by S. L. Naeole
“No. When I put on Gabriel’s ring, I could see every thought he ever had while that ring was in his possession. Even thoughts he kept from the others.” Lark’s eyes widened at his words and I finally looked at him for the first time since I took off the ring. His mind was like a window, and I looked inside to see the secrets that the ring had kept.
THE FLOOD
The sound of cries and screams in a memory that doesn’t belong to you will always sound hollow. In Robert’s mind, the memories that were older than he was sounded like a whisper. But, even as quiet as they were, I could still hear everything as though I was right there, instead of a bystander to a stolen thought.
“Have you told him?”
“Yes. He was the right choice.”
Uriel was standing beside Gabriel, his eyes looking down at a man whose shoulders seemed to sink lower and lower with each passing second. The sun was high overhead, and the smell of grass, sweet and green, floated along with hints of something floral.
A bird could be heard singing in a nearby tree, while an axe hitting wood thumped a steady rhythm that joined a whistling that seemed in competition with the bird’s song. Together they made for an interesting symphony that felt out of place with the serious tone of the conversation between the two angels.
“It’s difficult, this trusting of humans.”
“Gabriel, you will see when all of this is done that humanity is worth saving.”
“Why do we save them but not our own? I’ve never thought once to question our orders but I have to now—why are these animals worth more than we are?” Gabriel asked with resentment staining every syllable.
“Because they owe us nothing; we owe them everything. They are not born to protect us; we’re born to protect them. It gives us purpose, Gabriel. It gives us reason. Would you rather we be like them? Making mistake after mistake? Haven’t the Grigori taught us what happens when we try?”
Gabriel looked down and kicked at a piece of stone that was jutting out from the ground. It broke off and disappeared, sailing away like a bullet had been shot from the ground. “I do not understand why our brothers and sisters chose to destroy the legacy we have spent centuries to cultivate, but I do know that flawed as they are, they are more valuable to the world than any human being existing now or ever will exist.”
Uriel’s eyes turned down, disappointment plain in them. “We weren’t created to be valuable. We were created to ensure that they—humans—are.”
“How valuable can they be? Their weaknesses, their cruelty, their lust for blood and bodies—they’ve done nothing but destroy what we’ve built. They’ve taken the knowledge we’ve shared with them and used it against each other.”
“And that’s their right. Humanity has to be allowed to learn and fail. They have to be allowed to be human.”
“Humanity will be our downfall, Uriel. I see it. We barely prevented a war from breaking out amongst our own because of these…humans. Saving them now will mean our end later. We should destroy all of them before this happens again.”
“And then what would become of Avi? She cannot exist without humanity, and humanity cannot exist without her. Death cannot exist without life, and life can have no purpose without death.”
“Avi is more than her purpose. She will exist long after we are gone.”
Uriel smiled knowingly. “You love her.”
“If you speak of that human condition that blinds one to what they see, then no, I do not. But love in its most divine form…yes, I feel it for her. She may be one of us, one of the first, but she feels more like my child than a sister or a mate.”
“You feel a paternal bond to her though she isn’t your child. How fickle you are.”
“It has nothing to do with being fickle. Avi is special. I think when she was created she was filled with only light. There is no darkness within her; only illumination,” Gabriel said wistfully. “She is perfect.”
“Perfection is an ideal, not a reality; even among our kind. One day she will disappoint you. Will your love for her still exist when you realize this?”
“She will never disappoint me, Uriel. Avi is incapable of disappointing anyone.”
***
Everything was a depressing shade of grey, the skies dark with storm clouds that drenched the world in water that neither felt wet nor dry. It was like a layer of sweat. Sticky, dust coated sweat that clung to my skin and my clothes.
“It has only just begun. The rain will continue for many more days.”
“You feel no sorrow for what happens to them, do you Gabriel?”
Gabriel looked at the person who asked and I swallowed back a whimper. It was my mother. She looked ethereal, peaceful…alive.
“Of course I do. I just don’t see how it matters. The Grigori have betrayed our ways and the humans have betrayed their faith. Why have laws if we do not enforce them?”
“But to take so many lives…to destroy the Grigori because of the actions of a few-”
“Is what we’ve been told to do. We are not humans. We do not have the choice and if we take it for ourselves we end up like the Grigori and then where would humanity be? We have to be their light, not their darkness.”
My mother turned and I saw what she was looking at. I saw things through her eyes and it made my heart lurch in my chest. People were busy reinforcing their homes, gathering up their children, and collecting food. It was plain to see that. But, through my mother’s eyes, I could see something that I knew they could not: all of them were marked with a black feather on their forehead.
“I do not relish the taking of so many innocents, Gabriel. Look at all of these children—whether their fathers are angels or not, they do not deserve what I must give to them,” my mother murmured, though her face remained hard.
“You do not need to have them suffer. Be generous in your task, be merciful. It doesn’t matter how you kill them, just that you do it before the rains end,” Gabriel told her sternly. “If the world is allowed to continue as it has been, our kind will never be able to walk among the people again.”
“I already am unable to do so,” my mother lamented. “When the Grigori are destroyed, we will send a new flock of angels to take their place. The world will continue on as it has, and you will return to our circle and never descend again while I remain here; untouched, unspoken to, feared and loathed as though I were Lucifer himself.”
Gabriel’s voice softened and he waved his hand across the scene of panicked people. “You are the only one of us who can maintain balance here. Humans would destroy themselves in less than ten generations and then who would be left to fear you?”
“I don’t want any of them to fear me.”
“If they aren’t able to fear you, they won’t be able to love you either. And that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want them to love you.”
My mother’s face seemed to collapse and she nodded. “Humans feel so much. The love they know is nothing like the love we’re born knowing. It’s different, deeper almost. It grows and it expands, like a living entity. It dies like one, too. I know death and dying. I am Death. I am eternally dying. But to know the birth of something so incredible, to give birth to love, that would be…well, that would be divine.”
Gabriel took my mother’s hand and placed it onto her heart. “As long as this beats, you will never have a need for that kind of love. That is a human emotion, with human consequences. You will never know anything more destructive than that and you will never know anything more complete than what exists within you.”
“You speak words of kindness when I speak of nothing but my own self. You are a good friend, Gabriel.”
“And I always will be one to you, Avi.”
“Be my friend now…give me strength as I do this terrible thing.”
“I will not leave your side.”
With a heavy nod, my mother’s shoulders shook and wings the color of the darkest cloud in the sky spread out from her back, sharp and determined towards the furthest areas beside her.
“They’ve grown lighter,” Gabriel commented.
“They continue to lighten as more and more of humanity dies. I fear by the end of this rain that my wings will be whiter than yours.”
“It isn’t humanity’s death that changes their color. It’s the death of your spirit. You need to let go of this attachment you have for the humans.”
“I can’t. I will do what my call tells me but I can’t stop feeling for them. I won’t.”
Gabriel sighed reluctantly. “Then don’t. Have this defiance for yourself. If this is the totality of your rebellion, we shall be the better for it.”
Wordlessly, my mother descended upon the village. It looked like the sky had lowered to disguise her as she disappeared, but Gabriel’s eyes moved, tracking shadows and slight disturbances of air. The crying, the screams all stopped. It seemed even the dropping of rain had become silent as the smell of mud and wet grass changed, souring almost.
Time had not stopped, but life—all life—had, and the stench of it was growing thicker by the second. Gabriel’s nose was especially sensitive to its scent, picked up every nuance of the changes in the air. He was seeking a specific scent, one that smelled sweet and deceptively innocent.
He smiled when he found it and puffed with pride as the fog that had hidden my mother now revealed her, exposing her for what she was. She emerged with a pale face streaked with dust and crystal dew, her hands shaking at her sides, her wings even lighter than they had been when they’d appeared. Her shape was rimmed with a pale, golden light, but around that light, almost smothering it, was a darker presence
Her hair was hanging limply around her face and for a second, it was like looking in a mirror. But then she seemed to fade out, growing less opaque as her body shimmered with a gray, nearly silver mist. Almost as quickly as she thinned out, she reappeared, her face clear, her hair pulled neatly back, looped at the nape of her neck and braided around her forehead, almost like an onyx headband.
“I could not just take the children and leave behind their parents to mourn them. I took them all.”
“You did what you needed to.”
“Four hundred lights extinguished. This is the smallest of the villages in this area.”
“You will need help, then?”
My mother shook her head. “I’ve already sent out the others. We will not be able to help them all before the flooding begins but the most innocent will be spared the suffering.”
“How many will be allowed to survive besides the ark builder?”
“Across the world, only several thousand. They’ve already been chosen and cannot be harmed. The registrar has already recorded their names.”
“That many left alive? I’m surprised. I thought maybe we’d leave behind a dozen or so, but thousands?”
“That is not many, not when compared to the dead; so many…so many dead. So many futures ended by what we’ve done.”
Gabriel’s voice rose in pitch as he grasped my mother’s shoulders and forced her to look at him. “We did not end their futures; they did. Humans are not infallible.”
“And neither are angels, whether of the first circle, the second, the Grigori… These humans, these innocent mothers, fathers, and children aren’t dying because they went against what they are; they’re dying because we went against what we are. Humans didn’t implement the law of the Nephilim—we did. Humans have not betrayed their character or their faith; we have.
“I feel their confusion, their hurt, their heartbreak, and the closest our kind has come to feeling anything similar for our own folly has been shame. And so we kill to hide that shame, when instead we should be learning from it,” my mother said so passionately, I felt the burn of tears in Gabriel’s eyes.
“We are learning from it, my dear one,” Gabriel said softly. “With you to remind us, we shall never forget.”
“Is it really that simple? Can we save the world and ourselves through chaos and destruction?”
“Yes.”
My mother’s body grew slack and she leaned in to rest her head against Gabriel’s shoulder. He pulled her to embrace her, and she sighed.
“Peace is the child. Death is the birth.”
***
Leaves were floating atop the murky water that churned and bubbled as the winds blew heavily across every surface that the water had not yet touched. The rain had eased only slightly, but the darkness never left. Firelight flickered orange from torches held high by hands belonging to worried parents and children, their voices calling out into the distant darkness for any signs of life.
Gabriel drifted above the fog that settled around the boats. He was watching them with distaste as they moved frantically from one of the their tiny boats to the other. Women, sobbing tears that disappeared in the soft rain, carried lifeless babies in their arms. Men who had grown hard through the demands of farm life had broken down, empty shells that were of no use to those who depended on them to survive.
The children were the most affected by what surrounded them. For nearly forty days, they had watched as their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, and complete strangers lost the will to live, falling dead around them like the raindrops that kept them from remembering what dry felt like. The eyes of these children, once lively and filled with endless hope and fancy were now empty, flat. They couldn’t even cry anymore; inside they were as dead as the bodies that bobbed up every now and again from beneath the watery cemetery.
Children cried, Gabriel thought to himself. They cried and they laughed. But these children did not make a single sound. There was nothing left to be joyful or sorrowful for. It was if they were holes, physical holes in time and life itself and he had helped to create them.
“You feel for them now, don’t you?”
Gabriel turned to see the others. Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Avi stood wing to wing beside him.
“It’s not so much the feeling for them but realizing the failure in our actions. The intent of this flood was to clean the slate and start again. Instead we have shattered it. What do we build on from here? Centuries upon centuries we’ve studied them and adapted how we behaved because of these miserable creatures.
“Now we have forced them to adapt for us but how can they? The adults are the weakest of them, rigid and unable to change, but we’ve made their children into the waking dead. Look at them. They show nothing—no emotion, no thought. How will they repair the damage done to this world and to their own humanity?”
“With our help,” Uriel said, the others nodding in agreement.
My mother’s voice was raspy when she spoke. “There will be more dark times ahead. More deaths. Even ours.”
“Dying is inevitable, but we die only when we choose to.”
“You will choose to die one day,” Michael said to no one in particular.
And no one responded.
Through their silence, the calls for life continued. A large splash could be heard, the rocking of another boat in the darkness causing shadows as small waves disturbed the constant rhythm of ripples that followed every drop of rain that refused to stay in the sky. Another splash, and then another, and then the curve of the underside of the boat made its appearance.
“They have taken to ending their own lives,” Raphael said colorlessly. “They are prone to their dramatics, aren’t they?”
“They have nothing left to live for,” my mother lamented. “We have taken their homes, their food, their children. All that is left to them is faith, and we sit here and refuse to offer even that by way of hope.”
Michael uttered a weighed reply. “And would they take it if we were to offer it? They know what caused this, and at this moment the last faces they wish to see are ours. We will be reviled by most of them until we can prove ourselves, and even then many will never forgive us. Generations will die and we will still be hated and feared, instead of loved.”
Uriel bent down and touched a small blanket that floated by, the bloated body of an infant still attached t
o it. “Today is the last day of rain. Tomorrow the sun will appear, the world will dry, and humanity will recover. We will return to our places above and we will watch as our children heal the wounds we let be born. The new laws will prevent this from happening again. That is all that we can do.”
Gabriel turned away in distaste, but everywhere he looked, the world was covered in bodies. Even the Grigori drifted in death among the corpses. Their wings were stained and wretched, their faces puffy and distorted in disbelief, horror—they had not expected to have suffered the same fate as the humans they had played God over.
These faces were familiar. He had seen these angels as children, watched their wings come, passed along the history of their kind when their calls were finally heard. He had expected to feel the anger, but not the remorse. He didn’t even know what it was.
“It is one of the rarest of human feelings,” my mother informed him.
“It is detestable,” Gabriel muttered.
“I think it is one of the most commendable. It proves that humans are worthy of redemption. You feeling it proves that you are, too.” She smiled at him and took his hand.
He looked at their clasped hands and felt a surge of warmth reach even the tips of his wings. “You give life to this old angel’s heart.”
“I will miss you.”
“You will miss my bitterness?”
“I will miss you. For all your jaded cynicism, I will miss you the most. Uriel, Michael, and Raphael have always been understanding and permissive, but in a way that always made me feel less like I belonged and more like I was tolerated. But you were rigid and firm, and yet always tender. I was never a child, but if I had been, I would have wanted you to be my father.”
Gabriel touched the tip of my mother’s nose in a gesture that surprised even him. “And if I had had a child, I would have wanted it to be you.”
“Sentimental and generous—who would have believed it of our Gabriel,” Raphael said with amusement.
“I am capable of many things. Maybe I’ll even be capable of forgiveness.”
“Lies!” Raphael and Uriel laughed, while my mother giggled in a way that made it clear that she was young, despite her age.
