Chapter Text
“This is unacceptable!” Anthony pounded his fist on the table and tried to ignore the Metatron’s raised eyebrow and the slight jump from the rest of the angels around the table. He scrunched his nose and glared nearly snarling at all their passive bland faces and concentrated his ire at the old man in front of him who sat quiet and still at the head of the table, hands folded neatly on the table in front of him. Behind the Metatron the globe map of Earth spun on and on in its slow way the only difference from its usual appearance was small black spots throughout, like an apple starting to rot. And in every black spot on the globe people were dying.
“I will not send any more angels to their extinction until we know more about this strange force mucking about with time.”
Anthony stood up and crossed his arms. “Fine not sending angels to their deaths but what about every human that is taken by this darkness on Earth?”
“We will make a move when we know more.” Metatron stood and met Anthony’s gaze. He narrowed his eyes at the old man’s impassive and impossible to read face.
“Anthony….” The faintest of whispers brushed against Anthony’s ear, soft like a sigh. Startled his eyes darted around the room but everyone had gone perfectly still as if time had frozen for but a moment.
“If you lot won’t do anything–perhaps the Emissary for Earth will. Someone has to care about these humans!” He turned on his heel before anyone could say otherwise and took his leave of the council. The slam of the marble doors behind him reverberated through his chest releasing the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding in–a breath used to barely hold onto his temper. He ran his hand through auburn curls and leaned against the marble doors closing his eyes, willing his breathing to slow.
“Anthony…” the whisper came again, this time sustaining and building into a silver thread he felt compelled to follow. He looked down the long painfully white corridor in front of him lined in various places with alcoves filled with anonymous statues of angelic beings and creatures.
“...angel…” the word rose out of the murmuring and Anthony turned right into a new smaller corridor. In Heaven there were no true directions one had to manifest the way they wanted to go and wait for reality to fold itself to your will, and Anthony was trying his best to manifest a path towards the siren voice that called out. Something in these whispers was clouding his mind ever so slightly blurring the edges of his vision as the white walls started to narrow and close in. His chest tightened. Was it more dim here? That was impossible–Heaven shone from within with no sense of time passing–relentlessy bright and dull. But here there were hints of a dimness in the edges where floor met wall–a change ever so slight one might not register.
“Aaaaanthony.” the whisper was growing more insistent, almost pleading. Anthony looked down this narrow hall and could see nothing–no door or turn ahead the air compressed around him, clinging and pulling at him. He opened his mouth to cry out and with a blink found himself in a large rotunda.
“What–where am ?!” He whispered to himself because anything louder felt profane. The room held mystery hanging in the air and clinging to the walls, and to an angel who had been around since the creation of the stars and nebulae this felt strange and uncomfortable. Heaven was about order and for order to exist everything must be known and quantified. Mysteries were chaos. As both the Starmaker and emissary to Earth, Anthony was more used to chaos than many of the angels in heaven but it still felt unnatural to his celestial core and lodged itself in his chest painfully. He blinked and took in the rotunda–thirteen empty alcoves surrounded him and as he spun slowly taking them the whispering returned, voice upon voices piling into a cloud of words and sounds threatening to over take him.
With a pop as if the air were being sucked out of the room the voices vanished and Anthony opened his eyes to see what appeared to be a statue in front of him. She was impossibly tall. Tall as the silent redwoods, as expansive as the night sky in a vast desert and in one hand held a deadly looking spear. Her female form was clothed in a river of fabric woven of starlight and ribbons of clouds flowing from her shoulders around and through her essence to her feet. Anthony took in her face–framed by golden curls and beautiful and terrible in its fury behind pupiless blank glowing eyes surrounded. The light emanating was liquid fire and lightning and while not directed at him he squirmed under the heat he felt across his cheeks.
“Who are you?” his lip trembled.
With a violent fury her wings unfolded filling the space and Anthony’s vision. They wer silver and black and unlike anything Anthony has seen in Heaven or Hell.
“That is because I am not of Heaven or Hell, young one.” her voice, crystalline sharp, pierced his mind and resonated as the words formed with no movement from her. “I am Ithuriel, of the Dreaming–a realm neither Heaven nor Hell can touch although we remain connected.”
“Something other than Heaven and Hell–how can that be, we would have been told!”
A wry chuckle rippled through his mind. “You really believe that young one? How quaint.”
Anthony straightened his shoulders and he felt his temper–the one that often got him into trouble starting to rise again. “I’m not quaint–
“Quiet. There is no time.” The words rang in his head not loud but with the weight of seriousness and immediately Anthony put his hands in his pockets, as if being scolded. Almost imperceptibly, the face of Ithuriel tilted down and the eyes squinted minutely. The hand not holding the spear moved to hold out her hand, and within Anthony could just make out a glint of gold, he took a step forward and reached out.
“Yes, take Auryn, she belongs to you now.” the voice purred. Anthony looked down at the medallion in his hand, a silver snake symmetrically entwined with a gold snake on a light chain.
“What is this?”
“The Auryn will lead you to the Flaming Sword of the Eastern Gate–the only weapon that can truly defeat The Nothing before it devours all Hope on earth.”
“The Nothing?”
“Yes, The Nothing is a terrible plague sent by The Manipulators that seeks to change history so that our current humans are forced back into a Dark Age–devoid of all Hope.”
Anthony felt his chest tighten with anxiety–how could they fight nothing?
“Young one, humans fight The Nothing on a daily basis with hope, and love and most important–dreams. Without dreams human endeavors would stagnate. The Nothing knows this which is why it is attacking Hope–without Hope humans do not have the energy to dream and move forward.”
“I see.” Anthony clutched the Auryn tightly. “We have to take this information to Metatron–a whole host of us could get this weapon in no time–”
“NO!” the word echoed so loudly Anthony winced. “This weapon can only be found and wielded by one of your kind fallen to shadow and ruin, and only you can find him and the sword.”
“What does this mean?”
“You must follow the Auryn; it will show you the way.” Anthony squinted. The room had started to grow fuzzy around the edges of his vision as if the shadows were alive and moving closer. Ithuriel shimmered and Anthony braced himself as a wind whipped through the rotunda, pulling at his vest and jacket swirling and buffeting him around like a leaf in a storm. He closed his eyes and fought against the sensation of falling. The tumbling and plunging felt like in a dream when gravity decided to disappear for a time and return in different orientations, like toppling through a wormhole twisting and turning.
“What–” he exclaimed as the roar of the wind died suddenly. Slowly, he took his hands from his ears and with a shake of his head he realized his orientation was wrong–he had fallen over. He opened his eyes and found the sterile white halls of Heaven gone, replaced by the familiar stucco ceiling of his beloved bookshop. He looked around at his shop–warm and bathed in the golden light of lamps in and around the tidy shelves and potted plants decorating the various window sills. He sighed happily. Everything seemed normal, and most importantly real. Shadows lay where they were supposed to and there were no oversized statue angels commanding him to take a piece of jewelry.
“What a weird dream.” He rubbed the back of his head and froze. Looking down he saw laying between his vest and his button down shirt a glint of gold and silver. He took the Auryn in his hand and stared.
“It wasn’t a dream…”