Part III.
She was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
The beauty I’d witnessed, her hurtling plummet through space directly toward me of all creatures, was something I detested the moment I laid my eyes on her face. The angular shape of it, sharp and clean; her eyes, violet with specks of blue, like the very flames that had shot her from out of the sky; her hair as white and shimmering as the sun that almost blinded me the first time I opened my eyes at daybreak.
I hated her.
I hated her with every sinewy fiber of the strange skin I was now trapped in, just as I hated the thick vine that trapped me before her, on my knees and in the mud.
“Untie me,” I said, and as the words left my lips, the two of us startled. “Un..tie me.” This time, I said it slower, feeling and tasting each syllable as it fell from my tongue. I couldn’t say where the noise came from. It was air given sound. Purpose given form. It gurgled up my throat from the only place I could name and truly understand.
“Who…” Her words came out like a feathery breath. She startled again, pressing her lips together and clearing her throat, over and over again until she couldn’t help but cough at the strain of it. Slowly, terrified, she tried again, this time with more confidence, more vibrato. “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” This noisy thing—speaking, talking—I slowly started to get the hang of. If anything, it was like walking. One, slow, terrifying step at a time. “Who are you?”
She looked around and then back at me. “I’ve only just arrived here.”
“As have I.”
“No. You… You were here already. You attacked me.”
“I saved you.”
“Liar!”
I’ve been called many things. Never before had I been called a liar. At least not to my face. Or whatever this fleshy thing was that now represented me.
“Why would I attack someone I don’t know in a place I don’t know?” I asked her.
“Why does anyone do anything?” she fired back, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “For power.”
I considered this. It did make sense. “Fair point.”
“I’ll ask you this once and only once. What is your affiliation?”
In the midst of war, it is only honorable to be honest to your opposer of your allegiance. In and of myself, I am not a liar. As a soldier, a servant of the darkness, I am even less so. War is not as chaotic and reckless as most would assume. In my eyes, that made it all the more cruel and brutal. There are rules to war, unsaid rules, a code of honor, that one must follow in order to be deemed a loyal soldier. I was as loyal as they came, or so I once thought. I believed wholeheartedly in the cause of this war, my war. In no way would I ever betray my allegiance just to avoid death.
I was many things, but I was not a liar. I was not a traitor.
And so I spoke true to my captor, knowing full well what it could mean for me and my soul, when I said, “I honorably fight for the realm of darkness.”
Time meant nothing as barely a second between the air leaving my lips and the words touching her ears passed before she processed my admittance and gathered the gumption to spit, “Demon,” at me, with malicious spite and a splatter of precipitation.
As the words tore through her throat, I knew who she was, and I knew that she knew. And that is when I knew—only one of us would make it out of here with our souls intact.
It was most likely not going to be me. Not sitting in the dirt with my hands bound together.
“Sick, putrid demon,” the angel seethed, squinting her eyes at me with the power of a million suns, and with a heavy heart, I prepared to burst into flames.
But nothing happened.
Nothing changed.
The sun remained in the sky. The breeze remained in the air. And I remained in the mud.
Her eyes widened. And then she squinted again, harder, fiercer, never taking her eyes off of me. I winced, bracing myself for impact, for whatever horror awaited me beyond this plane of existence, but yet again, nothing happened.
The birds continued to chirp.
The Earth continued to breathe, as did I with it.
And the angel continued to squint, despite her clear lack of success. “What is…what is happening?”
“Nothing, apparently.” A new sensation bubbled up from within, and I laughed. At first, she froze, surprised by the sound. The feeling it brought—the joy and elation, emotions I’d never before experienced—felt magnificent, exhilarating, contagious, and so I did it again. I laughed until tears formed in my eyes, and the angel watched me, face twisted in mortification as if I were crazy; or worse—completely sane to a world she didn’t yet understand.
Oh, how I had loved that look on her face. That terror, that uneasiness. And as I continued to laugh, I realized the focus of my humor had shifted. I was laughing at her, and she knew it. And it angered her. An angry angel is a hilarious thing, mind you. She couldn’t see the look on her face, but I could, and it was too good not to laugh at.
Too damn good.
“Stop that.”
I didn’t.
“Stop it this instant.”
“And what will you do if I don’t?” I taunted. “Squint at me?”
“Tell me where we are,” she demanded. “Who sent us here?”
I didn’t utter a word. One, because I didn’t have a clue. And two, because I didn’t want her to know that I didn’t have a clue.
“What is happening to us?” she growled.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” is all I said, knowing how much it would anger her. But what could she do? Nothing, as it turned out. Neither one of us could do a damn thing. The power we once wielded, I beneath the Earth, and she in the skies, was now lost to us both.
The thought of being powerless exhilarated me just as much as it horrified me. And I could tell by the horrid look on the angel’s face that she felt, if not exactly, very close to the same way.
Her frustration was growing. Her chest rose and caved rapidly. She was doing what I did earlier. Breathing. Only it was different. It was fast. It was uncontrollable. She was sucking in air as if she might never taste it again—as if it was being kept from her, a limited supply meant only for those who could understand.
Her lack of understanding only made her gasp harder. Faster. “I don’t think you’re in much of a place,” the angel wheezed between swallows of air, “to deny my questioning.”
I finally came back to myself. I had been so wrapped up in this angel’s reaction, in her perplexed perception of this new world and how it affected her, that I had almost lost track of my own predicament in this physical realm. I remembered, suddenly, that I’d just spent a good two minutes laughing at someone who had taken me prisoner. Perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind nor in the best position to be mocking my captor. My hands were still tied. The angel was still towering over me. And she was indeed the enemy. Why we looked like this, where we were, and why we were here was a matter to be dealt with after I secured my freedom.
I came to this epiphany a little too late for the angel’s liking, so as a soldier of honor, I leant into honesty to offer reprieve for my ill-timed teasing.
“Look, seraph, I’m at just as much of a loss as you, unfortunately.”
She smirked. “Is that so? This isn’t a trick then, one I’ve been told those of your kind often use to deceive?”
“I’m sure you’ve been told many contrived tales of my kind. However, another story, from thine own self, is a side that might be surprising to hear, as it is a perspective you do not yet know,” I said, in a manner that I thought was rather enticing, for who doesn’t love stories? A madman, that’s who. “Wouldn’t it be much more interesting to learn something new, rather than something you yourself manufactured?”
The angel looked like she wanted to squint at me again, only to remember it wouldn’t do a damn thing. She dragged me to my feet by the skin of my neck instead. Part of me wished I’d just exploded. At least then the pain would come and go in the blink of an eye.
Pain on Earth lingered, however, and like myself, it wouldn’t be retreating any time soon.