The tale of Genneth Howle’s transfiguration has many beginnings. All happened long before my time; many happened long before Howle’s time, as well. I’ll start the way Howle did when he told it to us: with the second beginning: the Angel and the Sword. I’ll let Howle’s words tell the rest.

Two-thousand twenty years before the day of Genneth’s death, a stranger fell from a starless night, bearing a wondrous Sword. The blade was a sparse brocade of silver strands, elegant and curved and ever-revolving. The strands came together at a cusped tip, pointed to where the sea met the sky. In the stranger’s hands, the Sword shone like the sun.

Slowly, like a feather, he sank toward the earth and the edge of dusk. His dark, twilight coat billowed in winds that weren’t there, haloed by shifting, fractal wings. Pinpoints resolved into cypress canopies on the hills and valleys that loomed below. Scribbles by the shore grew into wooden towers and a market square.

A thriving settlement.

The stranger landed in slow motion on the wet, sandy shore. Force rippled out from him, scattering surf and sea-foam. The ripple washed over bluffs and timber palings. It swept through the streets like a great wind, rattling carts, horses, sheep and thoughts.

A barefoot lass on the beach dropped a basket filled with seashells. The sea-breeze whipped through her fire-red hair.

People flooded onto the shore to see the stranger. Wide-eyed, they stared, whispering in awe and terror. They called him an Angel.

The Angel’s face was a bronze eggshell, naked and smooth, covered by a mask of pinprick holes—constellations, twinkling with his inner light. He had no eyes, and yet he saw. He had no mouth, and yet he spoke. And his words were echoes in people’s minds.

We…

He had come to avert a tragedy, but the journey had been more difficult than he had anticipated.

Far more difficult.

Failure…

The Angel was wounded. Light trickled out through gashes in his coat. He staggered forward, dragging the Sword behind him. Something like stardust rose up from his footprints. It glimmered briefly before fading away.

Earlier, hereafter… a Precipitation…

He meandered through the speechless crowd, eyelessly gazing. Bits of his garments came apart as he passed. Fabric that wasn’t fabric crumbled into flakes that rose like butterfly wings and then stuck to the air as they vanished into nothing.

The villagers trembled before him. When his constellation face passed them over, the voice in their heads multiplied into whispering choirs. His head rocked left and right in an indefinite pattern, like clockwork winding down.

His steps slowed.

Soon he reached the heart of the crowd. The footprints behind him were thick and bright; his feet had crumbled into light. The light rolled across the sand with a silent hiss.

The Princess… Broken Memories… refused. Would not listen. Not unless—

—He lifted his visage to the empty sky.

Here? Also here?

In silent terror, the Angel trembled.

No… How…?

He fell to his dissolving knees.

With his head hung low, the Angel pitched the tip of his Sword into the sand. He leaned into the blade, clasping it tightly.

There will be great suffering.

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His unraveling quickened. The Angel fluttered like a tent in the wind. Garments and flesh drifted apart and away, first in slender strips, and then in a tapestry of many colors; cocoons within cocoons.

As the Angel’s dissolving hand pressed into sand, his head bent to the side, regarding the earth with elegiac wonder.

Oh, noble beast…

And the world acknowledged him. The earth trembled. Waves rocked on the sea. The people screamed.

The Angel’s head shook. Forgive me.

He tugged himself forward on the sand.

The mission… my sword…

Suddenly, a memory pulled his head to the Sword.

The Princess’ Question lies within.

Transfixed, the sea-shell lass drew close. She reached for one of the blade’s filaments. But the Angel caught her. His many eyes bore down upon her.

But the lass did not fear.

Waves of different hues cycled through the stars in the Angel’s face, the closest he could get to a smile. Gently, he stroked her auburn hair. His gentle touch became gentler still as his hand dissolved into motes, his fingers crumbling upon the beach. Beside him, the Sword’s ceaseless motions slowed. Only a fraction of its former luster remained.

The lass watched, helpless, as the being before her came undone.

Please… tell her what love is.

The bronze face fractured. Light streamed through the cracks. In silence, the fragments fell upon the sand and boiled into nothingness. Behind the mask was something like fire or glory, coiled in eddies like many swirling eyes.

The wyrms…

The Angel came unfurled—robe, flesh and all. His light faded into the colors of the gloaming sky.

The dark…

And then he was gone.

Waves lapped upon the shore. The wind hushed, and no one spoke a word.

Someone had to be the first to touch the sword.

All eyes went to the sea-shell maiden. A fisherman’s daughter. The Angel had touched her. A minute ago, she had been nothing. Now, she was everything.

The lass reached for the hilt of the Sword pitched upon the sand. Her arms trembled in her tunic’s ragged sleeves. The Sword was as warm as blood and as light as air. Barely had her fingers curled around the hilt when a wave of force shot out from the Sword and curled itself into a shimmering whirlwind. Faster it spun, and faster still, until from the heart of the tempest there came a message. It poured out in a torrent. It sang every sound, and gleamed in all the colors, and bristled with every sensation from here to eternity, filled with loneliness and a longing beyond all words. Every language of creation spoke at once, as if to translate the ineffable.

This was the Question that not even the Angel could fathom. A message without words. A riddle without an answer.

It was too much. People fell. Ears burst. Eyes bled, never to see again. The sea-shell lass sank to her knees, teary-eyed and quivering, as frightened as all the others, though seemingly unharmed.

The people had no answers to give, save to call it a miracle.

How much more the Angel’s sorrow might have been, had he known what they had heard and what they understood? In passing through their minds, his dying message had been twisted. No two recipients heard the same thing. Yet that did not stop them from claiming to know the truth.

Word of the miracle spread. Slowly, the world began to move faster. Ages passed like the pages of a book, writ full with victories and sordid betrayals. The sea-shell maiden found herself anointed the leader of a new faith. Kingdoms rose and fell. An emperor sought an elixir of immortality. An army of swords and words marched its way across a continent and a half, spreading word of the new, true god. Cataphracts gave way to catapults; and ballistas to bayonets. Strangers from across the seas landed on the sacred shores in search of riches, only to find more than they could have possibly dreamed. Evolution begat revolution: first engine, steam, and metal boats, then the iron horse, and even wilder fancies in its wake: buildings of glass and steel that touched the clouds, radio that whispered across the world; the spark of the silicon mind. The world matured. It digitized. But still, the Angel’s shadow loomed long. It loomed even after the sword fell into legend, as did all things lost to ignorance.

But, unlike legends, truth could not stay forever forgotten.

Because truth always comes true.

— — —

The end began on the outskirts of the city, in the green autumn of a pine-forested hill behind a hovercraft storage yard. Had anyone been there, they would have seen a spot near the top of the hill where the air had turned hazy, like a mirage that had gotten too close. Had they looked from a certain angle, they would have seen the spot had an inside—a churning corridor of mirror-like shards; a tunnel to somewhere… different.

The tunnel was there for only a moment. But a moment was more than enough. An eyeless creature emerged, its three legs lumbering onto the needle-dusted hillside. It was shaggy, like a corn husk doll, held together by dark, undulating tendrils. Slender stalks sprouted from its body bearing masses—acervuli—that glowed in the colors of a sunset, though their light was overwhelmed by the bright blue of midday.

The construct did not live for long, but life was not its purpose. Apoptosis set in; the creature cracked and crunched. Its parts wriggled away from one another, digging into the earth, until only the central mass remained—a ruined mound, just waiting to fall.

A breeze wafted off the sea and the bay.

The mound collapsed under the breeze’s gentle touch, crumbling into clouds of green spores that drifted down the hill like a breath of mist.

The plague had begun.