32.7

 

He takes a step toward Roisin and just for a moment the floor beneath his foot ceases to exist — a small circle of carpet and the floorboards beneath simply vanish to be replaced by the starless void — then flickers back into being as the world corrects itself.

Namaan snarls, stepping between them, though what he expects to do is beyond Roisin; the Nephilim is half mortal, like her, but no longer has a mantle to protect him. Worse, there is already an edict to destroy all Nephilim, and Hasmed is, quite literally, the Destroyer. At least he was, before he stole the mantle of Knowledge from her. What is he now, other than broken? She reaches forward to pull Namaan out of the way, but despite how thin he his, his height lends him enough mass that he becomes an immovable object.

Hasmed doesn’t react. He doesn’t even see it because his gaze is locked on Roisin. His voice rasps like the grinding stones of an unrepaired windmill. “You are… not… written,” he says, the words spat out like coins from a fruit machine. “You are not permitted. You are not forbidden.” His head tilts sharply, like a puppet whose strings have been cut and retied without concern for the shortened length. “You are undefined.”

The void around his wing sputters like a candle flame in a draught, withdraws, returns. For a moment he is all eyes and wings and spinning discs, and then his bipedal form returns. The angelic part of Roisin processes this as normal for an angel. But she hopes Steve and Paul weren’t looking when the change happened. If she hadn’t had her angelic experience, she would be on her way to a long stay in a padded white room

Astaroth murmurs an aside. She can imagine him on a stage, looking out at the audience with one hand shielding his mouth from the other actors. “He’s spiralling.”

Hasmed wraps his arms around his chest. Roisin recognises herself in the posture from the sixth months after college when she moved back to her mother’s house. It is depression, it is anxiety, it is the desire to shut out the world because it no longer makes any sense. For the second time since he was created she causing him mental anguish, and it is destroying him. “She is not an anomaly,” he whispers, more to himself than to the others in the room. “She is not a deviation from the Creator’s plan.”  He transfers his hands to his head as if he’s trying to keep his brain inside – do angels have brains if they don’t have a physical form? “She is not an error.”

His voice fractures, scratches like a record mixed by a DJ at a before-midnight club. “She… she… she is… change.” The word hits him like a mother’s condemnation and he crumples. His wings fold inward, collapsing into a tight knot of absence that pulses like a dying star.

The lights in the flat flicker and dim, their wattage reduced to that of an oven bulb. The air thickens. The walls tremble in the Escher-esque patterns they saw when Hasmed arrived.

Steve edges around the corner of the doorframe.  “What the hell is happening to him?”

Astaroth answers, his voice as soft as unsalted butter on a warm croissant. “He is trying to understand something he was never designed to understand. It’s tearing him apart from the inside, out”

Hasmed takes another step. Namaan moves to block him but he just phases through the Nephilim as if he is no more substantial than smoke from a distant bushfire. He stops inches away from Roisin and whispers, his voice akin the nails of a chalkboard, “You changed the mantle.”

Roisin swallows as she nods. Last time Hasmed was this close to her he ripped the mantle of Famine from her body, and she would never have recovered if not for the friends around her. “I did, yes.”

“You changed… yourself.”

She nods again. “Yes.”

“You changed… me.”

Roisin’s breath catches and she places her right hand on her chest, partly in a display of honesty, as if Hasmed could not spot an untruth even if she tried, but also to protect the mantle she wore around her core. “I didn’t mean to. I was trying to make it better.”

Hasmed’s wings flicker violently. “Better?” His mouth curls into a snarl. “You made me… question…” He closes his eyes tight, the way her mother did when she felt a migraine coming on. “Everything.”

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