Chapter 19: All the Colours of the World: Part Two
Hadriel had not grown any more comfortable in her new role. Naturally, she had every intention of fulfilling her duty to the utmost of her abilities, but even if it had been her creator that assigned her this task, she did not feel enthused by it.
She was the Angels of Swords, the third to have held that title since the ignition of the first stars. She was a warrior, a soldier. She had come to the mortal plane to battle the incursions of hell, to ensure that the outcast children of Eden were defended from corruption as a new age dawned on their world.
To be a bodyguard and teacher . . . she was unsure of how suited she was to the position.
When she had first arrived she had been sceptical of the necessity for her to be here at all. Yes, she had understood that the young demigod had needed aid to complete his Awakening, but she had not seen why she needed to remain here. The Hallowed Sanctuary would have protected him and Lady Joan perfectly well without her own presence.
To be sure, she had aided in the training of some angels that chose to become warriors later in their lives, but even that had only been cursory, simple supervision and a few suggestions and the like. She was a fighter, not a teacher.
She had fought in two battles upon the mortal plane since arriving here. Those had been battles where her blood had flowed, where she had fought on the very edge of defeat, her skill and experience all that kept her from being struck down. Where she had faced monstrous foes and been the one standing after they had fallen.
It had been glorious!
That was what she was meant for! Battle, war, that was what she had trained for, what she had dedicated herself to for three times longer than the time the crucifix had been a holy symbol. She could guard Adam’s body in battle, but to defend against hidden plots, insidious strikes, and knives in the dark, that was another matter.
Now Venduriel, he would have been better suited for this. An angel of her generation, one skilled in shadow work and stealth. He would have been a far better compliment to Lady Joan’s skills, the blade in the dark to her sword in the light.
Still, it did not matter. The Almighty had given her this task, and regardless of her own feelings, she would see it completed.
Before her the young demigod stirred, his slumped form tensing as he slowly struggled back to wakefulness. Above him, his halo made a gentle ringing noise, like a bell that had been lightly tapped.
His halo, his Crown.
It had been a surprise when she felt his energies drawing up the heavens to condense into a halo. A surprise, but not completely unexpected. Mortals with angelic blood might not be able to form halos unless they had some power to shift into full angels, but she had known that her charge was exceptional. That his halo had been a Crown though . . .
On the one hand, it was another sign of why this Adam West was worthy of the attention the Lord was paying him. To have inherited a Crown through the blood of Bath Kol was . . . significant to say the least, a symbol of authority that both indicated and imparted power.
On the other hand, it almost pained her to see a Crown wielded by one with so much mortal blood in his veins. A Crown was normally only earned by angels of the greatest merit. Mighty warriors such as Michael, Young heroes such as Desminael, or great leaders such as Metatron. She had no notion as to which Crown it was, but that was less important to her than why was it floating above this young demigod’s head.
Too many unknowns, too many uncertainties. Never in her long existence had the crimson-winged angel found her life so rife with unknowns and mysteries. Dealing with Adam and the questions that surrounded him was . . . uncomfortable. Perhaps it was even meant as a lesson to her, Hadriel supposed. The Almighty might have chosen to assign her this task in order to make her grow, to face challenges outside her usual areas of comfort. Such was not unknown of her creator.
Wordlessly the angel watched as her charge snapped back to awareness with shocking suddenness. Above him, his halo continued to sing its quiet note, a subtle reminder of its presence and power. There was going to be much work needed in the future before he was fully deserving of the Crown that adorned him, but that could come later. For now, she simply waited as Adam completed the final steps of his journey to power.
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Emma sat down on her bed, doing her best to calm her frayed nerves.
The last few minutes had been nothing short of torturous for her, and she’d spent most of them pacing about her room, trapped in a mire of indecision. She’d known what she’d wanted to do, but she’d also been acutely aware that following through on that desire would be catastrophic.
The spell that she was using to monitor Adam was imperfect, imprecise and riddled with flaws. In truth, she would have never used such a working if she had a choice, but the circumstances made it her best option.
The many imperfections were the cost of the spell being able to work at through the powerful Hallowed Sanctuary. By making it weak it could slip through the tiny vulnerabilities hidden in the Sanctuaries construction, the same weaknesses she’d used to infiltrate it before. Unfortunately, it was impossible to form a connection through the Sanctuary, its very nature extending across realms and planes to prevent connections and pathways from forming. In many ways it was an almost perfect system, one that isolated the inside from the rest of the world in a manner that guaranteed secrecy and safety.
But ‘almost perfect’ wasn’t the same as ‘completely perfect’, something she had proven with her own infiltration. The spell that gave her some idea as to Adam’s condition was one she’d set up during their meeting. In almost every way it had been a rushed and flawed affair, but it was all she could manage.
The spell was ironically fiendishly complicated, despite its haphazard nature. It worked upon the principals of sympathy and synchronicity, a link that transcended the connections that the Sanctuary was designed to block. The concept of the spell was that if part A changed, the part watching Adam, then part B would change as well, regardless of distance or interference. Part B was connected to her, allowing her an intuitive awareness of the young demigod’s condition. It wasn’t nearly as accurate as she wanted it to be, but it was the best she could manage.
Earlier that morning Emma had been almost dancing about her room with joy when she felt him following her instructions and igniting his mana. Almost all that he had done had been too vague, too undefined for her to sense, but the moment when his dormant energies had sparked into fully quickened magic had been impossible for her to miss.
However, her elation had only lasted for a few brief moments, then it became horror as she felt a dark swell of all too familiar energies rise up amidst the knot of sensations and impressions that the spell provided her with. For a few seconds all she could do was gape at the world as she frantically tried to see if she was wrong, if she was misinterpreting something, but certainty had come all too quickly.
Hell-born energies!
She was uncertain how they’d found their way into Adam, though she had some ideas. Those creatures that attacked the Awakening ritual had been throwing out plenty of tainted energy. At the time Emma had been distracted by trying to keep the ritual from failing, but she guessed those energies could have been hellish in origin. She’d thought they had been simple demon-sold powers, the sort that ambitious and foolish mages gained by trading with demons, but if they had been hell-born, directly drawn from the infernal plane, then . . .
That hadn’t been important though, mere background thoughts to the crisis at hand. What had mattered was that the demigod she’d pinned all her hopes on was infested with the energies of the single most malevolent and vicious plane of existence!
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Her first instinct had been to get to his side as fast as she could, to throw herself through the gaps in the Hallowed Sanctuary and be at his side as fast as she could. She was sure she would be able to extract the parasite energies, after all, she was very familiar with them. Unfortunately, there were plenty of problems with that.
In the absolute best-case scenario, she’d be able to help Adam, only to be caught inside the Sanctuary and unable to leave due to having exhausted her power. Maybe, very maybe, the demigod would be able to keep his protectors from skewering her, but even if he did then she’d be taken a prisoner and Adam’s relationships with his allies would be a mess or worry and suspicion.
A more likely outcome was that she wouldn’t even be able to make it through, that the Hallowed Sanctuary would detect her hasty efforts to enter and stop her. In that case all she’d do would be to distract those inside, who were trying to save Adam, and pointlessly reveal herself. No gains there, and she’d be setting herself and Adam up for loads of trouble down the road.
In the worst case . . . well, the worst case was accidently kickstarting an apocalypse early as several of the heavy hitters she’d pissed off in the past sensed her and all came for their pound of flesh. None of them would be willing to share either, so she’d be the reason some of the most dangerous creatures in creation would have a throwdown that would probably break the world. Good for her ego, not so good for the whole mortal plane.
In the end she’d forced herself to remain in her room. It had been torture, but she had to remember that as things stood there wasn’t anything she could do. Time would give her more options, more power, but for now she was stuck with having to be a bystander.
Letting out a sigh she let herself fall back on her bed, the feel of the old springs against her back oddly soothing as she bounced slightly.
Barely ten minutes, that was how long the mess had taken, but she felt as though it had been hours. She felt a wry smile touch her lips at the thought. For the past few hundred years her existence had been one of mostly boring monotony as she hid herself, interspersed with brief periods of frantic activity when she had to deal with mortal drama such as wars or disasters. Since the Black Sun and the opening of the Paths she’d been having to deal with much more excitement than the last hundred years put together.
It was harrowing . . . but it was also exhilarating.
Closing her eyes, the immortal pass herself off as Emma tried to think what her next move should be. Adam was coming into his power, that was good for her plans, but it wasn’t anything that needed her participation. The heavenly agents tasked with his protection should be able to help him train now that he’d sparked his magic, so there was no need for further intervention on her part. The same went for the bigger threats he’d have to deal with eventually. Even things like rogue demigods would have trouble getting past them.
What she had to worry about was the smaller stuff, the poisonous spiders rather than the charging bulls, things she could deal with quietly, without showing herself.
Of course, she couldn’t just let Adam forget about her either. The plan she’d pinned all her hopes on needed him to feel indebted to her, enough so that when she called for his help he’d feel he owed her his aid. Helping him get his magic up and running was a big step in that direction, but mortals tended to be fickle and forgetful, even the most well-meaning of them. She couldn’t let herself fall off Adam’s radar, she had to make sure that he remembered her, that he valued her.
The problem was that she couldn’t exactly talk to him casually, so making a lasting impression was going to be tough. That had been what had led to her current plan, doing small things in the background that she could later present to Adam. There were spells and items that could be used to prove her honesty when she did so, meaning she wouldn’t need to worry about being disbelieved.
Glancing to the side she saw the window to her room, a window through which she could hear the sounds of people leaving.
It hadn’t been too hard to work out that this small town had been close to the origin point of the huge white sphere of light, and that meant that a lot of people had grown interested in it. There’d been a brief media frenzy, but one that had faded away rather quickly. Since then the town was being quietly abandoned as more and more people left.
Emma wasn’t too sure why all the mortals were leaving. She’d kept to herself and used spells to make sure that she wasn’t noticed, her attention mainly on Adam rather than the town around her. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was an order from the government, she didn’t know and didn’t care. As long as the young demigod was in the Hallowed Sanctuary she’d remain as close to him as she could, and this room was her chosen base for the time being.
Sitting up she reached for her bag, preparing to see what she could do with the resources she’d scrounged up.
“Alright, gotta get back to work.”
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“Whoa! That’s the stuff!”
The words slipped out as I went from a sort of drifting oblivion to wide awake in seemingly no time flat. Seriously, even the most caffeinated coffee at the Well Grounded couldn’t have managed to give me a wake up jolt like that. That didn’t matter though, not as I blinked at the world around me and realized how it seemed to have changed
I felt the energies within my new core starting to twist about, drawing in energy from around me . . . which I realized I could now sense so much more clearly! In fact, I could now sense the energies within me as well, the flows of chi and magic as clear as the shadows cast by the sun on a midsummer day.
I couldn’t actually see them with my eyes, yet whatever new sense I had, allowed me to feel the ‘colour’ and ‘texture’ of each of the forces that were now revealed to me. The vibrant green from plants, the warm gold from the sunny air, clear wisps from the wind. These were only a few of a myriad of different tiny streams flowing into me from the world about me. It was beautiful, a clear natural beauty that was as pure as a sunrise upon a crystal-clear day.
“Huh, that’s cool.”
The words had just left my mouth when I felt my core still itself. It wasn’t a bad stillness though, not as if it had died or been petrified, rather it was the stillness of anticipation. Then it exploded outwards, through me, through the earth, through the air. I had a brief moment to wonder if this was the release of power that Emma had spoken of, or if there was something going terribly wrong . . .
Then my world went white. Then, it went black. But strangely my mind didn’t fall into the oblivion of sleep. I could feel my thoughts slowing, quietening, slowly drifting towards unconsciousness, but it was a gentle drift rather than a fall.
About me I could feel colours, colours that had concepts attached to them. The bright molten gold that I knew meant something, drifted away from me. The deep aquamarine that seemed to ripple with unimaginable depths. The clear transparent diamond that spoke of strength, durability and something more.
There were so many, all of them dancing around me in a riot of hues that made up my entire world, swallowing up everything else. The constant flood of interchanging colours was mesmerizing, and I could practically feel my already sluggish thoughts slow even further as the colours pressed in. Overwhelming. Smothering.
Yet before my mind could finish dissolving into a mush-like stupor there was a sound.
That I was hearing the sound at all was strange, because up until now the only sense I’d seemed to have was sight. Even the colours that seemed to have a sound attached to them, like the throbbing red that rumbled or the whistling blueish white, were impressions more than actual sounds. But now my world was now split by a crystal-clear note that seemed to resonate through my entire being.
Somehow, it drove back the lethargy that had been threatening to swallow me up, sharpening the thoughts that become dull. I snapped back to awareness, still feeling the tug of sleep, but at least able to think once more, at least able to identify the strange, altered state of my perception as being similar to the visions I’d had before. Even though the world around me was still swimming, normal dimensions seeming more like mild suggestions rather than strict rules, I still managed to orient myself towards the source of the sound.
It was . . . not above me, up and down seemed to be concepts that didn’t exist in this place, rather it was higher, greater, more important. As if the concept of rank applied more than physical location. And I was able to use that as a guiding point, a way to shift my perspective to find the source of the note.
It was a ring of floating metal shards, the individual pieces hovering together to form a cohesive shape despite the disparate nature of its components. It pulsed above the colours, dominating them the way a throne would a court.
Around me the shifting myriad of maddening hues seemed to pause in place. For a moment they just hung there, the world about me the product of a billion divine kaleidoscopes that had become fixed in place.
Then they began to move once more, their dance every bit as beautiful as before, but now there was a definite change. The chaos of before was still there, but it was changed. Mixed in with the randomness there was now a pattern, an order that lent structure, even though it was a paradox. More than that though, this change had done something to the very nature of the colours, taming them somewhat.
Where before they had seemed to draw my mind in and threatened to melt it, now the dance was gentler, soothing rather than mesmeric, comforting rather than stupefying. More than that, they were in harmony now, not randomly intermixed. I could only stare in rapture as the colours danced twirling and swirling, but maintaining an order, red leading to orange to yellow to green and then so on. It was a spectrum of shades that somehow managed to include colours that could not exist in the mortal world, but which boldly spun about me here.
The colour of ice that burned. The hue of gravity’s relentless pull. The shades of time as it ticked by. They were all there, alongside the red of roses or the blue of the sky. Every colour that was, that could be, and that never had been.
All there for me to see.
Once more my thoughts began to slow, but this time it was comfortable, a gentle flow rather than a dark undertow. Slowly I felt myself drifting away into slumber, the dance around me now a visual lullaby instead of an ensnaring trap. Gently I let myself go, but even as I did I knew it wasn’t darkness that took me. Instead, the colours followed me, my thoughts becoming my dreams.
I slept, and I dreamt of colours dancing so beautifully that it would have made even a heart of stone weep.