World Without Angels

by Campbell, Jamie

  “We don’t have telephones in the village. They are purely a human thing.”

  “How do you speak with each other then? Is the village that small?”

  “It’s huge, actually. But we have wings to get around, they’re quicker than any of your technology,” he explained.

  “What’s it like to fly?”

  Jerome grinned, flying was always something he enjoyed. Angels were made to live a life of servitude, created purely for the protection of mortals that walked the earth. Wings and the ability to fly were gifted to them so they could get around quickly and efficiently. However, to the angels, they were so much more. They represented freedom, the amazing feeling of flying could never be taken away from them, it was their gift and theirs alone.

  There weren’t enough human words to describe what it felt like to fly. The wind whipped through the hair and was a slave to the wings. The power that radiated from the feathered extensions sent their hearts thundering with the thrill. Flying at speed, up and down in the sky, it would never fail to make an angel’s stomach do back flips. There wasn’t one part of the body that was immune to the thrill.

  “Flying is like nothing else in any world,” Jerome finally answered honestly. That was it, he could try and use adjectives like awesome, astounding, or beautiful, but they wouldn’t be enough. No words could do the feeling justice.

  “It must be nice.”

  “It’s freeing.”

  The word free didn’t seem to exist in the world anymore, Leila thought to herself. Before the war, people were slaves to their possessions as they worked ridiculous hours to try and afford to live. Since evil descended, they were slaves to their survival. Nobody and nothing was free anymore. It was like a foreign concept.

  Suddenly very tired, Leila didn’t want to think anymore. She craved to close her eyes and seek respite in slumber. She said goodnight to Jerome, knowing he would still be there in the morning. Something had changed between them that day. It was only subtle, but it was there. He had accepted her help and in doing so, made a promise to protect her. He wasn’t going to go anywhere.

  As she settled into the bed, curled up underneath the sole blanket she owned, Leila felt Jerome lay beside her. The weight was reassuring, she was so thankful she wasn’t alone anymore. It had been so long since she had shared anything with someone else. She desperately missed that human contact, even if that contact wasn’t exactly human.

  Sleep came easily to both of them, despite their minds being in such turmoil. The exhaustion always seemed to overcome any unease in their thoughts.

  At ten minutes past three in the morning, Leila’s eyes shot open as she awoke suddenly. She had been suffering through a nightmare, except it wasn’t fictional. She had been reliving the moment when her family had been killed. Their screams rung out in her ears like she was there again. She could feel the fire as it licked her skin, leaving burns that would always remind her of that night.

  As she sat up, her heart was pounding so hard in her chest it felt like it might burst right through. She took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself down. The sweat beaded on her forehead, stubbornly refusing to abate.

  Carefully, Leila crawled out of bed. There was very little room between the angel and the wall and she didn’t want to wake him. She went slowly, making each movement deliberate and silent. She headed straight for the bathroom, needing a glass of water to stop the shaking in her hands.

  She looked in the mirror, telling herself over and over again that it was just a dream. Sure, it had happened, but it was in the past. She couldn’t keep reliving it and hoping for a different outcome. Nothing was going to bring her family back, nothing was going to magically stop the war. She needed to stick to reality and just accept it.

  She left the bathroom and sat on the floor of the apartment. She didn’t think she would be able to sleep again, even if she wanted to. The moment she closed her eyes, she couldn’t see anything except the face of her little sister in the bed beside her. If there was anything she regretted the most about that night, it was the fact she couldn’t save her. Why she had been spared when the little girl hadn’t, was beyond her. It didn’t seem fair to either of them.

  Somewhere in the distance outside, there was a woman screaming. It didn’t help to calm her nerves. Noises like that were common, but it didn’t make it any easier to listen to. Out in the night, someone’s life was being ended. Or if not, they would wish it would be. Sometimes surviving was much worse than not.

  To distract herself, Leila picked up the warrior statue. She wondered who the Greek God was that it was modeled after. It would have been someone important if they captured his likeness in stone so it could be there for all eternity.

  Her next thought was whether there would be anyone important enough now to have the same status. The President of the country had been in hiding for almost a year now. He ruled from a secret bunker somewhere, his life considered more important than his people’s. About once a week he would come onto the television and assure everyone he was doing the best he could to stop the violence. He would also remind them to ‘stay strong’ and ‘keep the faith’. Barely anyone paid any attention to the speeches. Most people didn’t even have a working television anymore. It was just a joke.

  She ran her fingers over the statue until she had felt every single part of it. Even though Jerome was so adamant there was a secret compartment inside, she still found it difficult to believe. The stone was so smooth, so perfectly pieced together. She tried to twist the head like Jerome had done. He had made it look effortless, but it barely budged with her touch. She clamped the statue between her knees and used both hands to try and rotate it. It gave a little.

  She tried harder, covering the head with a cloth so she could get some more traction. It was a little easier. She wondered how strong the angel actually was. He was taller and bigger than a human man, he obviously had many more features that weren’t of this world that she didn’t know about.

  Leila continued absentmindedly, trying not to let her mind wander to the dark place of her nightmare. She wished she had a television, or at least a radio – something that would distract her. She considered she might be able to steal one from somewhere. There were no stores that sold them anymore, but an empty house or office building might have one that worked. She tucked the reminder away for later, she would be more alert next time they went out.

  She was so distracted by the thought that Leila didn’t initially feel the click from the statue in her hands. There was more give to the head, she took off the cloth and examined it closer. Something had changed, there was a visible gap between the warrior’s shoulders and head. Even with only the moonlight filling the room she could see it.

  Working quicker now, Leila used a knife to lever the head completely off. She didn’t dare get too excited for fear it would just turn out to be nothing, but it was difficult. The head finally popped, she caught it before it could hit the floor. She looked inside, her stomach leaping with the anticipation.

  Jerome was right, there was a secret compartment inside. And it wasn’t empty. She couldn’t contain her excitement any longer. She hurried over to the sleeping angel and tapped his arm until he stirred awake. She didn’t care how peaceful he looked while asleep, she needed to tell him what she had found.

  “What’s going on?” He asked groggily, obviously his sleep had been deeper than hers.

  “I’ve opened the statue. There’s vellum inside,” she held up the warrior in case he didn’t believe her. It was pretty incredible that she had managed to open it. If the tables were turned, she probably wouldn’t believe him. Especially not in the early hours of the morning.

  Jerome sat up, now fully awake. He took the statue, examining the headless God. “How did you do this?”

  “I don’t know, I was just playing with it and it popped open.” She sat beside him on the bed, showing him the small piece of vellum she had pulled from inside the compartment. “What do you think this is?”
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br />   “It’s in Greek.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because it’s in Greek,” he said, as if that explained everything. By the look of confusion on her face, clearly it didn’t. “I can speak Greek. All languages of Earth, really.”

  “Do you they teach you that at school?”

  “More like a ‘born with it’ type of thing. We don’t know who we will be assigned to protect, we have to be able to speak all languages.”

  “Well, what does it say then?” The new fun fact about Jerome was interesting, but Leila was dying to know what was written on the vellum. If it was important enough to hide away for thousands of years, it must be good. She couldn’t wait a second longer to know what the weird writing said.

  Jerome held the vellum up to the moonlight. It read:

  Η αλήθεια βρίσκεται πάντα

  Ψεύτες ποτέ εξαπατήσει

  Το στόμα του Ἀνάγκη

  Είναι κρυμμένο στα πόδια

  “It says: The truth always lies, liars never cheat, the mouth of Ananke, is hidden at the feet,” he translated. “It’s a riddle.”

  “What’s an Ananke?”

  “She’s a person. Or an Ancient Greek Goddess to be more precise,” Jerome read the words over and over again to make sure he was reading it right. One wrong word and the whole meaning could change everything.

  “A God like Zeus? Or Athena?” Leila tried to recall everything she had learned about Ancient Greece in school. There was something like Gods and Goddesses, but they were only mythological creatures. The tales that accompanied them seemed so farfetched and unbelievable there was no way they could be real. It all seemed like such a lifetime ago now.

  “Kind of like that. Ananke was the Goddess of inevitability, compulsion, and necessity.”

  “Not exactly glamorous then, was she?”

  Jerome laughed. “I guess not. There were better things to be a God of, like the sea or love. Ananke drew the short straw.”

  “So what does it all mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  They both sighed, it was a letdown. The excitement over opening the statue quickly wore down to frustration again. They had a piece of old vellum about two inches square with nothing but a string of words that didn’t make any sense. As far as they knew, it could have been a practical joke from long ago.

  Leila suddenly had an idea. “What about if the statue itself is the key to working out the riddle?”

  Jerome was instantly on board. “What building is the statue from?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s broken off something.” She ran her fingers along the bottom, half of its stand was missing. She figured they wouldn’t have carved such a small statue out of stone by itself, it had to belong to a bigger structure. Jerome said there was an identical one in the angel world, what were the chances of there being only two in existence? There had to be more to it, she just knew it.

  “So we work out where it’s from and solve the riddle,” Jerome tried to make it seem effortless. “Simple, right?”

  “If we opened the statue, we can find out where it came from.”

  Jerome nodded in agreement, despite how difficult the task seemed. “Can we start in the morning? I still need a few hours sleep.”

  “Me too.”

  Leila carefully placed the statue on the kitchen bench and returned to the bed. She hoped she would be able to switch off her mind long enough to get some more sleep. But above all, she hoped the nightmare wouldn’t return. Living through a war was one thing, reliving it was another.

  CHAPTER 5

  So many hours had passed that the clock on the wall didn’t seem to make any sense anymore. It was just spinning around in an endless voyage of ticking, never getting anywhere exciting.

  Leila put her book down, sending a cloud of dust across the table toward Jerome. He sneezed – again. It seemed like everything in the city library irritated his nose, he had been sniffling since they stepped inside so many hours earlier.

  “Sorry,” she apologized. “Bless you.”

  “Thanks. Have you found anything?”

  She looked down at the book and closed it carefully, trying to keep all its dust within the pages. She didn’t want to set him off in another round of sneezing. They had been there since the very early hours of the morning when the sun was still peeking over the horizon. They wanted to get there before people started walking the streets, but they were keen to make a start anyway. Their mission for the day was finding the origins of the stone warrior statue. And they were going to do it even if it meant going through every single book in the library.

  They had the entire place to themselves. There was nothing in a library that could be useful in times of war. Occasionally, someone would break in and steal some books to use for firewood but that was the extent of it. There was no money, no food, none of life’s essentials. It was a ghost town in there, and completely at their personal disposal.

  They concentrated their efforts on books about Greece. Anything about Gods or architecture was on the top of the list. If they couldn’t find anything about the statue, then perhaps they could learn more about Ananke. They were searching for a needle in a haystack, but at least they had a haystack. It was more than they had at three o’clock in the morning.

  So far, the six hours of searching had led them to nothing. There was barely even a reference to Ananke anywhere and the statue didn’t resemble anything in the photographs. They may as well have been looking for an invisible needle in the haystack for the amount of progress they were making.

  “I’m starving,” Leila complained, stretching her arms and shoulders. “Everything in these books are looking like food. I need to eat or the paper is going to look too tasty to resist.”

  “I forgot you need to eat.”

  “Three times a day, apparently. I’m going to see if there’s anything around here, maybe there’s a vending machine someone forgot to raid. Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck. Don’t eat anything stale, I don’t think it’s good for you,” Jerome warned, he’d heard that somewhere before. Humans needed to eat nutritious food or they would grow ill, that he learned in school. He made a mental note to make sure Leila ate regularly in the future. He didn’t want anything happening to her, not on his watch.

  He continued to search through book after book. Leila returned with a chocolate bar. She had to blow the dust off the wrapper, it wasn’t a good sign. He let it go, at least it was food.

  They continued flicking through the pages for another hour. Then, just as he was considering giving up, Jerome saw a photograph that made him look twice.

  “I think I’ve found it.”

  “Don’t joke around,” Leila responded, her eyes almost crossed over from staring at all the dusty pages.

  “I’m not joking, look.” He turned the book around and pointed to a black and white photo. It was grainy, the book printed in the sixties, but it clearly showed a ruin. Much larger versions of their warrior lined the sides of the rectangular building. Only three were still standing in full, the rest were missing arms, heads, or half their bodies. Some were missing all except the feet.

  “They look the same,” Leila smiled, disbelieving what she was looking at. They had found the building they were looking for, they found the needle. It had taken all day and hundreds of books, but there it was, staring back at her from the pages. “It says this building is in Greece. A small village called Ronana. It’s called the Temple of Ananke.”

  “If it was there in the sixties, I bet it’s still there today,” Jerome was excited with the thought already. “We need to go and find it.”

  Leila, on the other hand, wasn’t as sure. “That was over fifty years ago. Anything could have happened to it, especially since the war broke out. People are destroying things all over the place.”

  “It will be there, it’s got to be.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

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nbsp; Jerome didn’t even hesitate. “Because the riddle said so. The mouth of Ananke is hidden at the feet. If we were meant to find the riddle, then we were meant to solve it too.”

  “Perhaps it was just a coincidence?”

  “There’s no such thing as just a coincidence, trust me.” What Jerome wasn’t saying was that everything happened for a reason. Everything. Humans got it stuck in their minds that things just happened coincidentally, he knew better. There was absolutely no such thing.

  “So how do we get to Ronana? There have been no commercial flights for eight months. All the airlines have shut down. The only people still flying are the military or private charters.” Leila should know, she tried to get out of the country herself. There was a time when she was wanted to get lost in a faraway place, somewhere there were no memories of her family. Nobody had been willing to take her.

  “I have wings,” Jerome pointed out, letting them flap behind him loosely to prove the point.

  “But I don’t.”

  They were interrupted by a noise in the library, it echoed through the otherwise whisper quiet surroundings. Leila put her finger to her lips, making sure Jerome wouldn’t say a word.

  They strained to hear for the noise again. They recognized it as footsteps. There was someone else in the library and they would soon discover them sitting around the research table. There would be no way to explain the man with large wings.

  “We need to get out of here,” Leila whispered. Jerome nodded and silently pointed towards an emergency exit. Once, it would have been alarmed, they took their chances and hoped its electricity had been long since cut off. She put the book under her arm and made her move.

  Leila pushed on the handle, it didn’t start an ear-shattering alarm system. She swung it open and hurried through, Jerome closely following behind. They made their way through the alley beside the museum and put as much distance between themselves and whoever had been in the building. They didn’t stop until they were in the tiny apartment and the door was firmly locked behind them.