Playing with Faustus Fire: Angel and the Judge

"Immortality on Earth?"

"Yes."

"Never to return here, to me, and to be free of all of the shades that haunt humanity?"

"Yes, that’s all I want, nothing else."

"You once wanted to pry open the eyes of those who refused to look, to succor the fallen and those who felt alone. You had such dreams." The Judge said, betraying herself, more of her knowledge of what Angel had been.

"What did I know?" Angel cried. "There will always be ignorance, turmoil, loneliness, and grief. Nothing changes in the world. The players merely change now and again. And we all have dreams, dreams that no amount of deserving or hope or goodness or endurance can turn into reality."

"You wanted to save the world from itself..."

"I don’t care anymore. Humanity is a blight on the planet, but I am resigned to it. I won’t directly ask for the freedom of escaping from my poor fate or for the power to control it. I just want my own immortality, and that’s all."

"Very well, I will give you what you want." The Judge said at last. "But it comes at a price."

"You want my firstborn son?" Angel asked. "Take him, I wasn’t planning on getting married or having children, anyway."

"No."

"Money? I can give you all I have-"

The Judge laughed. Absurdity here. Money? Paper? Nothing.

"What then can I offer you?" Angel asked. "I have nothing left to offer you or anyone."

"You are wrong." The Judge countered quickly. "For you, because you want immortality so much, I can ask the greatest price of all."

"Name your price."

The Judge paused.

"I want your soul."

"Fine, then, have it, I won’t need it if I’m not going to die."

"You give your soul to me so easily?"

"If with it, you also ask for my conscience, then I concede both gladly." Laughed Angel. "Take my soul, but give me immortality. I don’t care how I get it."

"Then your immortality shall be granted in the form you always wished for it, and your soul of memory, secret, and all its bittersweetness is now mine to savor here in this nothing-becoming place for all time." Proclaimed the Judge.

Angel blinked, blinked again, waiting with breath caught, flinching for the end, and in the distance Bravery nodded its approval.

And as the moment became another, a shadowy but oh so fat and imposing, coverless book took shape before Angel, while Angel herself faded into shadow. And all at once, Angel-shadow was sucked into the voluminous book, to become only mad words on a page, after page...

Still one angel-scream lingered in the air, and it fell towards Despair.

"Help me!!!"

But Despair, though there, did not move; he was a shade.

"Why?" The Judge asked the angel-shade as it was losing form. "Why should he help you? Despair there, does not care; he is not your friend. He only led you to me."

Angel stilled in time to listen to the judgment, brief though it was--not enough, never enough!--and then let her scream fade away. And when at last her shade burned out, she had long been silent.