He stares back at them as if reading forward in the book of the dead because he is almost certain to fail them. It is altogether too tragic. Too absurd. But it doesn’t matter. All is comedy before an audience of gods.
But all the cosmetics the desert had to offer could not hide those piercing eyes. To look into them was to peer back into primordial time, offering a glimpse of that first clash between light and dark and hinting at an unsettling truth that seemed to defy every hopeful instinct. The gods themselves, it seemed, were destined to be held to account by them.
And this was precisely what the boy was. He was the Angel of Death and Chaos which the gods outwardly decried but inwardly yearned after. He was the remedy the world needed, even though he would be shunned and despised for it. And if he was right, the boy knew it already.
The priestess huffed at the notion. “And yet, your characterization of the high god always comes back to that of the father figure. It seems the mother is conspicuously absent from this household. And in my experience, a motherless household is a very troubled home indeed.”
But she knew. Maybe not the full picture, in all its gruesome detail. But she had a sense of the rough shape of it. Like a hideous monster crouched deep in an unlit cave. Its presence sensed, despite holding itself ominously still in the rank darkness.
Lidless eyes looked on vacantly as he wandered the volcanic-like deathscape in search of a most terrible truth.
And even though there was no face to be discerned, there was the sense of a persona—suspended somewhere between manhood and boyhood and filled with both a love and a hate so intense as to annihilate the line between.
No one of sane mind would venture into such a vast, utter emptiness. Not unless they are running from something. But where the air is thin, and the landscape stripped of all embellishment, so too is the veil between a man and his god. In a place such as this, even the most uncomfortable of truths become hard to ignore.
I push ahead harder, angrier, reeling the sun closer with each drumming of the horse’s gallop. The more it sinks into the terra firma the larger it looms, like an arched gateway into a forbidden realm. Now I take aim at the gods themselves. Finally, to be held account for all the cruelties inflicted upon their terrestrial playthings.
He was the perfect spy, obvious only after the fact.
In that moment the axis of the echelons could be felt to shift. The matriarch could exert her will upon them no more than earthbound objects could rearrange the stars in the sky. They had risen beyond her reach to become part of a larger drama in which she was a mere bit player.
In a moral landscape dislodged of its foundation there is only one virtue left standing. Not love, not truth, not even kindness. Only exactness.
Somehow, while the stewards of heaven were bathing themselves in light, a virulent darkness had taken root in the neglected ruts lining Creation’s underbelly. Another had risen in Tiamat’s place. And with it, a new kind of evil had been born into the world. Unlike any before it.
In a city still sleeping off its post-festival hangover, there were no crowds in which to blend. No ubiquitous chatter in which troubled thoughts could drown. Only empty streets and empty silence for an empty soul to haunt.
And even though there was no face to be discerned, there was the sense of a persona—suspended somewhere between manhood and boyhood and filled with both a love and a hate so intense as to annihilate the line between. It was by this combustible contradiction that he had come to reverse the interminable tide. To set things in accordance with what he insisted to be right.
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The Satan and the Cherubim Overview
