Like a scrap of paper in the wind, or a broken insect, he let himself be led.

 

First it was fate and humanity that dragged him through the darkness to the light; and now he followed a pretext of an angel. And now, abandoned by the womb of sleep, desperation took his hand. Again.

 

His dreams were rarely pleasant. This night was no exception, and he woke up panting, sweat-soaked sheet a bleeding noose - or perhaps marionette strings - wound tight around his body. The echoes of a leprous touch still itched, just beneath his skin; just behind his eyes, a mouth reeking of alcohol still smiled and closed around his ear. The whispers in the back of his head guttered, then died, as he gulped down cold night air and slowly drew reality back together, piece by piece.

 

It was always worse at night.

 

Ripping the sheet away with a panicked viciousness, he slid onto the floor in a shaky crouch, savoring the animal feel of sweet shadow as a second skin. Almost as good were the tight black clothes that covered him to the knuckles and throat, even as they still managed to flatter every cut and curve. He had a good body, and he knew it all too well.

 

Slip them on and go - he had to keep moving, with a demon so close to him now. Instinct knew every corner of the ship, and Instinct was the second-best master of them all.

 

With a predatory cat's fluid grace, he set off at a silent pace, rippling through the halflit labyrinth - once the seed casing of humanity, now the cradle of its destruction - like a dark ribbon. The mind, baskingly malignant, wandered away from its pretty shell, and in the solitude he wondered why.

 

He wanted what he was utmost forbidden to have. Adam desired to taste the fruit God denied him. Likewise, he lusted after the God that, by his very nature, he should not even presume to look upon.

 

Oh, but he had done more than presume. And that only made it worse.

 

He was surprised to find where his excursion had taken him. The stasis room was the cool shade beneath the apple tree, where the mortal could be easily taunted by his aspirations, his hopeless fantasies; where he would be tempted to commit that first act of sin, and where he could thus expect to find his first taste of death.

 

It was three floors high and perfectly still, just as the name implied. A glass encasement bulb, like a pendulous droplet, depended from the distant ceiling. It shone with a diffuse, buttery light, and the ethers within cushioned an impossibly beautiful and tragic being.

 

The Dhimitri Plant hung there, a single burst of featherlike protrusions and folded limbs, neither dying nor living. It had once put its energy into what was now a ruined town, and the effects of its captivity still showed as raw spots - where the wires and electrodes had been taken out - covering its translucent skin. He had not even been born when the Plant was liberated and decanted, but he knew what had happened. It had stopped breathing, its flesh bruising wherever it was touched. He had taken it here, to His reclaimed home, and placed it into limbo as He cursed humanity for doing this to His people.

 

Despite its scars, it was beautiful. He knew he was so hateful and unclean compared to that holy stillness, with his rough, dark skin and freakish, piss-colored eyes. Even horrifying attractiveness by human standards was nothing to the Angels. It made Him even more of a God in his thinking, that He would put up with the sight and stench of him to get back what had been stolen.

 

And it made the one who refused to come back even more of a Lucifer.

 

Unbidden, a memory flooded into him. He was small and weak, trapped between a stone wall and a thick, pressing mouth - oh, and other things, harsh and ugly and sickening - that muttered awful noises that he vaguely recognized as language. Everything was alcoholic, and for the first time he realized that there was going to be no salvation for him. The voices crackled in the chambers of his mind, hot breath stank in his face, and he felt it all explode into blood and bits and brains.

 

And suddenly, as he saw the ruptured body of his rapist congealing in the eyelike moonlight, he knew that everything was death.

 

The end was coming, barreling evercloser with all the precision of a thousand years of cutting shame. It was coming. The God of Death had been born, undocumented, starless and without any gifts except for the killing noise – the God of Death, unloved and unloving. He who smiled a smile great enough to swallow the world, and all the sinners in it, whole.

 

The end was coming, and the Shi no Aoi Kaze grinned like a beautiful skull while he waited. And he watched. And he prayed.