“It’s coming. On your feet!” Rose said.
“We’ve been in the abyss before,” Ty said. “Blake too! Listen to what he has to say! He knows how this place works!”
One snowflake, however, didn’t move.
Distant, at the edge of the Abyss, I could see it. But it was humanoid. Impossible to look straight at, as space distorted around it.
The dog. The angel.
“Faysal,” Johannes said. He’d collapsed onto his back, and he looked hurt.
Between a rock and a hard place, I thought. With monsters all between.
“He says ‘stay’,” Johannes said.
14.x (Histories)
The wind blew, pulling dry bits of vegetation from the low, rust-colored shrubs and sending them dancing over the rocky floor of the tundra. Snowless, but frozen. When the wind didn’t blow, it was nearly silent. The only noise would be the shifting of the earth, reacting to the pull of gravity, the noise of dirt stirring beneath nearly still water.
The vantage point the angel had chosen wasn’t a high one, but there weren’t many options for high vantage points.
Shape wasn’t a mandatory thing for him. He could be all things, if he needed to be, but no one form completely fit. He wore three at the same time. A great white bear on his hind feet, a shaggy-haired wolf, and a man, neither young nor old, with hair and beard that had never been cut. The white of the hair and fur were so pure as to be shining.
He thrummed, though utterly still, a part of all he interacted with. The motes of sun that touched the tundra made it reverberate like a skin stretched tight, and that reverberation reached all the way to him.
Once, he had built. He had been a theme, spelling out a thousand narratives simply by being, like so many pens touched to an endless scroll of paper. He inked out paths and behaviors on the broadest scale.
When man had come about, he had been reflected in man’s thoughts and behavior. As man became intelligent, so had the angel. He had guided man and been guided in turn, a symbiotic relationship.
Man, however, created its own demons. Some were obvious, while others stirred in the midst of the noise and chaos and took form. Sentiments became figures, fears took form, and in some cases, man abandoned his kind to join the storm of thoughts and ideas. To become the monster.
The creating ended, and man took the center stage, bringing change to that steady, stable creation. Born from chaos and noise like anything else, a chance configuration of molecules, man carried that change and chance with him. Each movement brought change, like a stirring of dust swelling and spreading out from underfoot.
As man’s power waxed, the creators’ power waned.
Soon, man’s power would wane, and it seemed ruin would follow.
Once the angel had created. Now, he only maintained. He mended that which had been destroyed, and he watched as the world spiraled to an end. A distant end, yes, but an inevitable one.
A great distance away, glaciers cracked and erupted, and they fell into the oceans.
Here, in a small inlet, the local fauna was suffering, as the salinity of the water rose.
He left the area behind, but he traveled a specific path as he did. The creeks feeding into the inlet changed.
The fix would be slow, but it would mend itself. A small change, compared to the damage that was being done. At this stage, it was only man. Only change, carrying the world from one state to another. In time, there would be more to be done, and the changes would not be so easy. He would go to war and he would die.
His day had passed. Things would change, they would find ruin, and the ruins would settle.
There was no emotion at this, no concern, no anxiety. It simply was.
■
People milled through the streets. Every one different, every one a harbinger of change, given the opportunity.
Collectively, more powerful than he was.
He counted the individual faces he saw. Four hundred and twenty thousand, two hundred and eleven unique individuals had passed along the busy street since his arrival. Brightly dressed, drab, young, old, male, female, happy, sad. There were the locals, their skin a rich brown, and there were the foreigners and tourists, with skin and hair covering every natural human variation, and some colors that weren’t natural.
Most moved with purpose. All but a small few moved in straight lines, once he corrected for the small changes, moving around people or letting people move around them.
In other places, the very light of the sun striking earth and the response of the earth to the pull of sun and moon could be deafening.
Here, amid so many footsteps, a storm of being, he wondered if mankind could take him to pieces simply by going about their day.