34.5

 

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.”

Hasmed’s voice becomes a whisper of static. “I do not want this.”

Roisin’s mantle pulses. “I know.” She extends her hand again and touches his arm. “It’s happening anyway. You can be for or against us, and I’d rather you were on our side.”

His brows furrow as he looks at her, holding her gaze for several long picoseconds, then takes a deep breath before answering with another plea. “Stop this.”

She shakes her head. “The sixth seal has been broken. It can’t be stopped. Hasmed, Was God not ineffable? He must have foreseen this, for surely everything that unfolds is as He willed it? Ending the world was never His plan, was it? If He’d meant the world to end, then the Sixth Seal would have meant everything that John of Patmos saw would come to pass, and it hasn’t, has it? One architecture is being deconstructed in order for another to take its place. If that’s what is happening, then God, or the Creator as you call Him. Must have already planned for me to break the sixth seal, exactly as I am doing now.”

“No.” Hasmed’s wings flicker as the angel steels himself. Every muscle becomes as taut as a David statue as he looks over Roisin and the other riders to Astaroth behind them. “You did this. You corrupted the seal before she took it. This is what you had planned all along. All because of your damned –" he waves a hand toward Namaan, “—abominations.”

“Me?” Astaroth places one hand over his own chest. “You offend me, brother. You attribute too much to the Fallen for this to be such a conspiracy. I am wounded by such an acusation.”

“More lies, demon?” Hasmed wears the sort of expression that means he would have spit if he could. “All you do is lie, and manipulate, and undermine. Protest thy innocence if you must, but thou art the lord of lies. And thy protestations are worth less than the foreskin of a Palestinian adulterer. And this one—” he gestures at Roisin, “—has your stink all over her. What hast thou promised her, I wonder? Hast though offered her Creation, just as Lucifer offered Eve the mantle of Knowledge? The Creator was well minded to take away the power of mortals to carry the mantles, for they are as treacherous as any that Fell.”

He takes another breath as his wings stretch fully, only here they do not look like they would fill an aircraft hangar, just a moderate parking garage. He looks at each of them in turn: Roisin and the riders gathered behind her, Namaan, Linnea and, finally Astaroth. “Then the world will break.”

He takes a single step back. It’s just one step, but he places his foot just-so, and the architecture shudders. And while the architecture, though already dissolving into intentions, begins to shudder, the void trembles as well. Hasmed looks once more at Roisin. “And I will be the one to break.”

Astaroth lunges toward him, but is hampered by Death, who crowds too close. “Hasmed! No!”

But Hasmed is already moving, rising up toward the architecture itself; toward the bones of the world; toward the place where he can end everything before the Revelation completes.

Roisin gasps. “He’s going to collapse the whole structure!”

Astaroth grabs her hand as the Sixth Seal pulses. “Then we have to get there first.”

And Hasmed disappears into the collapsing weft.

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