33.3

 

She shakes her head. “Me? I’m not doing anything. I don’t even have the sixth seal. I have Famine again, remember?”

Astaroth inhales sharply. “Roisin, You are the sixth seal. When it breaks, you will see everything. Everything the architecture hid. Everything the Author denied. Even the things the angels refused to acknowledge.”

Roisin’s breath trembles. “Everything?”

Astaroth nods. “And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.” He hesitates. “And neither can anyone else.”

“Can I stop it? What happens to me when it… when I break?”

A nod and half a smile. “You’ll be fine.”

He wasn’t lying. She could see he wasn’t lying; that he fervently believed she would be fine. It was deeper withing his core, that belief, and angels couldn’t lie. Unless they had Fallen, which Astaroth had, to be fair. He’d lost the rebellion and been cast down with the remainder of the rebellious angels, which meant he was capable of lying. But he also knew there was an Afterlife. So his sense of ‘you’ll be fine’ could equally refer to her life after death, which was less than reassuring.

The is a flicker at the edge of Roisin’s vision. A shimmer in the air. A distortion in the shape of the room. She blinks and the flat…shifts. The walls lose their straightness. The corners bend. The ceiling ripples like the membrane of a bat’s wings, stretched too thin.

Steve gasps. “Roisin—what’s happening to the room?”

Astaroth holds up a hand to quieten him and answers without looking away from her. “She’s seeing the world without the architecture’s filters.”

Pestilence smiles faintly and leans toward her, almost as if he’s sniffing her hair. With anyone else, this would feel creepy as, but because it’s a rider, like her, it’s oddly reassuring. “Ah. There it is.”

Roisin clutches her chest as a massive pulse lashes down through her body, lighting up her groin with… pleasure? Pain? She’s not sure she can tell the difference anymore. Through a gap between the planes, far, far away but close enough to touch, she can see a man kneeling on a the top of a mountain. She doesn’t recognise him, but she knows know without doubt it is John of Patmos, his skin rippled like melted plastic, barely able to see from the pain of his injuries. He is suffering from the Romans pouring boiling oil over him because he denounced the pantheon of Jupiter and the other gods. And having survived the ordeal, was driven out of Judea to live or die according to the will of his God.

She feels his pain now; his thirst, his hunger, his blistered face, his hands which have almost no sensation left from the scarring, and one foot broken and knitted without medical attention at the wrong angle. Compassion sweeps though her for this isolated, lonely old man, barely able to survive and she has the thought to check her pockets for a gift to show his that the God he believed in was indeed real, and he would be praised hereafter. She could feel a crumpled paper packet, tucked at the bottom of her jeans pocket, and pulled it out. The gummies Paul had given her. Was it only yesterday? Reaching through the planes, she pressed the small packet into his clasped hands. And then he was gone, and there was Astaroth, and Pestilence, and Steve and… where was Paul?

She cries out as the pain sweeps through her, and she can’t tell if the pain is hers or John’s. Did she somehow take away his pain and transfer it to her own body? She feels like she is on fire. “I don’t— I don’t want this—”

Astaroth holds her steady. “You don’t have a choice. You are the Sixth Seal and it will break when you see the truth of all things.”

The Nephilim reaches for her, barely brushing her face with his hand as his voice reverberates inside the hollow void of her head, trembling through the joint awareness. It has begun. The revelation has begun.

Her attention is distracted as Paul coughs again, leaning on the doorframe, strings of blood and sputum dripping from his mouth. He sees her looking and tries to wipe his face with his sleeve, but his sleeve is already filthy and he manages to only smear it across his chin.

But this time, Roisin doesn’t see the blood. She sees threads; thin, black writhing threads of sickness coiling through his lungs, his bloodstream, his breath.

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