She bites the corner of her bottom lip.
"Okay, I'm just going to say it," she says
I squirm on my bed, backing away, slowly. Or at least as fast as my injuries will allow.
"Say what?" I ask, "Who are you?"
"Nyyx..." She pauses, taking a breath before she says, "...I'm your mother."
My face goes numb, the blood draining from it. My mouth slackens open, and I go limp, feeling weak.
She starts laughing — full-on, breathless laughter. I look around, confused. I was on the verge of a breakdown at the mention of my mother.
"What the hell is going on?" I ask her.
She ignores my question and continues to laugh.
"You should see your face," she manages to say between quick intakes of air into her laughing lungs. Then she starts to imitate me, "W-w-what the hell is going on?"
She stands up, still laughing, and walks out of the room.
"God, that was good," she says from beyond the door. "That look on your face was priceless—'Nyyx, I am your mother.'"
"I am only going to ask you one last time!" I scream.
She comes back into my room, carrying a longsword sheathed in a leather scabbard. Then she throws the sword on the bed, and it lands beside me. The eyes on the angelic face depicted in the sword's silver pommel look as if they're following me. I gulp, looking at the fine etching on the cross-guard meant to make them look like angel wings. I back away from it.
"Who are you?" I ask her. My question comes out as a nervous whisper.
"You know who I am," she says. "How many times do I have to tell you to stop dropping your sword?"
"Astraea!" I say.
She smiles at me. "Good to see you, bud," she says.
"But how are you here? I thought I lost you. You've never looked like this to me before. Are you in my head?"
She shakes her head, smiling.
"So, what is this? You have a body?"
"I know, right!" she says. "Look at this thing. It's pretty cute too."
She does a little half turn and displays her body in modelesque poses. She looks at me alluringly with those gorgeous blue eyes and smiles. I scan her body appreciating the contours of her fit, slender, frame. My attention is drawn to the little square space between her legs where they meet her pelvis. I squirm a little. Then she catches me staring, and winks.
I turn away, embarrassed.
"You don't have to turn away," she says with a soft pursing of her full lips. "I don't mind if you look."
She walks sinuously towards the bed. I admire her movement, soft, and hypnotic.
"You know, Nyyx. We've known each other a long time," she says, dropping her voice coquettishly low. "And..."
She begins unzipping the front of her thermal suit, causing the avatar projected by her image modulator to peel away, revealing the graceful collar bone below her long neck, and the rounded tops of her breasts.
"Whoa, Astraea..."
"I've never had a body before," she continues, ignoring me, running the blade of her finger down her cleavage. "I haven't felt the sensations you humans enjoy."
I squirm some more, squeezing my legs together as blood rushes to my groin.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa..."
She unzips her suit down further to the top of her abdomen, showing the soft, defined lines of a sculpted physique with a promise of something better to follow beneath.
"Don't you want me?" she asks. "I know it's been a while for you. Over a hundred years, I believe."
She gets to the edge of the bed, and kneels on the mattress, with legs spread. She unzips her suit down to the top of her pelvis. The tightness between my legs worsens.
"Don't you want to touch me?" she asks. "I want you to touch me. Will you. Please?"
"I can't,"
She picks up my sword from the bed and unsheathes it. The sound of sharp steel scraping leather cuts the room. The swirling surface patterns on the Damascus steel blade flashes a chromatic silver before going back to normal.
"I've always wanted to hold her," she says. Then she lays the sword down across her hands and faces the hilt towards me as if she was a queen presenting me with my weapon. "Take your sword, Nyyx. Heal your wounds. Then we can take those bandages off of you, and I can have you inside me."
I look once more at the offered pommel. The angel face looks as if it's smiling at me. I close my eyes and shake my head. The mention of The Destroying Angel shakes me from the fugue of desire.
"Okay, Astraea! Enough! What the hell is going on with you?"
Her eyes flutter, welling up with tears. Her lips quiver, and the corners of her mouth drop down.
"Oh, no. Don't..."
She starts whimpering small sobs, breathing through her nostrils.
"No Astraea. Don't cry. Stay with me here."
She clenches her fists, looking like she's trying to hold a geyser of emotions within. Then she erupts. She drops the sword on the bed, turns her back to me, moving from a kneeling position to a sitting one with her legs over the side of my bed. Then she hides her face in her hands.
"I hate you!" she yells.
"Astraea, please."
She turns around with drool hanging out. Her mouth is misshapen into a childish crying face, exaggerated and cringe-worthy.
I mean, what am I supposed to do? What would any man do when his angel friend finds herself in a hot corporeal body, comes onto him, and then cries at the side of his bed because he spurned her advances? This is not a normal situation.
"Would it help if I looked like Emily?" she asks. "Well I can't, okay! I can't turn myself into your stupid ex-wife anymore. This is the body I'm stuck with."
God, I don't even know where to start with this. I move closer to her at a consoling distance — enough for me to stretch a sympathetic hand to her bare shoulder. But I pull my hand away at the last second.
"Look,I'm dealing with a lot of stuff here," I say. "I'm waking up after a building exploded on top of me. And before that, I was being chased by magic hurling elves trying to kill me. This is—"
She turns to me with fire in her eyes. Her breasts are still loose underneath her thermal. She didn't take the time to zip up, and I can see them shifting and swinging, as her chest heaves with angry breaths.
"Dealing with a lot of stuff?" she says, her nostrils flaring.
She stands up from my bed and zips up her suit.
"You're saying that you're dealing with a lot of stuff? Let me tell you something! I am the one stuck in this..." She looks down at her body disgusted. "...thing. I've never felt emotions before. And now I feel everything! Do you have any idea what it's like to be sad, happy, angry, and horny at the same time! This is all new to me, you dick! I have no idea what's happening!"
I squirm away from her on the bed with palms up in surrender.
"Okay, okay, okay," I say to her. "Calm down. Let's think about this. No need for both of us to be losing our minds right now. Let's figure this out."
"My mind is fine," she says. "It's these stupid emotions that are messing things up."
"Okay, well, whatever it is. Let's be cool and try to make sense of what's going on."
She looks down at her applicator, presses a button, enters her password, and flips through the holographic windows to find her image modulator. She picks an outfit — the same one she was wearing before, and the applicator projects the image on her thermal.
"Pick up your damn sword," she says. "We got work to do."
She turns around and walks away from me. When she gets to the doorway, she spins around.
"And for the record," she says. "I woulda rocked your world."
I scoff. "What? How? You've never had sex before."
She points her thumb to her chest.
"I've been around for eons, buddy. I've seen billions of people having sex. I know the deal! Hell, I've watched you do it, and I know exactly what to do."
"Do you not realize how disturbing that is," I say. "And trust me, watching and d
oing are completely different things."
She bites the inside corner of her bottom lip. Her eyes flash up with an anticipating desire, which she seems to be able to summon on command. Then she drops her voice to an alluring softness and says, "Well, maybe you can teach me..."
Then she runs her hand up her inner thigh.
"Astraea!"
"Ugh! I hate this stupid body!" she says, and storms out of my room.
I plop back down on my bed and go through some breathing exercises. There is still some lust left in me, so I take a moment to get it out of my system. Then I turn to my side. The Destroying Angel, unsheathed, lies there beside me. The swirling surface pattern on the dark Damascus steel blade, the angel wing cross-guard, and the angelic face in the circular silver pommel is calling to me. I take a deep breath, and wrap a hand around the sword's hilt, wanting to feel the buzz of healing energy, but knowing nothing will happen.
Ten
I live in a small one bedroom apartment. It's four hundred square feet give or take, and costs a fortune to rent. Plus, I live in District Ten and pay north of nine thousand a month, utilities not included. But that's okay. I can afford it. One of the perks of being alive for five hundred some years is that you can build a lot of wealth for yourself — gotta love compound interest. The only problem was I had to work out a way to cheat the system so that my cash will always be available to me throughout the ages, and not arouse suspicion. Kyle helps me with that. Before I met Kyle, I had another guy helping me — a human, computer whiz named Brett. He's dead now; died of old age, clocking out at a hundred and eight.
Astraea is at the kitchen, or should I say the common room, because it's where everything is — kitchen, living room, dining room, with a hidden compartment opening to a one-person shower, and another opening to a toilet. She is at the kitchen's island table, sitting on one of my red cushioned bar stools, cracking walnuts, and popping them in her mouth. The television is on, projecting a holographic rectangular screen floating in the middle of the living room.
"God, I love eating," she says, popping another walnut in her mouth. "I mean the nutritional replenishment is good, yes, but the whole process, the chewing, especially. It's a pleasant sensation."
I limp into the room to join her. My legs are wrapped up in robotic flex-wrapping. They're designed to immobilize me enough to heal broken bones and internal bleeding properly, but also allow me to do normal things, albeit slow and laboriously.
Astraea turns to me as I hobble to her.
"Why are you limping?" she asks.
I throw the sheathed longsword in my hand at her.
She catches the sword without taking her eyes from me. After catching it, she looks down at the sword. Then she looks up at me with narrowed blue eyes.
"Nyyx, what's going on? Why are you still in bandages? The sword didn't heal you?"
I shake my head. "The sword doesn't belong to me anymore."
She chuckles. "What are you talking about? Stop fooling around."
"I'm serious," I say. "The sword’s chosen someone else. I think she chose you."
"Excuse me? What do you mean she chose me?"
"Okay, this is going to come as a bit of a shock."
"Nyyx what's going on?" she asks.
"Let me explain everything."
That's when I tell her all that's happened since she left me in the delivery truck. About how I dropped off the bomb at Kyle's; that the ogres I fought off and killed weren't ogres but ended up being living creatures, and the consequences that came from shedding their blood. I tell her about how Kyle used his magic on me and how the erolith are after him. Then I describe the chase through the sewers and District Seven, and about the demonic face in the flames after the Halcyon compound blew up right in front of my face. After I unload everything on her, she takes a moment to process the series of events that led us here. She stops eating walnuts and stares blankly while the gears turn in her head.
"So you went through The Rending, and came out of it alive?" she asks.
"Yeah, thanks to Kyle."
"But that means..."
I nod. "I'm a normal guy now."
"Oh, boy."
"Tell me about it."
"No-no-no-no this is...You have no idea what you've done. You guys are messing stuff up left and right," she says.
"Yeah. Which is why I need to find Kyle. If the erolith find him first, they're going to execute him on sight. I need to keep him safe until I can find a way to somehow clear his name. So I thought maybe I'd start at—"
"Whoa, hold on there Mr. Normal guy," she says. "There are more important things we should be dealing with."
"Like what?"
"Um, hello? The first thing we have to do is deal with this!" She gestures to the television.
There is a female reporter on camera. In the background are sirens, and an army of firefighters and policemen, rummaging through the rubble.
"Emergency services are still scouring the Halcyon compound," the reporter says. "Thus far, some four thousand survivors have been found, with tens of thousands still reported missing by loved ones all over the city. If you are looking for survivors, we will post names and pictures up every five minutes to show which urgent care centers they were sent to..."
"You know as well as I do this bombing could be tied to the bomb those ogres were carrying,” Astraea says. “There is no way that those two aren't linked. We gotta get to the bottom of this. Then we can start to fix the mess you've caused with The Omega Treaties."
"Um, Astraea, I know this might sound a little cold. But that isn't my problem anymore."
"Excuse me?"
"Okay wait, relax."
Her eyes bulge. "You did not say that to me," she says.
"No, let me explain..."
"Because, if you did say that to me, then you are the biggest piece of human garbage I have ever been around."
"Try to understand. I have an opportunity here to be normal again. Do you know what that means?"
"I don't give a crap what it means."
"Astraea, listen to me. I could have the life I had before I got the sword. Don't you get that? Let me put it like this. For the longest time, you were a celestial. And now you're human. I mean how long you'll be stuck as a human for, I don't know. But if you, someday, get the chance to be back to what you used to be, wouldn't you take it?"
"You selfish piece of—"
"I'm not selfish,” I plead. “Please understand. I owe this new life to Kyle. Finding him, and getting him out of this mess with the Elven Nations is all I feel obligated to do. Fighting demons, The Omega Treaties, tracking down ogre bombers; all that stuff isn't a priority for me anymore. Even if I wanted to keep doing that stuff, I can't! I'm a normal guy now! Being the Bearer is not my job anymore."
"So you're saying it's mine!"
"Well, you have the sword so..."
"Oh my god, you are something else," she says. "Let me tell you something, pal. Whenever you needed me, I was there for you. I stood by you. I fought with you. Now you turn your back on me?"
"We were doing our jobs. I had no choice in the matter, and neither did you. The Destroying Angel bound us to each other. You helped me like you helped my mom when she was the Bearer."
"First of all, before your mom went on a killing spree, she had others helping her. Not just me. And second of all: Fuck you! Just our jobs? I cared about you, you jerk!"
"I cared about you too. You're not the problem; the job is. Or at least it was."
"Nyyx! People are dead!"
"People die every day," I say.
Astraea's jaw drops. It looks as if her heart fell to the bottom of her gut. I immediately regret what I said.
"You have got to be kidding me," she says. "We have been defenders of the human race for over half a millennium, and that's what you say to me?"
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I want you to understand. When I touched that sword and nothing happened, you know what I felt?"
; "What?"
"Relief," I answer. "Yeah, my body hurts like hell right now, but knowing I don't have to carry that sword around anymore is the best thing that's ever happened to me."
She looks away from me with a pained grimace. She knows she can't force me into any endeavor. Free Will, capital F and capital W, is a pretty big deal in the realm of the divine. Upholding it is the whole reason there's a Rending in the first place.
Before The Omega Treaties and The Rending it brought with it, my mother was a force to be reckoned with. Essentially the Bearer was the ruler and defender of the human race — anointed by the celestial worshiped by the humans as the one true God. The sword she carried, the Destroying Angel, was meant to be a symbol of that power. A weapon capable of mass destruction. She had a license to kill anyone and everyone she judged to be a threat to our species — demonic possession, dead. Bunch of people gets all riled up by a demonic presence and start rioting, killing, and acting like complete dicks — all dead. Her sword has had many names. She's been called Azrael, Malak, Mashiit, Mo, Abbadon. The Angel of Death. Commander of an army of angels tasked with carrying out God's judgment.
Things changed after my mom went on a rampage that everyone called The Black Plague. After that, all who called Earth home (elves, dwarves, angels, demons, humans, whatever) concluded that my mom was way too overpowered. No one person should have the power to judge and execute as she did. A bunch of talks took place between all inhabitants of this world, spiritual and corporeal alike, and all came to an agreement called The Omega Treaties. The powers of The Destroying Angel were diluted by its creator. When once she had the command of an army of angels, the Bearer will now have the help of only one. And since rulers are often defined by the kind of army they can command, the Bearer was a ruler no more. At most, my mom was limited to being a watchdog for the weird and otherworldly.
The world came to a stalemate. My mom couldn't go around committing genocide, and infringing on people's Free Will like she used to. Creatures of the spirit world, demons, and angels were given equal rights to our planet's Field source and were free to exist on our plane. As long as they don't start killing people or making people do stuff against their will. Elves and their magic retreated into their forest homes, bound by the Treaties to never use their magic to influence human destinies. The dwarves were happy to stay underground. And, if the Bearer ever uses the Destroying Angel to spill living blood, he or she shall suffer The Rending and death.
The Irispire Portal Page 6
