The tower rose

Mortal divine right

By hubris we fell

  The Archangel Gabriel, angel of Protection, guardian of the Ancient Path, master of the Unspoken Voice, captain of the Golden Spear, bearer of the Hand of God, first among the Legion, survivor of the Tyrant’s Scourge, leader of the last resistance of Man, and Savior of Eden never much cared for titles. The Father of the Resistance, the Nemesis of Tyrants, the Guardian at the High Gate, and the One Who Remained found that such epithets grew to be a touch silly.

  Regardless, they pressed upon him, the driftwood of history weighing between his shoulders. He felt that burden with every downbeat, the gravity he warred for the skies.

  He was free to soar and others earthbound.

  Were that he could exchange his every honor for one more day with cherished men.

  Gabriel tarried in the clouds above Ruhum, drinking the late season’s sunlight. His feathers hungered for the dawn, that breaking of first light, the clarity of a new day. Swollen with fresh dreams, each dawn sang just a little different. By that progression, he watched humanity rise and fall.

  He watched them learn, and he watched them forget.

  Which Foundation first envisioned the dawn? Which drew the unbound Light of the first creation into stars and skies? Or had the dawn arisen from the subtle dance between Foundations as so many things did – an emergent property of Wills drawn in broad strokes?

  Perhaps one day he would find the right Foundation to ask, or perhaps he would remember the answer from his own distant lives.

  The quietude of Foundations lingered in the back of his mind, and he drifted on the winds. An election waited below, but he needed neither succor nor rest. He could dance with the Harvest wind the bustle passed below.

  There was always a crisis, after all.

  Here there was freedom from the oppressive concerns of brief lives.

  His quiet destiny called, but he resisted for one more day.

  Gabriel tucked his wings and fell. The ancient thrill of freefall still quickened his pulse, and he plunged through the layers of clouds towards the unseen earth below. Layer by layer, the sounds of the world below grew.

  Silence lurked above, but it was a patient hunter.

  His duty and his family waited below.

***

  A thrum rolled through the manor as the Archangel landed outside the solar.

  Alisandra mentally marked the days – no, weeks – since last he visited.

  The skies must be a seductive mistress indeed.

  The young angel sat on the kitchen stool, sipping her coffee, a treatise on the divine language open before her. One finger played in her unbound hair, and her right foot twitched to the rhythm of a song. Here, before the formal gowns and noble demeanor swallowed her, she could be any young woman fresh from bed instead of a Lady of a failing House.

  “Your father is home,” Sebastian said, frying pancakes at the stove for her breakfast.

  “I noticed,” she murmured, distracted. Her eyes skimmed the tome, but her mind wandered to her dream last night. She could remember little but an impression of flowers and unfair questions, but she would try again soon.

  “Oh?” He smiled. “Have you grown more sensitive in your aspect?”

  “I can always tell when he gets home.”

  The old wood beneath her feet always grew warmer in his presence.

  “Ah. A different connection.” Sebastian flipped three pancakes onto a plate and slid the food her way. “But which is the stronger, I wonder?”

  “Do you truly expect me to pit my angelic strength against my love for my father?” she asked drily, drizzling syrup across the plate.

  Sebastian chuckled. “If you would indulge me as such.”

  “Clearly the answer is that they are one and the same, dualities to the same core.”

  “Alas, I am undone,” the angel of witness agreed. “My tricks exposed.”

  “You’ve been quizzing me since I was old enough to talk.”

  “And you have been reading from our library almost as long,” Sebastian agreed, indicating the tome on the table. “Soon you will be a university unto yourself.”

  Alisandra split her syrup-sodden pancakes into equal quadrants. “Flattery is unbecoming, Sebastian. Even if I read a book a day, I would need years. I would scarce remember the first by the time I reached the last.”

  “Oh?” Sebastian sensed an opportunity for instruction. “Is that so, young angel?”

  She answered by stuffing a wad of pancake into her mouth.

  Gabriel swept into the kitchen, trailing his gleaming wings. He kissed his daughter on the cheek and hopped onto the second stool.

  A winged man perched on a kitchen stool like a rooster, ready to crow until we wince…

  “I’ll take a plate,” the Archangel chimed. “What are we annoying my most precious flower with this morning?”

  She threatened her father with her fork.

  “Open and productive discourse, of course.” Sebastian began the next batch of pancakes. “Now, Alisandra. What gown did you wear to your commencement as Lady of the House?”

  Swallowing, she sighed. If I ignore him, he will simply keep repeating the question for the next season. Besides, she remembered the day easily enough. “The golden sheath dress, the sapphire gemstone necklace, and sapphire stud earrings.”

  “And your hair?”

  “High braided bun.”

  “And what did I say to you before you left the dressing room?”

  “‘Your father is running late. Try not to hold it against him.’”

  “Late? Me?” Gabriel feigned outrage.

  They both ignored him.

  “It was an eventful day, Sebastian,” she said. “Of course I remember.”

  “Very well. What did you have for breakfast the morning you Bloomed?”

  Again, she remembered with a moment’s concentration. “You made sausage and egg biscuits.”

  If only I could remember the Blooming…what sort of angel can I be when I don’t even recall my own birth?

  “What about the morning before?”

  The novelty of this conversation wore thin, but Alisandra humored him. She thought for a moment…

  Gabriel accepted his portion of pancakes and let the angel of witness work.

  But she recalled nothing of the day before her Blooming. Why should she? It was hardly notable compared to becoming an immortal.

  “And the morning after the morning of your Blooming? What were you doing at third bell a week later? What color was the dog’s eyes in the park on the thirteenth of this last Spring?”

  She skipped breakfast; she was reading; the dog’s eyes had been simple brown.

  Why could she remember these things? Not the surprises or the jokes, but the cracks in the sidewalks and the reflections in the shop windows?!

  “Amnesia is a gift of mortality, Alisandra,” Sebastian explained. “They reinvent themselves every decade, the memories of the past consigned to mist and fairy tale. We angels, on the other hand, carry all that we are within ourselves.”

  She paged through her memory of the last year with a growing sense of vertigo. Yes, she could recall the exact scent of bakery donuts at the height of Summer, the look of irritation from Mirielle during a particularly boring Conclave, and the play of shadows at twilight through her bedroom window.

  Before a plate of half eaten pancakes in her own kitchen, Alisandra felt a budding strangeness. Though her Blooming gift was strength, that power felt no different than before; she simply had more of it. Where she once strained to lift a sack of potatoes, now she strained to lift a boulder. Where once she panted after a hundred-meter sprint, now she maintained that pace for miles with an even heartbeat. These were miraculous, perhaps, but they felt no different than a mortal’s own experience.

  Yet she paged through the last year of her life with all the ease of reciting words from an open book. She recalled the sensations, the smells, the impressions…anything and everything except for the depths of her own dreams.

  Her father clasped her wrist. “Be at ease, my daughter.” To Sebastian, he said, “That is enough instruction for now, old friend.”

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  Sebastian coughed in quiet disagreement, but he would not raise the issue in front of their youngest charge.

  None of them ever argue before me, Alisandra noted with a drop of bitterness.

  “Your daughter has an appointment this afternoon,” the angel of witness offered instead. “Please do not encourage her to malinger.”

  “Me? Malinger?!”

  “Among other things.” Sebastian turned his attention to the dishes.

  Gabriel finished his breakfast while Alisandra read a few more pages. Pushing away his empty plate, he offered a grand sweep of his arm. “Would you deign to accompany me, Ali?”

  “If the Archangel promises not to instruct or teach in any way,” she replied, smiling despite herself.

  “A promise easily kept!”

  Father and daughter strolled into the garden. The grounds were brown and dying, the sun dim behind a grey layer of clouds, and the Harvest wind blew Alisandra’s hair into a halo of fuzzy locks.

  She did not have to care here.

  “Sebastian did not mean to disconcert you,” Gabriel said, spreading his wing to block the wind for his daughter.

  “He did not…”

  Gabriel stopped and dared her to finish that lie.

  Alisandra scowled. “Okay. Yes. It is a…a surprise.”

  She remembered the precise shade of the ice cream she ate with her father on the thirty-second of Spring and the ill-fit of her boots the first time she tried to run on air. Would she recall the rest of eternity with this clarity?

  “What did you think being an angel would feel like?” Gabriel asked.

  “Less human,” she admitted.

  The Archangel paused. His voice sank under the weight of memories of his own. “We have fought very hard for you to be able to feel human, Ali.”

  “To let me war as mortals might?”

  He nodded somberly.

  She scooped a rock from the garden path and gently flexed. The act felt no different than before, the tensing of muscles under her command. Then she reached deeper, like a weight lifter before a competition, and gathered herself.

  Alisandra pitched the rock into the sky, and a crack of thunder rolled after the pebble.

  “Why was I granted this power, Father?”

  Why this useless strength? What good is it to be able to grasp the Hand of God, throw cars, and smash boulders? For all this power, I never have the need! What Council meeting will require me to crush a rock with my bare hands? Shall I go racing through the night apprehending muggers like a penny dreadful hero?!

  He smiled, but he hesitated the faintest fraction of a second before he responded. “I do not know, Alisandra.”

  And still he withholds so much from his bedhead flower.

  “And the Chorus? And the Foundations? The events that drove Mirielle to devilry?!” she demanded. The litany of her own ignorance weighed against her like a pinafore dress in an unfair dream. Markers of childhood she could not seem to shed.

  The Archangel raised his hands like a man assaulted.

  “Would you tell me these things if I asked?!”

  Gabriel pressed his lips together. “If you asked it… I would.”

  Unspoken: But please do not, my beautiful star.

  Curse her for a coward; Alisandra relented. She could no longer hope to forget the answers once learned, and deep in her heart she feared those answers would be the end to walks along flower paths with her father.

  He nodded in relief and steered her with a nudge along the path.

  The hedges and flowerbeds led inexorably to a white gazebo overlooking a sculpted swan’s lake. The gazebo was neglected, paint peeling from the benches. An abandoned bird nest stuffed the steeple, and dead leaves crowded the floor.

  For no conscious reason, Alisandra’s pulse quickened.

  A gazebo at the end of a flower path…

  “You still seem troubled, Ali.”

  She ran a finger along the dusty banister. “Do you resent that I have not told you how I Bloomed?”

  “Why? You will share what you wish to share, my daughter.”

  “I do not even remember the Blooming,” she admitted, studiously avoiding his gaze.

  Gabriel waited patiently.

  “Yet by what Sebastian has taught this morning, I must remember. It is the beginning of eternity! I do not understand what I am doing wrong!”

  She reached angrily for the memories. They should have been as clear as her breakfast six months ago, as easy as flipping pages in a book!

  Instead she felt a kiss like butterfly wings across her hands and found only empty pages.

  “I do not know why some souls Bloom and others pass,” the Archangel replied. He tucked his wings close, gaze still and distant. “The best men I have ever known died without a murmur, and yet I have seen such Tyrants rise in the name of Light…”

  “Is that why you ask us to avoid interference?”

  “To interfere as mortals might, my bedhead flower,” he corrected absently.

  “So that they might forget we exist?”

  “Or perhaps that we might pretend to forget what our pride brings.”

  For a moment, Gabriel gazed into the trees, an old man with a face lined by tragedy.

  “Father?”

  He shook away the past and kissed her on the head. “Mere echoes. If you forget your Blooming, it is for a reason. You will find your answer. Today, attend to the world we have, Ali. There will be time for more.”

  “I do not feel eternal either.”

  “When no living man remembers the greatest legends of this time, not in name nor myth nor fairy tale, you will have grasped the first grain in the hourglass that is eternity.”

  “Yet I will remember it all.”

  “Yes. You will.” Gabriel stretched, spreading his wings wide, and planted his hand on her shoulder. “But first I suggest you remember your appointments for the day.”

  Alisandra elbowed him in the ribs. “Proud words from a birdbrain who hides in the sky! You left all the work to me, Father!”

  He chuckled, rubbing at his side. “Would it kill you to call me Daddy like you used to?”

  “Yes. Stone cold on the spot.”

  The Archangel responded by using his trump card. After all, he knew her secret: Alisandra was terribly ticklish.

  Then again, so was he.

  A small war commenced before the gazebo on a cloudy day.

***

  Sebastian found the Archangel at the gazebo where once the Lord Mishkan and his Lady Alice would share their supper on warm nights. The angel of witness approached, a packet of papers tucked into his elbow.

  “Never fear, old friend. She is off to her duty,” the Archangel remarked, slouching on the lonely bench. He leaned forward, a finger tracing the place where his wife would rest her hands.

  “I do not doubt it. She strives to please you.”

  “What do you bring this disreputable cur today? I relinquished my signing authority, you know.”

  Sebastian slid the papers into reach. “Ah, this is perhaps more interesting. A proposal to generate substantial revenue by selling certain bureaucratic positions.”

  Most mortals thought of the Conclave as the gleaming procession of nobles. Those nobles decreed the vague outline of law, true, but a small army of meritocratic bureaucrats and clerks converted those decrees into governing verbiage. Some of those clerks would work feverishly through the night to draft a proposal before the morning announcements. Faceless bureaucrats could generate problems of their own, but in Ruhum they provided a quiet and entirely ignored check on the whim of the Houses.

  This was entirely by design, of course. Two old men with an eye for detail and time on their hands could accomplish quite a few things in the margins where few nobles bothered. After all, bureaucrats were mere commoners.

  Sebastian remembered and foresaw the power of commoners.

The great swell of the proletariat screamed for blood before the Conclave, armed with scythes and pitchforks. Farmers and craftsmen would accept the yoke of the noble parasites no longer.

  “Again?” asked the Archangel Gabriel. “It was a terrible idea last time, you know.”

  “The House system teeters on complete insolvency,” Sebastian reminded him. “The gold sovereign accord quietly bought a little more time, but too much of that new liquidity flows to the free cities and the rapacious Guilds.”

  “Always a crisis,” Gabriel sighed. He glanced down at his fingers, still tracing the place where Alice’s hand belonged, and tucked his own beneath the table. “Should we involve ourselves in this election? The people cry for democracy, but what experience do they have with demagogues and populism? Can they tell the difference between righteous men and fascists in pretty clothes?”

Fires in the tenements, people screaming, clawing, biting. Men reduced to panicked animals, pillaging the smoke-ravaged wasteland of Ruhum.

  “Are you ready to pull that sword from its stone?” Sebastian asked. “You know where to find the raiment, and you have the chin for a king.”

  They kept the sword and sigil of Ruhum’s lost king in a display case on the second floor. So far, none of their visitors had noticed.

  “Technically, I was only the Queen’s consort,” the Archangel noted.

  “Ah, but you have heard legends of the returned king, have you not? How he will wear wings like the sun and command a ship as vast as the earth?”

  “Strange, isn’t it? How our own iconography bleeds into myth, no matter how delicately we step.”

  “As both Aure and Lynne have found to their dismay,” Sebastian agreed.

  “We echo, old friend. Our every step rattles the firmament. If I was a wiser man, perhaps, I could balance the thunder of Will with the freedom of men…”

  The angel of witness swept a few leaves from the gazebo with his foot. “Perhaps your daughter is the example we need. Alisandra does not debate eternity. She sees this Redeemer cult as a threat, and she moves to thwart them. She could have attacked with all the power of her latent aspect, but instead she dances on the waters she knows.”

  “Perhaps…or perhaps not. My beautiful daughter does not yet understand what we can become…”

  “Better that she gently grow,” Sebastian said. “There is no rush.”

  “Agreed, of course. We may not be wise men, but we can at least avoid making the same mistake twice.”

  There was no need to scar a second young woman with the burden of destiny.

  The Archangel wasn’t sure that the first was ever going to forgive him…or even if he would deserve it. “Always a crisis,” he mused, sliding the papers away untouched. “The world is yet new to my daughter, and she charges forward with the energy of youth.”

  “We are more than happy to oblige…so long as she obeys the edict.”

  “Of course she will,” Gabriel agreed easily. “Alisandra is a good child.”

  And if she should Bloom in full unto Power, will she still be your good child? Sebastian wondered. If she joins Mirielle and grasps the reins of the future?

  If such a thing occurred, would Gabriel be the Archangel or her father?

Alisandra Mishkan straddled the world, the Hand of God gripped tight.

Mountains of bleached bones crunched under her boots, and ancient works stirred at her word.

No one remained to challenge her ascendancy.

  “What do you see?” the Archangel asked.

  “The usual,” Sebastian remarked. “Fire, death, and endings.”

  He saw the elections swelling and spilling over, inciting the flame of revolution across all mankind. A new unity would rise, driven by a simple precept: one man’s vote for one man’s voice. There were not so many men in this world; the wars of a broken covenant had spent enough lives for population growth to remain effectively flat for nigh a thousand years. The power of radio would sweep together the meager millions in a single generation.

  Unless, of course, the flame burned everything in its path, revolutionaries carved crimson rivers, and mankind reverted once more to tribalism and superstition.

  Neither prospect moved the angel of witness. Men would live, die and learn in this endless cycle of souls regardless. Would a man learn more hunched before a fire pit or basking in a heated sauna? Only the Song could say.

  The demons pretended not to hear that Song, but they too would serve it in the end.

  Beneath the visions of tragedy and change, though, something else lingered.

Tyrants of bone and ancient hunger.

Stirring deep in the darkness

Chasing the diaspora, a maw spread wide as stars…

  Sebastian winced.

   “Old friend, I am here for you,” the Archangel said.

  “I know.”

  “Then tell me what troubles you.”

  The angel of witness accepted the seat next to the Archangel – it still lingered with a thrum of Alice – and rubbed at his hair. “There is a darkness before us. A dread that lingers like the sour aftertaste of an overcooked meal. This shadow…it reminds me of Eden.”

  The Archangel stilled. “Place your feet on the ground. This is not Eden. It will not be Eden. Lynne will see to this thief in the night before he can master the divine arcane.”

  What if it is not the thief we should fear?

  “And if she fails? You hear the radio as well as I.”

  “The Foundation Occult stands between the mortals and that lost art.”

  “The Foundation stands between mankind and that knowledge,” Sebastian corrected. A seal of blood and sacrifice to wrest a fire from mankind before they consumed all that might be in their ignorance and hubris. “But what of a man?”

  “We have dealt with mages before.”

  “We haven’t always won.”

  “There was never any guarantee that we would win. Merely that we would endure.”

  Long past their fellows and their world.

  When the heroes of Eden fell from the farthest reaches of myth or legend, two angels grasped the first grain of eternity and the duty contained within.

Are those memories truly a burden, watcher? Have you considered the privilege of standing amongst the greatest of heroes? They would not care they were forgotten.

  At that familiar voice, Sebastian snapped upright and searched the garden with sharp, roving eyes.

  The Archangel had begun to trace the gap of his wife’s hand again, reminiscing with a sorrowful smile.

  The angel of witness gathered himself. He let his gaze sizzle with concentration, and he peeled away time and meaning like a surgeon.

  Seeking a voice that could not still remain.

  He found nothing but the memories of this happy, protected place.