To his relief, the ‘logs’ vanished after a while. He realized they had to be the ones who had been on the outer edge of the strange weapon that had wiped out The Eternal Father Of All’s personal guard. Rigt on the edge, to close in to escape, to far out to die quickly. Further in, all that was left was the blackened stains on the ground where the people had exploded into flames and burned to ashes. And yet still further in there wasn’t even that trace of the survivors. Just the shadows of the dead, burned into the bleached ground. Human, Angel, it didn’t matter. They had died as if they had never existed, leaving only a shadow behind them
That was when Uxhalar stopped in his tracks, backwinging so he could absorb the immensity of what he saw. For, in front of him, the landscape had changed and become something he couldn’t have imagined. For at least three miles in front of him, the ground had been completely flattened and turned into glass. Soil, trees, grass, animals, people, Angels, all had gone leaving nothing behind but the sheet of glass. He tried to imagine what could have done this, what great power could fuse soil unto glass. He flew over it, looking down, realizing that this glass plain was the only memorial to the Army that had been once marching through the valley. Through the valley, that was not true any more for even the valley itself had been changed. The hills had been distorted, their pleasing symmetry destroyed, looking as if a giant hand had pushed them away.
Another strange sight caught his eye. Right in the middle of the great glass plain was a lake where no lake had been before. An odd, perfectly circular lake that was slowly expanding as it filled with cobalt-blue water. Uxhalar could sense evil from that lake and he stayed well away from it. The sight distracted him though and he was shaken by a flash and another thunderous roar. For a hideous moment he thought it was another one of the great explosions but he quickly realized it was just a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning. Not that thunderstorms were common in Heaven unless He Who Is Above All Others willed it. And yet, it was a storm unlike any other he had experienced. The rain that began falling from the sky over was jet black, a mixture of water that was condensing on the plentiful dust and smoke particles. The black rain soaked into his wing feathers and along his back, causing an intense burning sensation on the patches of skin they touched. He tried to brush them off, but they stuck to him and all the efforts he made just spread the burning sensation further. He gave up, he would just have to tolerate them.
Eventually, the plain of glass with its strange, evil lake was behind him. He pointedly did not look at the track below until he was clear of any hint of the ‘logs’. It was then that the one thing he had not seen struck him. On all his flight over the site where the terrible thing had happened, he had not seen a living creature. Had the entire army been destroyed in that one great blast?
He flew a little higher and started a methodical hunt for any survivors of the Host. It took time and he was rained on again in the process, but he found them. A ragged column of survivors headed west, away from the death of their army. Had he not known better, he would have assumed they were Fallen Ones, for they were black overall. Even from above, it was obvious that few could see, most staggered along, their hand on the shoulder of the one in front of them. As he winged down, Uxhalar tried not to look at their faces, he knew what he would see there and he had already seen too much this day.
On the ground, he tried to find an angel he could speak to. Surrounded by the moaning of the survivors, he searched for anyone who could tell him what had happened. He saw hands with the fingers so burned that the knuckles stuck through the flesh and the skin peeled off in cylinders that retained the shape of the fingers within. He saw muscles that had once been red turned black with deep splits that ran to the white bone beneath. He pushed through the crowds, trying to hide his eyes and feeling only shame that these were suffering so much while he was unharmed. Then, at last, he found an angel, one badly injured where debris from the blast had carved deep into his body but an angel nonetheless.
“I am Uxhalar-Lan-Sarael. What happened? Where is our leader?”
The angel looked at him. One eye was clouded and blind, the other reddened and inflamed. “The mighty Elhmas, son of He Who Is Above All and leader of our host? He is back there, I think. He was over the column when the thing happened. He is part of the glass and the black rain. Our Eternal Father has no son any more.” Then he pushed past Uxhalar and was lost in the shuffling column that wound past him.
Uxhalar tried to take off but the effort suddenly seemed too great for him. He inflated his flight sacs to the maximum but it was no use, he was just too heavy to fly. So, he turned around and started to walk west with the rest of the survivors. As he did so, he noted that his wing feathers, once a pristine white but now stained with the black rain, were beginning, one by one, to fall out.
Chapter Seventy One
Angelic Treatment Ward, Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD
“How are you feeling Maion?” Lieutenant Grace Zachariah looked at her patient with professional concern. A concern that felt slightly ridiculous given that the size differential between them was so marked. According to the medical records, Maion-Lan-Lemuel was about 20 feet tall standing up. Fortunately, she wasn’t doing that right now. She was laying while Lemuel was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside her. The other thing that made concern seem unnecessary was Maion’s beauty. Now the bruising had faded from her face and body, she was radiant.
“I am much better thank you. But I feel sick and my skin crawls. As if there were insects underneath it.”
“That’s you getting free of your drug addiction. Didn’t anybody in Heaven tell you to just say no to drugs? I’ll get you some methadone, you’re about due for a new shot anyway.” Lemuel’s expression was one of resentment at the prolonged treatment and Grace didn’t like that. “Not a word from you Lemuel. We’re detoxing you as well, remember?”
“How long is this going to last?” There was a hint of petulance in Maion’s voice, one that reminded Grace of car trips and her little sister asking ‘are we there yet?’
She hesitated before answering, partly because of a nurse’s instinctive caution in telling patients anything and partly because any answer she gave would be a guess. When the Salvation War had started, the last thing anybody had expected was the problems inherent in treating drug-addicted angels. “If you were human, it would take between three and six months to get you cleaned up. Angels, we just don’t know. We’re only just beginning to get a handle on how daemonic and angelic body chemistry differs from ours and without knowing that, our best predictions are guesswork.”
“How is our patient Nurse?” Doctor Zinder had arrived and was reading the patient’s clipboard.
“Suffering from mild drug withdrawal problems. I’m getting her daily methadone dose to deal with that. Otherwise, much recovered.”
“Very good. Memnon is waiting outside, would you ask him to step in please?” Zinder turned to Maion. “You are looking much better. But, you must have realized by now that something is seriously wrong with your wings.”
“They won’t move.” Zinder also noted the petulant intonation.
“Let me show you why. These are called X-rays, they’re a sort of photograph that shows the inside of your body. These white things are the bones of your wings, these very bright white bits are the screws we put in to hold the long bones together while they healed. Now, these are pictures of a healthy wing, they’re of Lemuel’s actually. Compare them with yours, you can see the difference in the wing joint here. Lemuel’s is a marvel, five bones coming together in a joint that has three axes of movement. Your joint, on the other hand, is just a fused mass of bone. Left to itself, it will never heal to anything more than that.”