Chiaroscuro

  A sound enters the stillness, but it is not, this lime, like a pure note from an oboe across a hushed and crowded theatre, but more the Imperial March played during a production of The Magic Flute. The sound is of heeled boots cracking against a concrete ramp; the beat of the monitor on a terminal coma patient; the familiarity of an ice cream truck when you have three kids under ten and not a penny to your name. Footsteps. Soft, measured and familiar at least to some of them, to judge by the expressions of the other riders and Astaroth. The figure stepping into the debris of the architecture is someone Roisin feels she should know, deep inside, but the name escapes her memory for the moments. It is an angel, though not one who is radiant; not one who has Fallen and climbed from the Pit, and not one Roisin wound have expected to be the first angel to rise after the Revelation but she certainly recognises the mantle they wear, draped like a fur stole around the shoulders of a 193...

  She shakes her head as the collapse spreads outwards; a cascade of dominoes falling in all directions with her as the epicentre of destruction; a shockwave that permeates like nuclear fallout through all the planes of existence, collapsing them all, compressing them like a zip file into one distinct plane where everything that ever was of ever will be has equal validity and merit for existence. It spreads through metaphor and meaning; perception and architecture, Heaven and Hell and all those states of being that people believed so hard they became real. Everywhere Revelation touches unravels lies and lays bare the truths of the world; illusions vanish like parlour tricks under studio lighting and the fractures in people, in objects, in beliefs and become visible even to the limited vision of the human eye. The neighbours scream as they see their own shadows, as living and animate as any horror film might imagine. Paul gasps as he sees the sickness inside him, curling outward...

  The architecture is trembling around them, half‑collapsed, half‑revealed, the world’s bones exposed in shimmering scaffolds of logic and intention. Roisin stands at the centre of the revelation. Astaroth and the Riders at her side. The Nephilim trembling with awareness. Mortals, post-mortals, gods, demons and angels are arrayed around them in splashes of soul fragments and collections of polyhedral prisms, and they are all looking at Hasmed. Hasmed who is no longer collapsing the world but collapsing himself. His wings fold inward. The void coils circle tight around his chest like the tornado no storm chaser will ever witness. His outline flickers between mortal, angel, function, absence and purpose, and his face reflects every angel, mortal and demon who has ever been erased by him. They are all part of him now, each of their shards added to his own in reverence and remembrance, for once something is created it is never truly lost; even if its soul is consumed, it will forev...

  Hasmed raises both hands as if he’s lifting an offering to the Gods. Or just the One God, rather, Roisin thinks, and she hesitates as she tries to anticipate his intentions. As he brings his hands together, the architecture around her screams not with a voice, but with the shriek of tearing steel; the sound of car being pierced by the steel rods transported on the truck ahead of it, or the shriek of a ship as an iceberg, freed by the rapidly heating climate, rips through its hull in what was previously a safe shipping lane. The chamber folds inward like a closing fist. The beams of logic twist into spirals. The membranes of possibility tear. The threads of meaning snap like overstretched wires. Astaroth tries to pull her back, but his grip on her arm is like a toddler trying to pick up a live pony as it would a toy. “Roisin — he’s collapsing the architecture around you, specifically. He’s trying to erase the space you occupy.” Namaan shouts a similar warning: “He is targeting...

  Roisin lifts her chin. “But I do exist, whether you like it or not, and I cannot allow you to end the world because you think it is the right thing to do.” Hasmed’s voice fractures. It reminds Roisin of being a child and speaking through the whirring blades of a fan; a low-tech voice altering mechanism before she was old enough to own anything with an audio app. “Then I must end the world before you end it.” Roisin steps forward, and around her lines of possible futures twist and reform, growing like vines across Hasmed’s crafted voids and blocking them away into Renaissance-style arches, mid twentieth-century glassworks and Gaudi-inspired columns. Statues of angels and semi-religious icons form like stalagmites from the ground, climbing it into towering representations in ceramic forms, helmeted or faceless, each one a perfected sculpture of the human form. “No. You won’t.” The architecture trembles as the Sixth Seal pulses; the chamber of scaffolding and light fighting ag...

Astaroth’s jaw tightens. His attention to detail is so great that the muscles at the junction between his jaw and skull (were he human) and down his neck became taut as iron rods. Roisin could have drawn the muscles easily as the cascades of memories from her anatomy classes came flooding back, and just for a moment she saw the angel devoid of human skin; just a mobile, moving mass of expanding and contracting muscles around a skeletal core. “He’s not tearing it down, he’s correcting it from first principles.” Roisin frowns. “I don’t follow. What does that mean?” Astaroth gestures to the unravelling path. “He’s removing everything that contradicts the original script, everything that changed or evolved since before you opened the Sixth Seal.” Roisin’s brow furrows as she extrapolates exactly what he means. “He’s removing me?” “He’s trying to.” Astaroth squeezes her hand. “Not if we reach him first. Your mercy is like unto Iesu but I can’t help but wish you’d ended him when you ...

  He covers his face with his hands, his index fingers in the sockets of his eyes as he shakes his head. Even in this micro-cosmically slowed reality, his shaking looks like that of a speeded-up horror film -- the sort where someone is trying to escape possession. A thin wail issues from the open O of what would be his mouth, were he human. “This is not permitted.” Roisin steps forward, hesitant to interrupt the shaking, which is reminiscent of an oscillating blade. “I’m sorry, Hasmed. It’s happening. You forced me to this by taking the mantle of Knowledge.” The head shaking slows and he moves his hands away to answer. His head tilts. “This is not written.” She shakes her head, purses her lips. “It isn’t. But it will be.” His head tilts the other way, and she is forced to stifle a smile that he’s acting like a dog hearing an odd noise. “This is not allowed.” Still with the pursed lips, but a nod for him this time. “It is now, and once done it will always have been.” Has...

  The moment Hasmed disappears, the flat shudders as the architecture begins to topple. Cracks appear across the walls and floors, exposing bits of void with the glowing sparks of like caught like bubbles in a frozen pond. The walls ripple like fabric as the ceiling bows inward like a tent under a heavy rainstorm and what’s left of the floor becomes a grid of trembling intention. Astaroth grabs Roisin’s hand. “Don’t look at the room, look at the pattern behind everything. You can look past everything to see the inner kernel of all the planes that exist around us, built like layers of onion skins continuously expanding with new layers and new planes. Every decision made spawns a possible future and the layers around the outside should be growing at an exponential rate.” Roisin closes her eyes for a picosecond and when she opens them the flat has gone. There is no void, either, and no sparks revealing the location of mortal souls, just a vast landscape of not-light and not-darkne...

  A shimmer runs through him like a monitor refreshing as he stands, stock-still in the doorway — or rather, in the absence where the doorway used to be — wings dim, void coiled around him like a crown of static. Roisin’s revelation is still blooming through the room with the walls unravelling and the whole population being reduced to a point of light to mark the presence of a soul. Around them, the walls unravel into intention as the weft of the world fades away to leave only the base threads of warp. These are the bones of the world, more being exposed with every picosecond that passes. Hasmed head turns in a circle (thus proving the whole internal skeleton is a myth) and stares, disbelief etched into his blank eye sockets as the architecture he has maintained and protected for millennia fades away in front of him. Eventually, his face turns once more toward Roisin and she can feel him examining her, gauging her, assessing her and if he breathed at all, she would see him free...

  As the seal cracks and splits, the architecture of Creation begins to collapse. From her vantage point of microseconds, Roisin narrows her focus further. Microseconds become nanoseconds; nanoseconds become picoseconds, until she is at the very edge of time, where only darkness exists, because there is no interval left for which light to bounce off surfaces to reveal then optically. She can still turn, though the movements feel sluggish because she still has a physical body and can’t move freely trough time with it still attached. She looks down at herself. The jumble of shards she first saw inside herself has shifted until her soul has also become a perfect tetrahedron, and she can touch it as if it was a physical object. The touch makes her physicality vibrate, a sensation she recognises as both the one referred to as ‘somebody walking over your grave’ and that exquisite ache as she is teetering on the brink of an orgasm. Something else to contemplate later. Is the act of perf...

  She looks across at Linnea and the assistant is standing in the cliched stance of an angel. Wings folded, hands held in prayer. Her architecture is permeable, crossed through with lines of possibility, fractured with obedience to two masters and flushed with determination. determination. If only could have seen her duplicity before. The ghoul was Fallen, but Linnea is risen, through the introduction of structure; a structure which looks too much like the work of the Artist to be a coincidence. She has fractals now; enough to make a whole geometric figure; an eight, perhaps, or an infinity sign. Who is she praying to, if God is dead? “Anyone who might be listening.” Pestilence’s voice is softer now, and as Roisin shifts her gaze back to the artist, she sees his changed form. If gender was still part of the architecture, Pestilence would be female and Roisin recognises her at last; some part of he connects with the rider in a way she has not felt for millennia; they are two parts...

  If John of Patmos is sitting on a mountain as he has his visions of the Apocalypse through the help of the Angel of Revelation, he probably had the second-best view of the end of the world ever. Only the second, though, because the very best view is granted to the person who makes it happen and sees it all unravel in real-time. In the time it takes Roisin to inhale and exhale, the Sixth Seal has cracked, split, and been torn apart like the skin of a balloon filmed at two thousand frames per second as it is pricked by the tip of a dirty heroin needle. The skin of the seal peels away and the inner core expands faster than a nuclear fusion bomb detonating over Central England and the world breaks open. Around her, and spreading outwards too fast for human eyes, but slow enough for those of angels, the flat peels away from perception. The walls don’t fall away so much as unravel, as the loose thread on your favourite jumper from your nan catches a nail from a salvaged stretcher f...