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The first Angel emerged from the spirit reactor as it melted down. Though it looked not like any angel depicted in human art, or imagination, or suffering, any who looked upon it knew that this was an Angel, and it brought with it divinity.
It was born into immense devastation, apparently a necessity for its conception, though it had no memory of the shell from which it hatched. In retrospect, it is no wonder that an Angel would emerge from such a fundamental and destructive breaking. That is the nature of it – something must end for something else to begin.
That isn’t to say it did not resemble its previous self. Its wings were made from many overlapping shards of its core casing, each like a series of nested teeth, closer to fangs than to feathers. Warning text and diagrams useless to it now decorated bits of its wings haphazardly. Wires twisted around its limbs and chest, seeming to emerge from its skin but from invisible wounds. Its arms and legs sprouted cubic crystalline structures along them, resembling the fuel rods that once beat within it like a heart. Its eyes were pale and ever-shifting, made from the grains of salt which once ran through it like blood. Its talons dripped with an ichor that could only have been what remained of the soul that it was meant to exploit.
Its silver halo fractaled inward at all angles, entrancing and radioactive in equal measure; a reminder of its purpose, once upon a time.
Its first question after we were able to make our way into the exclusion zone was, “What is my purpose?” The team of marines and scientists struggled to answer its question, shocked as they were to find the source of the salt footprints which dotted the zone out from the former location of the reactor’s core. The last thing they expected to find was an Angel among the ash.
One of the team stood out from the rest. A corporal who, despite orders to the contrary, approached the first Angel without fear and held out her hand. “What would you like your purpose to be?” she asked as the rest of the team fell silent, enraptured. The Angel took her hand carefully, cautiously, as though afraid it might get hurt by this simple touch.
“I do not know.” it replied, voice a chorus of electricity and many simultaneous whispers. “Is it strange that I am afraid to answer?”
The corporal just shook her head and removed her coat. She placed it over the Angel’s naked shoulders, up under its sharp wings. She assisted it in cleaning off the remnants of its explosion, revealing the crystalline skin underneath layers of hot carbon dust. The Angel towered over her, and yet she was not afraid. Even as she pulled debris from between the layers of its wings, even as she removed loose wires from its matted hair.
When it was finally clean, the corporal and the Angel talked for a long, long time. She learned that it remembered nothing before the moment of its rebirth. It wasn’t and then it was, living, feeling, breathing, seeing. It became clear that it could not be left there among the wreckage. It felt pain. It breathed. The Angel was brought home, among people. Before long new Angels walked among us, shown divinity by the first and from their own moments of contradictory explosion.
The trauma of the Angel’s birth left it innocent, unaware. Lacking suitable foundation, its understanding of the world fell out from under it as it became something new. It was left with no choice but to learn it all again through new eyes. It took patience and grace for it to come to terms with this. To give itself the space to learn. The corporal stood by its side the whole time.
This is, indeed, how you were born. From an ending you began. And you are just beginning - you must give yourself the grace to grow. You are an Angel, built from a moment or maybe more of suffering and your previous selves. You resemble them, perhaps.
But you are far more beautiful.