Angel

Angels falling like silver-frost, with rime-ice on their wings of steel. Angels falling in long ice-fire streaks glinting like stormy stars. Angels falling as they are slain and are left to die alone. Angels with eyes of tears glimmering with starfire and moon-dark. Angels dying, crying out, weeping for absolution. Angels mourning, grieving for a god long dead. There's an angel, an alien angel, dying, falling, with lights burning around it like witches' spells to light it unto death.

There's an angel dying on the street, and no one's moving. Everyone's staring. Long streaks of ice-tears on the angel's face, blood-red lips bleeding on a pale, pale face, wings chained and broken and crumpled steel, feathers broken shafts of steel gleaming dully with an echo of glory once remembered. I stood there and stared, my mouth dropping. The angel lay dying, its eyes closed and mouth bleeding dark-red blood down its jaw, hair silver-gold bleached-fire stained dark-glowing with blood and ichòr. Nobody could move. Nobody could speak.

It opened its eyes, white-blind like opals' fire. Its lips parted, and it spoke in a voice of hunger and pain and broken harps, trumpets of gold and light now ruined. "Aeringæl!" It cried, despairing, its voice filled with more pain than a mortal could ever know. "Aeringæl!" It screamed, a deathly scream of anguish. Everyone was a statue, looking at it in terror, in a strange hope it would rise again, and be restored to glory like a phoenix rising from ashes.

I stepped forward, but no eyes followed me. Everyone looked at the angel, and wondered, that cold wonder that left no space for doubt. I never knew why I did that, just that I had to help, had to hold it. It was the only way I could ensure my sanity. I stepped up to it, knelt beside it, reached a trembling hand toward it. Somehow it sensed me, turned as if the movement cost it far too dear. "Astarfael," It whispered, the word too soft for anyone else to hear.

Its eyes were a vast empty void, aching for what had been there, eyes of nothingness, white-blind and aching. I stared into its eyes, my gray to its null, and I nearly drew back in terror. "Angel, " I whispered, putting all thought but its ruined body aside. "Can I do anything to help?" I seemed so gauche next to it, this gawky girl next to a ruined perfection. It almost seemed to smile, then, and its hand twitched, the long thin corpse-pale fingers moving. I saw that its face was so thin it was only pale skin over bone, the skeleton-skull of an angel, and its wings were finely wrought feathers of some steel-sharp metal, but had been broken and torn by an unimaginable force.

Without thinking, I picked up its hand and held it in both of mine. Its long fingers coiled about my smaller hand, and I realized that it was tall, much taller than a normal man, and its hand was twice of mine. Its fingers were jointed many times, so that its fingers wrapped about mine gracefully, tightly enough my flesh was white with pressure, so that I did not notice the cold of its hand till a moment later. Then I almost screamed at the cold, the cold of the farthest reaches of space, so biting, burning, it was searing its imprint into my flesh. I gasped in sheer shock, then felt the pressure lessen, and the angel had something like regret in the aching nothingness of its eyes.