years, or a minute or two, to narrow her focus down until her vision
approaches something near the surroundings of her physical body, where Steve,
Paul, Namaan, Astaroth and the assistant look over her inert body, jumping and
twitching like a green stick on an open fire.
On guiding herself (is this the expansion of consciousness
Gurus are always on about?) back into her jerking body, the first thing Roisin
feels is the absence of absence. The mantle of Famine is an old, old symbiote;
one that leaves her in constant need of soul fragments to eke out of the
living; to bring those she gifts with starvation – and it is a gift, for in
suffering they are brought closer to God – to the joy of Grace.
Bu the mantle has changed. It no longer pulls at her to find
souls for the Creator; it no longer feeds on the fragments of souls she gleans
from the fields of suffering; it no longer hollows her out. Instead, it has
formed a framework around her consciousness, one she can equate with the
heads-up display of the computer games she used to play, although instead of
the mundanity of weapons available, compass and life energy remaining, she can
direct it to advise, to adjust, to seek; to respond to her thoughts before she
is even aware of them. It is part of her consciousness, except she can use it
to alter that which is around her, for whatever exists is made of souls and
atoms and souls are malleable and atoms can be reformed into compounds as simple
as love and as complicated as life.
She could take a paintbrush and bring to life whatever she
painted, for paint and canvas are just atoms to be manipulated. This is how the
skeleton she drew became a doorway for the imprisoned Nephilim, The mantle drew
each one to the other to bind them together once more, as the Creator willed
them to be.
Now it waits, orienting itself around her, moulding itself to
the structure she has made herself to be. An artist, a poet, a seeker of
balance, a discoverer of inner peace, and a darned maestro in the bedroom. The
mantle shifts dissolving the constant hunger to find souls to starve; the empty
hollow it caused as Faming dissipates, drawing upon the fractals she took from Mahariel to
fill the space where hunger festered, closing the frame around her as a tight
as a vacuum sealed package suffocates the ocean it gets dumped in. What remains
is potential; the awareness of what might be missing and the provision of a solution.
It is no longer the force that manifests lack and the hunger that
results from it, it has become instead the force to reveal the lack that already
exists, and align it to where it would exist without the lack.
Roisin feels the mantle settle into her bones like a new
kind of gravity and she is able to once more open her eyes and limit herself to
the here and now. She takes a deep breath as if after a long sleep, and flexes
her muscles; rotating her head, freeing her shoulders, arms, wrists, fingers,
then down to her hips, knees thighs, feet and toes. She looks at Astaroth as
she rises, fluidly with almost no effort other than to pop her muscles and straighten
her legs. He is watching her with a half-smile, anticipating this new being he
has helped birth. She can see inside his thoughts, such as they are. He was
telling the truth about his desire to save the world from the apocalypse, but
less honest about his reasons for doing so. It is for the sake of humanity, but
only because humanity is interesting, and interacting with them is limitless
entertainment as they while away eternity.
She raises her hands to look upon her mortal form. They look precisely
as they had a millennia ago, before she even returned to Wolverhampton; before
she believed in the denizens of Heaven and Hell; before she discovered she was a
fucking angel. “This isn’t Famine.”
Astaroth smiles. “No. It’s you.”
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