Playing with Faustus Fire: Angel and the Judge

"Ah," said the Judge wistfully, sweetly, as the freed soul of the Angel came floating airily into her grasp, and then the Judge opened her mouth and gobbled the soul whole. It was forever filling, hers to savor, a nothing without form but still a something that defied nothing.

"Oh," The Judge added wistfully, as though to the forever-companion soul of Angel herself, "If I could only have taken this treasure from you when it was young and bright, not with this tarnished coating on it and aftertaste bitter like ashes! Yours especially I would have had, Angel, it was so beautiful, that soul, I remember, once upon a not so long ago wonderland, in the golden glimmering days of your childhood. Brighter than a thin little sunbeam scorching its way through an eyeglass, or merrily bright as an evenstar content to shine in its allotted sphere. Maybe your soul was too bright for the Earth, Angel, because you see you were supposed to die shortly after birth... Call it a whim, I took pity on you instead and let you live, for a babe’s soul can no more be caught forever by me than a wisp in the wind or a firefly’s fire. I left you in the world, dear Angel, to see what would become of you. And to watch the slow corruption of your purity, a purity too good for a world that has begun to contemn angels and to praise coarseness, malice, ruthless ambition, and most of all, greed. I left you alone there-was it to saturate the malice of the world, to neutralize its poison with your bountiful stores of deliberate goodness despite all that you had to endure and fight to calm-I think not. You only thought this was your task. I had only one agenda-to watch, to learn if it is not as I suspected, that angel and demon are separated only by one turning point. Thereafter, they are one and the same."

The Judge stopped to look at all that remained of Angel, leaning forward. And flipped through the pages of Angel-book.

There on the pages was a stream of tiny words and words and words. All in all, a tome thicker than ten volumes. Full, luscious volumes. All powerless and meaningless as they lay, inert, blots on a page.

And in the mouth of the Judge, the taste newly came of the deeper layer-secrets. The taste of sweet green meadows drenched in sunlight and dewy rain, high, rugged mountains middling through vaporous mists, swirling low into green valleys where blue-grey pools like mirrors shone, winding tays and firths over the stones of ancient making. There were ripening autumns of lovely hue and the exquisite ecstasty of the heart that had merged its pulse with the rhythm of the passing time upon the land. Then came the winter silence Angel had beheld in wonder, the crisp purity of a color-prism dancing its light over the cold heart of an icicle... And all of this was merely the beginning, before came the golden store of memories. And if this, the early beauty, began to fade slowly, as all the life pressing from around made this most ardent, bold fire feel its vulnerability, like a fire blazing in and to spite the noisy wind flickers defiantly but still flickers on, there was still beauty to follow. This new but aging beauty was in the mellow tones of empathy, and the hollow but somehow rounded pangs of human life, and in the secrets, swirling behind eyes veiled by the distracting power of a white, sweet-nothing smile. There, behind it all was power for none to know of, none except the observer, the Judge, who now drank the Angel’s soul at her leisure.