Excerpt: Beyond the sixth Circle

Angels are beings without material qualities. All that is endearing, in the manner, in quirks, in the special things that make an individual what they are, angels do not have. Ezekiel stepped out of infinity. The material world hit it with the shock like walking through a swamp. It wasn’t sure of all the things it felt. There were crunchings and the breaking of branches underfoot. Ezekiel stepped onto a city street and looked around, becoming used to the material forming. It flexed it’s fingers and fluttered it’s wings before folding them to avoid recognition. Ezekiel had no material qualities, nothing to differentiate it from anything else in the world, but it had to appear as something. Therefore Ezekiel appeared to most as completely uninteresting. There were no remarkable features. The light changed skin colour. But this started to change as Ezekiel embraced spacial reality. It was tall. Noticably tall, but still no one would stare.
And then it hit him. A wave of grief so strange and powerful that Ezekiel wept, for angels are not forbidden to weep. It would not matter anyhow. God was gone. There were no rules. That was why Ezekiel was here, because there could be no God in the sort of world he saw and now the sort of world he felt. All he could think was to find the source of the pain and stop it somehow. He stepped out of reality, and through a fold, and stepped into Anna’s bedroom. Anna did not hear anything, for her grief made her deaf. Ezekiel stepped to her bed. He sat down and gently edged the sleeping girl into his arms. Here was the individual. The one integral creature solitary and alone. It worked when there was knowledge to protect them and keep them happy and away from harm, but sometimes the individual was not the clever one. Sometimes it so happened that an individual evolved without evolving along with that individual a connection to anything beyond itself. Anna moved a bit in her sleep and wrapped her fingers into Ezekiel’s robe, for all angels wear robes. This poor creature was entirely alone, and entirely useless. Ezekiel unfolded his wings and wrapped them around her, as if to protect her from all the world. How he hated individuality. How he hated freedom. How he hated anything that could create a creature like this one. How he hated the idea of a God that would separate itself so much from it’s creatures. But to hate God. This would not due. The child in his arms must be poisoning his thoughts. The material world must be corrupting him. He could not remember why he had come there but it was not for this. It was not to think such strange things as this. What had gone wrong?

These thoughts were slow, for angels think slowly, being unused to it. By the time he had wondered what was wrong the light in the sky brightened. Ezekiel did something he had never done before. He interacted with the material world. He reached up and tried to open the curtains, but with unnecesarry force he pulled them off instead, and let in a flood of sunlight. Anna moved a bit, and adjusted herself. She curled up against Ezekiel like a tiny child. Poor thing. That was probably the last time she had had any human closeness. Of course this was not human closeness, but it was close enough. Well she still slept he studied her. She was small and a bit too thin. Her hair was brown with green highlights. She had been wearing makeup, which had ran and smudged from her tears. Her clothing looked was very tight, and meant to show off her small figure but just ended up making her look like a child. The room around her was completely impersonal. Ezekiel could tell this somehow. He doubted she ever touched the books or puzzles or games that sat there and he was right. They all belonged to her brother. This was his room.