Angel. Their appearance hit softly against my senses. Just hard enough for me to identify them, just soft enough for me to be aware I was not in conflict with them. I flinched anyway.
They smiled and I felt ashamed for being afraid. They shook their head. “You have every right to be afraid. Knowledge cannot unravel experience, and not every entity you have encountered has been beneficial to you. It is going to take time for us to be reaquainted. Let us start, then, with the truth. I am not here to hurt you.”
“Be not afraid.” As I spoke I noted their voice sounded a lot like mine, only with harmonic edges a physical voice cannot make unassisted.
They nodded.
We sat side by side on the edge of an indeterminate substance in an indeterminate place.
“So… what brings you here? And are you coming or going?”
“You’re not going to ask if it hurt when I fell from heaven?”
I groaned. “Oh, hell no. That joke needs to fall into the abyss itself. Wrung out like a car rag.”
Their light shimmered as they laughed with me. I was getting comfortable sitting with them. I was still braced for some shit to happen anyway.
“Well… it’s been a while. And you have changed so much. Things can’t be the way they were before. I have been separated from you for too long. You have a new angelus aspect and it is nearly complete. I do not want to break you. Do not want to rule you. Do want to rejoin you. But it will take time.”
I turn to look at the angel and force myself to see through the warm and bright light emanating from every square inch of their surface.
My face looks back at me.
We stare at each other cloaked by a long and uncomfortable silence. I turn away and resume my vigilance over the indeterminate darkness under us. They look away and resume their vigilance over the indeterminate darkness above us.
“I’m apostate.”
“I know. The breaking away hurt, but it was necessary if we were to survive.”
“I’m being called back in a different way, a different manner. I don’t understand it.”
“I can help with that, in time. My perspective is different from your point of view.”
The silence wound around our dangling feet forming a tactile Moebius strip of nothingness.
“So… what’s Mary’s husband like?”
They smiled, and for the first time I felt that things were legitimately going to be okay.
“In words you would understand? He is the shockwave expanding from a nuclear explosion. He is the backdraft that devours when the door is opened. He is consumption, not from hunger, but from the force of will that comes with bringing things into creation.”
“… I wouldn’t have survived that.”
“He is also the type of person who would go out of his way to rick-roll you in such a novel way, you can’t get pissed at it.”
“… Now that, is surprising.”
They laughed and I laughed with them. We sat in mutual silence for the rest of the dream. It is going to take time to be reacquainted with each other.
I’m willing to take that time.