Chapter 32.1 (NB: This is out of order for some reason: read 31.12 first)

 


With a final glance at Astaroth, Roisin purses her lips and closes her hand around the mantle. She feels a jolt as it flares; not the relatively easy settling she experienced with the mantle of Knowledge; more like jumping into a hot spring that’s actually too hot for comfort, and having to suppress the urge to climb straight out again and instead tolerate it, imagining lobsters in boiling pans, until her skin had turned bright pink and she could finally bear the heat. There is no climbing out from the mantle of Famine. It is akin to grasping the hot metal of an iron mask, feeling the skin blister as peel as it as it sticks, cooks and peels away against the hot surface.

The heat of the mantle courses through her, entering every vein; every artery; every bone and muscle and breath. She grimaces as the pain begins, flowing through her hand to her chest and then out through her limbs, feeling out every part of her from her fingers and toes to the hairs on the back of her neck and the clusterbombs of nerves in her cunt until it gathers and explodes in her clitoris and she cries aloud in shock and blissful, enduring agony as the mantle reshapes itself around her; filling her with recognition as it feels her resolution and reshapes itself around it.

Finally, after what feels like hours or days, the euphoria ebbs and solidifies into a solid core at the centre of her being. She who was once Famine has become something new. Not the Fifth, for that was but a part of what she needed to be; a stepping stone on her journey; a learner’s permit to the power and the glory of being an angel. Now she has passed the test and become one with the mantle. The memories of Famine return, but rather than overpower her with the need to walk the world and bring hunger to the poor and displaced, she is filled with the strength to bring the laws of Justice to the world, though not to re-establish the balance of the Creator’s framework, but to reshape the world into the balance of what it always should have been: the birthing of Reason.

The room steadies. The air stabilises. The walls stop flickering. The floor regains its solidity, as much as can ever do. She can see the shards of souls, the framework of Creation, the spaces between atoms where she can step through space and time. And be anywhere she needs to be, at any time she needs to be there. This is what it means to be touched by an angel. This is why so many people relate the experience of being touched by an angel as the agony and the ecstasy. For just a moment she can feel the joy of every orgasm ever experienced and this, this is what divinity feels like.

Astaroth smiles holding out his hand as if inviting her to dance, and dance she will, though her ballroom is of a global scale and she is both the leader of the dance and the conductor of the orchestra. “There she is.”

The Nephilim bows its head as Steve drops to his knees; not in supplication but simply as a means of supporting his weight on suddenly weak legs.

She takes a deep breath and she turns her face to the newly risen sun. She can’t see it through the walls of the flat, but she can see it through the gaps in the atoms, and through the gaps in the air and the atmosphere and the plasma of the burning gases, she sees God, or the little that remains of Him in the broken, hollowed-out husk left behind.

“What’s wrong with her?” She can hear Paul’s voice as both a vibration in her eardrums and as a verbal construct the expands into the world, writing indelibly on the fabric of the universe. Everything is written there. Every mother’s first kiss, every father’s smile, every victim’s personal nightmare.

“Nothing. She’s adjusting.” Astaroth’s awe penetrates her consciousness. Is this how an angel sees the world? Every layer of history laid over the top of one another and each one happening at the same moment? No wonder, then, that possession drives people insane. Even the tiniest fraction of what she can see would send a normal human to a life spent immobile and drooling in the corner of an asylum.

“Adjusting to what?”

“To everything.” Even Astaroth’s voice carries the modulations of his smile. “Have you never heard the phrase ‘finding yourself’?”

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