by Daniel Caet
“Well, here we go again,” thought Becca and without hesitation she opened the drawer of her night table to take out a small letter opener and make a cut in the palm of her hand. The drops of blood, only three, fell on the first page and, once again, the magic of the first time made its effect and the words began to appear on the pages in an intense scarlet color. And Becca knew at that very moment that night she would not sleep either.
Past
I do not know exactly how long I broke that silence with my voice, with my screams, at first calling Liliath, then filling the void with threats that no one could hear and finally crying with despair until the silence that Liliath had left behind also filled me and I kept quiet.
That was when her words came to life and my punishment began. If I had believed that I would be alone in that cave, I was wrong, all my ghosts were with me. The ghosts of Armesh, Suriath, Sadith, Raphael, all of them appeared before me silently, looking at me with their inert eyes without saying a word. I shouted at them, I asked them to talk to me, to say something that would explain to me why they were there, but not a single word came out of their lips. Finally, tired of their silence, it was me who started talking to them trying to explain the reason for my actions, asking for their forgiveness, telling them that I never wanted their deaths and that I would have done anything to avoid them. But their faces still gave me no response. Other ghosts joined them, those of all the creatures I had killed throughout my life, demons, men, all. And none of them said a word to me. Like my father they had all chosen silence. My father. How many times did I shout his name in that cave? At first, I called him asking me to get out of that hell of darkness, but there was no response. Then I asked him to give me what you had, death, a finite life, that my torment would end someday. But there was no response either. I finally understood that I was just as I always had been, and that silence was my only companion and I surrendered letting the darkness take over me and make me one with it.
But my mind was not willing to abandon me in the dark and began to show me images of everything that could have been and never was, of everything I had lost. Images of my family, only that it was not my family. Narmesh and Niel were two tall, blond and tremendously beautiful children who played with Liliath in the garden of our house. Their laughter and joy echoed in my head. Suddenly Niel turned to call me with the high-pitched voice of the small children asking me to play with them. Liliath looked at me smiling with infinite tenderness, and she also begged me to join them. My hands tried to reach them, but then the image dissolved in front of me giving way to a very different one, bones, skeletons at my feet that became dust when my hands tried to touch them. And again, the darkness. I felt like the rage I had felt in the cave in the mountains was coming back to me, the rage for everything that had been taken from me. Nothing of what happened had been my choice, it had not been my choice to become a human or, rather, a creature halfway between the human being and what I once was. I had not asked to be betrayed, nor that my family died at the hands of my own brothers and my children were taken from me. Others had decided for me that I had no right to be happy and, although I could do nothing to turn back the clock, I could make them pay. All of them would burn in the flames of my anger, one by one, until there was not a single memory of them, men, angels or gods.
The accumulated rage asked to explode inside me, overflow my power and devastate the world, but the walls of my prison would not allow it, there I was just a poor human devoured by his thirst for revenge, but without tools to execute it. There, enclosed, I was nobody and darkness and silence were the only company.
At first, I did not recognise the subtle change that occurred in the cave. A point of light in the background, barely visible that grew in intensity and size little by little. My body was prepared for another of the games that my mind was offering me, but this time there were no images of my family or my lost happiness, in fact, there were no images at all. The light kept growing and I understood that it was getting closer to me. It was not any lamp, that was sure, too intense, so much that its brightness prevented seeing what was behind it, or rather, in it. Its size continued to increase until it suddenly stopped in front of me with a height somewhat higher than mine. Suddenly the chains that held me broke into a thousand pieces and my body, weak from the time I had been hanging, fell forward to be picked up in the arms of the light that quickly died to show me that they belonged to a man. My eyes took a moment to focus on his face to discover that he was not just any man because he was not a man at all, it was Uriel. And with the image of his face looking at me compassionately, my body could hold no more, and I lost consciousness.
My eyes opened slowly, my body expected to be hanging still on the wall of the cave and that the image of Uriel wrapped in light had been no more than a dream, however Uriel was reclining in front of me and his face smiled at me in welcome.
“My little Helel,” he said, using the affectionate treatment he had always used with me. “I'm so glad you're alive! The resistance of this human body is truly remarkable, almost angelic.”
He brought a bowl to my lips, so I could drink, and the water filled my mouth awakening a thirst I had not felt before and I consumed it as if I had never drunk.
“Slowly Helel, your body although special, is human, if you drink too fast you will collapse. The cave slows the biological needs of the prisoner by putting him in a kind of trance so that he does not succumb to his punishment, but it was never intended for such long sentences.”
“Long? How many weeks have I been here, Uriel?”
“Helel, it is important now that you recover your strength, we will talk about that later.”
The tone of his voice told me clearly that something was not right.
“Uriel, what is it that you hide from me? I beg you, tell me the truth, how long have I been here? Months? Years? I said with a tremor in my voice for fear of his response.”
“You've been locked in that cave for almost a thousand years, Helel.”
I felt my body faint again. A thousand years. Liliath had shown that her cruelty had no end. She was not lying when she said he locked me in the cave to get rid of me once and for all. If it were not for Uriel, eternity would have been my condemnation.
“How did you find me?”
“A group of demons attacked someone very important to me. I went after them to make them pay for what they had done, and I heard them talking about the story of a fallen angel and how a sorceress had locked him in a prison for all eternity. I tried to get something else from them before killing them, but none of them seemed to know anything else; for them it was little more than a legend, but the description of the prison made me think of my own creation and I decided to come and check for myself if it was real. My surprise was to find you. But enough talk for now, we must leave it here for your body to recover, as soon as you get rid of the influence of the cave your powers will return and your recovery will be faster, but you need food and rest.”
Uriel took me in his arms like a child without making the slightest effort to lift my weight and suddenly a blinding light enveloped us and, when it disappeared, we were no longer in the cave but in a low house with adobe walls. An older woman with grey hair and stoop approached us as soon as we appeared.
“How is he?” Uriel asked.
The woman answered with an affirmative gesture of the head and made with the hands the gesture of sleeping. Uriel replied with a smile.
“Thanks, Fasit, we have another patient, so we'll need to prepare the other cot in the room.”
The woman nodded again and disappeared behind the curtains of the adjoining room. Uriel followed with me still in his arms. The room was larger than I expected and had two cots, one of them occupied by a boy of about fifteen or sixteen who seemed to be asleep. Uriel deposited me gently on the other cot and the woman covered me with a blanket before leaving us.
“Fasit will bring you something to eat and a sedative infusion so you can sleep without dreams.”
“Thanks Uriel. Can I ask you who my partner is?” I said looking at the adjoining cot.
“His name is Hasiet, the light of my days and my nights,” he replied, looking at the boy with immense tenderness. “Since I decided to leave the heavens I have lived among men as one of them, without attracting attention. During all these years I have managed to disappear by posing as a healer and avoiding using my angelic form except when it was absolutely essential.”
Uriel's words explained why since his departure his presence had only been felt sporadically and none of us had been able to locate him. Uriel had embraced his human form almost to the point of suppressing his angelic part or, at least, hiding it absolutely.
“I've been in this town for about five years,” he went on. “A couple years ago I went to a nearby town to help a slightly older woman give birth, and on my way back I found a caravan of slaves. The owners of the caravan had just bought boys and girls from the poor families of the city in exchange for a few coins to sell them as slaves in the capital. Normally I do not meddle in the affairs of humans, but I met Hasiet's eyes and something inside me could not be separated from him. Do not get me wrong, I've had other lovers before, but my soul never felt a connection like I felt with him. That night I rescued him from his chains and brought him here, since then he has been by my side, he has been my light, the passion and the calm of my heart.”
The way Uriel talked about that boy was that of a devoted lover and his way of feeling reminded me of the one I lived in Liliath's arms.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Though we want to live among them, Helel, we are not human, and our other life will always be a burden on our shoulders and on the shoulders of those we love. It has taken me some time to understand it,” he said sadly. “I was in the mountains tending to the daughter of a local pastor. Somehow a group of demons Tahir must have heard that there was an especially skilled healer in the area and you know that this species feeds on the energy of humans with supernatural abilities, so they came to the house. They must have noticed something of my angelic essence, but they could only find Hasiet, so they took revenge on him. They told him that if he was the whore of an angel he could be a demon’s too, and they raped him in terrible ways. I went back the next day and found him in a pool of blood. Even with my power, I could hardly bring him back. That was about a week ago.”
Uriel's eyes filled with tears and I realised that it was not only because of the love he felt for Hasiet, but because of the guilt he felt for what had happened to him, but I did not want to dig into the wound. I could not imagine how terrible his revenge must have been on those demons.
“Well, the past is past,” he said. “I'll go and see how Fasit is doing with the food and I'll let you rest. Tomorrow if you feel better we can continue talking.”
He got off the bed and left the room. A little later the woman returned with a soup bowl that revived my absent energies and another with an infusion of bitter taste. The infusion turned out to be a powerful sedative and, as Uriel had promised, I could sleep without dreams of any kind. Only two words echoed in my head again and again until I fell asleep, a thousand years.
The next day I got up from the cot and left the room, careful not to wake up Hasiet who was still asleep. There was no one in the main room of the house so I thought I would go outside, but I changed my mind thinking that I could get Uriel into some trouble if someone from the village saw me. In the back of the room there was a small door and I peeked out to see where it was leading. I found Uriel in a small garden plagued with plants of several types without any particular order or pattern almost as if they had grown there by chance. There was a small palm tree at the back of the garden and Uriel was sitting on the ground in its shadow. I approached him who greeted me with a smile.
“I'm glad to see that you feel stronger. I understand that you have been able to rest?”
“Yes, thanks, the truth is that this infusion has been almost miraculous. I feel that my strength has returned to me. And my powers too,” I said, stroking the symbols of my name on my arm but not daring to make my sword appear.
I sat next to Uriel and the cool breeze that ran under the palm tree was comforting.
“Do you want to tell me what happened to you?” Uriel asked softly.
A part of me hesitated for a second, but the rest needed to shout to someone about everything that had happened, so I told him everything that had happened in that time. I told him about my fall, about Armesh and his family, about Liliath, about my children and her betrayal, about how I had looked for her hoping that this was the key to finding my children and yet finding her had been my condemnation.
“You really have suffered greatly, my little Helel,” he said thoughtfully. “I'm so sorry that someone like Raphael, created from our father's pure love, deviated so much from his path.”
“He is not the only one, Uriel. Rafael gave me to understand that there was more of ours involved in my fall.”
“I'm not surprised, unfortunately, since our father's voice vanished, there are many who have believed themselves better aware of their will than the rest and able to reach the worst extremes to get the world to work according to their vision although it differs completely from his.”
“Is that why you left?”
“I could not continue communing with actions that in my eyes deviated completely from the work of our father and at the same time, for that same respect to him, I did not want to raise my sword against my brothers. Unfortunately, on your words I see now that some of them are beyond redemption.”
“For that same reason I want to recover my soul, Uriel. To be able to go back to heaven and put things in order. Recover my place and stop this madness, put us again in the path of our father.”
“Are you sure that is your only reason and not the desire for revenge?” His words left me without an answer, a silence that he understood very well. “Let me ask you something, Helel. If tomorrow you and I returned to heaven to stop that madness as you say, and we returned our brothers to the correct path marked by our father, would not we be doing the same as them, imposing a particular vision of his plan?” One more time I did not have an answer for Uriel. His green eyes looked at me with an intensity that did not need words. “My little Helel, the reason for all this is the absence of our father and only he can fix it by coming back to us when and if he wishes it.”
Uriel's conformist attitude irritated me no matter how much he disguised it in logical reasons and well-spun words. How could someone as powerful as the Archangel Uriel not do everything in his power to help me stop that debacle in our father's kingdom?
“I cannot understand you, Uriel, are you so attached to your human that you think it's more important than our father's plan?” I said with a rage that I did not know where it came from.
Uriel looked at me again, but his face showed no emotion, he just smiled at me with sorrow.
“Will you talk to me about love for a human, Helel?” That simple sentence broke me inside and understanding how unfair I had been with him, my eyes filled with tears. He approached me and taking my face in his hands he kissed me on the lips tenderly. “You are still as impetuous as when I was your teacher in the heavenly armies.”
“Some things do not change,” I said, smiling. “I was hoping that you would help me to fix this disaster in which my life has become, but I understand and respect that you do not want to do it.”
Once again, he looked me straight in the eyes.
“I have not said I'm not going to help you, Helel, but maybe the help I can give you is not exactly what you expect. In these thousand years the world of men has changed a great deal and at the same time, everything remains the same. There are still empires and kings, poor and rich, good and bad, men and gods. The road you need to undertake begins in a city called Thebes in a western kingdom. I will not tell you what is waiting for you in that city because that you must discover it yourself. Tomorrow I will accompany you there and you wi
ll decide if you wish to embark on that path or not.”
He did not say anything else. He got up from the ground and went back inside. I wondered what Uriel knew and did not want to tell me, but I also knew that he would not tell me if he did not want to. The name of Thebes did not mean anything to me, it was just another city in a world that was no longer mine, but I had no choice but to follow the path that Uriel marked me because I had no other and that was something that we both knew.
The next morning Uriel woke me up just before the sun came up. I got up and followed him outside. A part of me was nervous about what was about to happen. Accepting Uriel's offer to accompany me to Thebes meant starting a new path for which I was not sure if I was ready and the uncertainty of where it would take me accentuated my insecurity, but I had no other way out and my gratitude to Uriel for saving me from that horrible condemnation made me swallow my fears and embrace his offer.
“You are nervous, I know, and it is normal, but do not fear, I will still be with you a little more.”
Without saying another word, he embraced me, and his light enveloped us again. When it extinguished, the air stirred my hair and a dry smell of dust and sand filled my nose, we had reached our destination. We were at the top of a hill and the sun was beginning to come out in front of us, dazzling us. I looked at what was at our feet and I could not prevent my incomprehension from showing on my face. Below our level there were a lot of open holes in the rock. Some of them had a kind of gate in the upper part carved in the stone so that the entrance resembled doors. Paths clearly constructed by human hand climbed the hill allowing access to those cavities. Below, a series of buildings of a single floor and of varied sizes seemed to define an avenue that led to a large river.
