Chapter Text
Dirk hit the ground before he’d even processed falling.
He let out a sharp cry as his behind connected with the surface below him and he sprawled backwards, fingers still reaching for the fissure that hung above him in the air – but the gap was already knitting itself shut, its crackling molten edges fusing together until it was nothing but a line of distorted light; and then not even that. Dirk scrambled to his feet as it shut and groped, to no avail, at the emptiness where the fissure had been. The comforting darkness of his shop and the rising, destined fire within it were locked out of sight and out of reach.
And he was trapped away from it all.
The angel attempted to compose himself for the second time in a handful of minutes. (Had it been so few? Time twisted in his mind, rendering the last quarter of an hour abstract, both instantly recent and endlessly long ago.) In his mind, he saw the fire surging across his backroom and swallowing everything he owned – and then he finally focused on what was behind the fissure’s absence, and, for an instant, his worries were drowned in wonder.
In front of him was a thing that gave the solid impression of a wall, yet was so inconstant and ephemeral that it could barely be considered one. It was not opaque, yet what lay beyond it was somehow inscrutable, as though Beyond simply didn’t exist. And the wall itself was hard to focus on: a constantly shifting web of interconnected nodes that passed through and over one another in layers. Woven together by threads somehow both sharp and hazy, the nodes were points of pulsing light, faint movement within them, all fading and returning and dancing like waves in mesmerising patterns that captivated and consumed. Even their colour was beyond understanding, an indistinguishable hue that registered itself as blue and teal and purple and green all at once and endlessly more.
Dirk poked himself accidentally with an object in his hand and snapped out of his trance. He looked down at it scornfully. It was the thing he’d grabbed in falling, which had failed to stop his descent. Turning it over briefly in his hands, he tried to recall where he had got it – an old wooden awl, no engravings, nothing special. Just a smooth, simple handle and a metal spike. He shrugged, and put it in his pocket.
That was when he noticed the fog.
The floor beneath him – so white it could barely be seen – was being slowly taken over by a gradual spread of mist that coiled, almost beckoningly, around his ankles. As he watched it curl with movements eerily precise, he was overcome with the feeling of being watched.
Dirk turned around. The wall of nodes stretched out in a circle and domed overhead – and at the centre of the inscrutable space rose a pillar of white cloud, rich and full and bursting with a crown of light.
The light watched him. He felt its all-seeing gaze bore into his very being. Terror gripped him and awe grasped his soul.
And the radiance spoke.
“Ikariel,” it said, in a voice like woven sunlight, like a chorus of harmonic vocals descending from beyond the ether, like metallic strings of dawn struck softly into sound; “oh, what have you become?”