From the Cradle to the Grave

Dante stared past the ceiling at something beyond. Fire danced in his eyes and he felt nothing further than his elbow. Sealed in metal was what had once been his hope, his only angel amidst the flames of a hellish existence. Visions flashed by, lives previously lived, children born, children dead, souls.

A sole light bulb dangled from the ceiling, flickering on and off, casting its dull, indistinct light over him and his silver appendage. The glow, cold rather than warm, made the shattered windows look like the teeth of a dragon, sharp and unforgiving shards of glass. Life did not exist below his elbow, only death. His eyes saw only the red that sheathed his forearm like a makeshift scabbard.

His breath clouded before his face and he rose, stalking across the small, barren room of chipped floorboards and peeling wallpaper to the headpiece on the counter. Dante turned around and, for a moment, saw something imprinted into the sheets of his bed. A body. A woman. A love.

Only her silhouette remained, but he still remembered her supple flesh, her primed body like a rose blossoming to its full beauty. He had seen fear in those emerald eyes of hers, fear and terror and anguish. But now she was a part of him. Always. Her thin red lips were now his. Perfect love.

The headset beeped once, then again. He put it to his head and listened to the report, all the while staring out at the glass buildings that scraped the sky bloody in the setting of the sun. It reminded him of Babel, that tower that proclaimed the arrogance of mankind for the entire world to see. How foolish some could be. They thought, for one moment, that, like Lucifer, they could become as God, but God had confounded their language, played a cruel trick on his people. Would God confound their language this time?

He flicked a switch by his mouth with his hand sheathed in iron, shining brightly whenever the light fell upon it. He would kill tonight.

Tendrils of icy reserve ran through him as he prepared for the leap. Cold wormed its way into his very core, turning his heart to frost-covered metal. Icicles hung from him and he closed his eyes, feeling the release of bonds to an earthly realm. He felt invisible shackles fall away and release his arms and legs, constantly bound to the ground of humans. With a gasp, he entered the sky of souls.

Diving headfirst into the cold wall that separated the two dimensions, he let his astral form, translucent and wavering, fly away. He knew not to where he journeyed when he left his body, only that it was heaven and hell, God's mercy and His wrath, all rolled into one perfectly round sphere and stuffed down his throat.

Warm serenity flooded through him, invaded his coarse, oily veins. But eyes he could not see constantly watched him, pricking him with apprehension, as if a demon lingered behind him but he refused to look over his shoulder. Here, love and hate fought side by side within him, against something else, something inhuman, something metal.

He basked in the feeling of light and darkness constantly combating for dominance over him. He saw Asia's face, her red bangs brushing across emerald pools of vision, and opened his eyes and ears to the sounds of a subway train rushing by.