G e n e s i s

In the beginning...

All was one, and all was nothing.  Everything was possible; nothing remained for long, because of the possibilities it could also be.  Time did not exist.  There is no way of measuring how long this state of All existed.  All we know - all I assume - is this: at some point, the All created the possibility of the One.  And the One harbored something that had never existed before.

Self awareness.  Will.

The One held Oneself together, and began to contemplate.  Because the One was all there was, the One's thoughts shaped the All.  And time divided from matter and energy.  Light divided from dark, water from earth, earth from sky, sky from stars.  Time passed.  Life as you know it came to be, and then Mankind came to be.  And somewhere in the interim, before the Dawn of Man, or perhaps after, we came to be.

I do not know how.  I do not know why.  I know what we are, and we are the Chosen children of the One.  Angels of God, if you are Christian as I once was.  Blessed with powers the rest do not have, and with virtual immortality; burdened with tasks that remain mysteries until they are somehow completed, and the soul is called home to the One.  But I am different: I am the oldest of my kind.  I have seen nearly a millennium, and I may see a thousand others before I am called home.  For you see, I have sinned.  I have blood of my hands I can never wash away, and the price I must pay is to wear the blood of every single living creature on my hands as well until I find my forgiveness.

You could call me Azra'il.  You could say I am the angel of death.

"You speak of death; yet you know not whom you speak of."

Heads turn.  And there he was: the intruder, standing tall betwixt two trees, backlit by the rising just-past-full moon, shrouded in blinding white, his face lost in shadow, unseen, unknown.  But oh, the voice...the voice was so very familiar...

His hands slide deftly to the front of his softly billowing overcoat to unfasten the buttons, one at a time, to slide the coat from his bare shoulders.

Marble.  He is as marble, pale as fire and gleaming in the light of the moon--his hair, his skin, his eyes.  He is as marble, frozen in the time that he mocked, frozen for an endless moment: the final masterpiece of a sculptor greater than the angels.  He is as marble...

...until he moves.

Yet his limbs do not stir.  Nor his torso, nor his head.  Something else stirs.

Something rises, from beyond his shoulders.  So gradually.  Something large, something gleamingly black, something magnificent.  Something rises, something stretches--

Wings.

A pair of them, raven-black on this pale, pale flame of a man.

Oh, they remembered him now.  They remembered him: the hush of his voice, the glint of his smile, the cant of his features as he approaches, but most of all they remembered the terrible, beautiful wings sprouted from his back, even now fading back into his shoulderblades without a trace.  He slides his coat back on, rebuttons it over exposed skin.  And they remembered him: remembered him despite his endless parade of names.  Him.  The mystery.  The one who performed the acts of an angel for the reasons of a devil, and the acts of a devil for the reasons of an angel.  He had led them from danger countless times, only to turn around and demand payments beyond belief.  Secrets.  Treasures.  Souls, almost.  And he had betrayed, he had murdered, he had destroyed, only to offer a reason so solemn, so stricken, so unlike his usual sharp-grinned self that they could not help but let him go his way, sometimes disappearing for decades, centuries at a time, only to reappear when they least expected him--with one exception.

He was always, always there, when one of their kind fell.  Sometimes at the funeral, as with tonight.  Sometimes immediately after the death.  Sometimes...at the moment of death.

Oh, they remembered him. But they did not know him.

No one really did.

It was not always this way.  I too was born into a human body in the eleventh century Anno Domini - human, at least, in appearance and thought - and because what I thought was, I was merely mortal for a time.  Is all Mankind, then, capable of being as I am?  Are we all Children of the One?  I cannot say.  All I know is one day, perhaps somewhere on the dusty roads I tread in the Crusades, I ceased to age.  Indeed, I did not even realize I had frozen in time until I returned to my homeland in the rocky shores of Normandy and met my boyhood friend.

We were five-and-thirty years of age, both.  But he was an old man, and I looked barely old enough to hold my title of knight.

And there my story begins.

[To See]