32.8

The void around the angel spasms. “You made me… want.”

Astaroth stiffens and holds his hand up to forestall Namaan’s interjection, then makes a gesture toward Roisin that she can only interpret as a fishing line being reeled in.

She uses her free hand to touch Hasmed lightly on the chest. She can feel the mantle of Knowledge, pulsing slowly inside him, connected to him but still aware of her proximity. She can tell it isn’t happy. She voices the thought, unsure of whom she is asking it, Hasmed or the mantle, her voice softer than her mother’s ever was: “What is it that you want?”

Hasmed’s voice clatters like pebbles on a dustbin lid, one of the old metal ones she used to pretend was a knight’s shield when she’d found a good stick she could pretend was a sword. “Definition.” He places one hand over hers on his chest. “It tells me I am whatever I want to be, but I know of nothing but the function I was created to be. I am Annihilation. I am the Executioner. I am the Bringer of the Void. But the mantle tells me there can be more. I can want. I can change. I can be… something else.”

The Angel of Annihilation collapses to his knees in front of her. He is not surrendering to her, nor is he kneeling in worship as other angels must to the Creator. He is in genuine need of counsel. “You are unwritten,” he says. “You are undefined.” He lifts her hand from his chest and hold it in front of the shadows where his eyes would be, “You are… free.”

His head lifts, those dark sockets meeting her gaze. “Tell me what I am.”

The room goes silent as they all turn to look at her, all except the assistant, who still seems to be in her trance-like state. Astaroth raises his eyebrows and, with Hasmed’s back to him, raises both hands in a shrug. She realises she’s on her own with this quandary. It is her first test of being… whoever she is now. Her mantle glows around her like a traditional image of a saint with a halo. It was not, after all, a painterly trick to bring attention to the face but an actual representation of an angel of power. She wondered which artist in the past was witness to a Rider and survived. Hasmed has not come to destroy her, but to ask her to give his the gift she herself has been given; the opportunity to define himself on his own terms.

He is here because she is the only being in existence who can give him what he has never had: a definition of himself; a purpose other than Erasure.

She looks down as he bows his head. She feels no threat from him as he kneels before her; broken, glitching, torn between forms as his wings flicker between absence and form. The Void spasms around him like a wounded animal in the jaws of a predator. He looks up at her with hollow pits where his eyes once were. “Tell me what I am.”

Roisin inhales as her mantle stirs. It has transformed inside her; no longer the mantle of Famine but something else. She can feel it expanding, enveloping the room and the people – and angels – within it. It has become the mantle of Recognition. A soft pulse behind her ribs heralds a widening of her awareness. There is a shift in the geometry of the room as the world sharpens like an optician’s board when the right lenses are inserted. The world sharpens as the mantle opens like the lens of a microscope, seeing all the way down to the very building blocks of the universe.

She sees Hasmed for what he has become. Past his body, past his wings, past the void that flickers around him like flames on a half-burned piece of coal. She sees his absence. 1. She Sees the First Truth: Hasmed Is not Destruction. He was never meant to be the Wrath of God or the Punishment of Luxury. He was never meant to be cruel or to kill. He was created to edit; to remove; to take away what was not supposed to be there. Inside his thoughts she can see the angels he’s condemned, the mortals he has erased, the ideologies he has unwritten. He is not the Sword of God but the red correction pen of the Editor. He was a function. A mechanism. A line of code in a hastily written subroutine, and now the author of that code has gone, leaving him adrift in the gigantic program that is Creation.

Roisin releases her hand from protecting her chest and rests both on Hasmed’s shoulders. “You’re not death or violence. You were made to be…” she frowns as the truth comes to her. “Maintenance. The caretaker. The janitor.