36.2

 

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 1930s Hollywood Femme Fatale. The mantle of Creation.

Astaroth’s eyes widen. “Fuck, no.”

“Who is it?” Roisin asks, sotto voce.

He barely glances at her, so fixed is his gaze upon the new entrant. “Ever swatted a mosquito and discovered you’ve just hit a hornet’s nest?” He shakes his head and offers an upward nod to the angel. “Gabriel. Long time, no see, brother.”

Gabriel stops and smiles, hands held palm upwards like a drag queen basking in the spotlight at the end of a runway. Calm. Serene. Certain. “God is dead. The throne was empty., the mantle just draped over it like a forgotten jacket after prom night.” He spreads his hands wide and gives a tiny, perfunctory bow. “So I took it.”

The angel is not how Roisin expected it to look. There have been so many depictions of this archangel over the centuries, she was expecting a Renaissance icon like Gaudenzio Ferrari’s depiction, or van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece: The Angel of the Annunciation, or even, be still her beating heart, the gender-fluid Gabriel played so well by Tilda Swinton. This one was more akin to the Neo-Nazi version of him in the film ‘Legion.’ Wasn’t he supposed to be the most beautiful angel  of them all?

Gabriel steps forward, looking directly at her. “You know I can hear you, don’t you?”

Roisin feels the architecture shift. It is realigning with Gabriel at the centre instead of her, though not towards destruction as she expected, but toward rewriting. She can see the blueprints changing, although not having had more than a passing knowledge of architectural drawings dating back to her time in high school, she cannot yet tell what it is they are detailing.

Gabriel’s voice is gentle. “Hasmed did his part and opened the seal to release the silence.” One hand goes to his heart and with all the robes and the light as he raises his other, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Jenny Joseph, the Columbia Pictures torch lady. He looks at Roisin again. “And now I will write the world that comes after.”

Astaroth snarls. “You can’t. You’re not the Author.”

“Po-tay-to, po-tar-to.” Gabriel smiles. “I am now, Bitch.”

Roisin feels the revelation inside her pulse violently as he begins to re-write the Rules; rewrite the Truth and every plane in existence. He can overwrite everything the Creator wrote with his own version, his own little perfection. Everything the Creator wrote. Everything.

Roisin can’t help the tiny grin of glee as she realises she is not something the Creator wrote. She is the result of careful breeding, gene manipulation and temporal engineering to get her in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. As the Unwritten, she is the only thing Gabriel cannot overwrite

Gabriel hears her thought and sees her small smile and his joy fades. “Oh. You.”

Roisin lifts her chin. “I’m a fucking angel, mate. You don’t get to overwrite me.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrow. “Then you are a problem.”

“Brother, no.” Astaroth steps between them. “She’s the Sixth Seal. You can’t touch her.”

Gabriel’s voice is as soft and gentle as a seaward zephyr, the moment before it hits a cold front and twists into a tornado. “I don’t need to touch her.” He raises his hand as if her were about to bless an infant in its mother’s arms during their baptism. “I only need to write the world around her.”

The architecture shudders as the silence comes to an end with a shrill pull on the open E string of a concert violin and the new creation begins.

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