34.4

 

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 freeze as if the universe has paused him mid‑breath.

His wings lock into a rigid structure, as if they had been petrified by the gaze of Perseus’ gorgon. She recognised the expression from the day she was cleaning the house, since her mum had taken to bed with ‘one of her turns,’ and had knocked the crystal mixing bowl from the sideboard and watched, in a similar stated of paralysis, as it shattered into a thousand pieces on the quarry tile floor. She could still see the smudge on her soul where she’d lied about ti to her mum and said it was the cat. The whole episode, and her mum’s descent into disbelief, rage, denial and grief, put her off practicing her Irish dancing classes for evermore.

The void around him spasms, then freezes, then spasms again — like a Windows operating system caught between two incompatible commands. “No,” he whispers, as if, like her mum, the denial could unmake the act. “No.” He shakes his head slowly. “You cannot have dismantled it.”

She looks around, the other riders connected to her and Astaroth hovering, partly in horror but partly in delight, behind them. She can’t help the amusement on her face when she faces him once more. “Oops.”

“What have you done?”  His outline flickers between contradictions; the angel he was and the function he served, the Fallen he refused to become, his continued desire for annihilation and his ultimate fear: redundancy and dissolution. She can see the concept bloom like algae through him. Never before has he even considered his role would no longer be required. He whispers again: “No. No. No.” Each repetition is softer more desperate, more human, until the last is almost a wail of despair.

He lifts his hand, once more gathering the tendrils of void and sending them arcing across space between them. She can see them clearly, for they are not tendrils of destruction, but those of repair. Some part of him wants to mend her, as if she’s dysfunctional; as if with just a the right adjustment he can set her to undoing the damage she’s caused; to force the world back into a shape he understands, but the void recoils and will not touch her.

Hasmed’s voice fractures. “You are outside the architecture. You cannot be outside the architecture, yet you are outside the architecture.”

Astaroth steps forward. “That’s right. She has brought this instance to a terminal point. It was her destiny from the start.”

“Destiny?” Hasmed’s gazes fixes upon him. “Talk not of destiny, Fallen, for I was there when the map of creation was drawn up. I was there when all the patterns were set in motion. I guided the whole of Creation to His blueprint.” Hasmed’s wings twitch violently. And she… she is unwritten.”

Astaroth nods. “Yes. She is the Breach.”

“She is…” Hasmed’s voice breaks. “She the Sixth Seal.”

Roisin inhales sharply. “Dude,” she says, holding out her hand, palm upwards, for him to accept her now that he knows what she really is. “Not only am I a fucking angel. I’m The. Fucking. Angel.”

He reaches for her again, flickers of void-stuff reappearing around his form, his wings creaking as they move once more, and the architecture itself pulls away from his touch. Creation refuses him. His voice sounds hollow as a bone as he whispers once more. “I cannot erase her.”

Astaroth answers softly: “No, brother, you cannot.”

Hasmed’s wings collapse inward in the death of certainty.