The Soothsayer - Conscription

The Suspended World of Mankind, Denmark, 1894 - The Vacant Town Of Tainted Seal.

Degaliel, Of Cherubim wandered off in sheer boredom, from the flock of thousands of Cherubic defenders in lieu of Inferno's possible invasion of Earth.

For the young Cherubim waited long with waning patience and a soundless neighbouring city, though suspended by the powers of The Great Oriaries, was filled with alluring sights and colors that beckoned Degaliel to venture.

Folks paused stop from their way to work in the dusky morning, street lamps frozen like yellow lumps and the mist appeared shimmering in its muted struggle to dissipate. Everything looked like an art piece from the museum. Degaliel trotted her bare feet, with soft brilliance melting the dusk with her wings, she explored the city filled with mannequins blissfully ignorant of their fates that came crumbling down.

They were like dolls, with curious eyes and eager expressions, probably wanting to get ahead in life. 1849; the beginning in the course of history that brought violence to the corners of Europe with its working class revolutions, as if a poetic reflection to the events that took place by the hungry youths in The Silver City.

Their idyllic township tucked away from the mandates of Amsterdam's ruler-ship and its eventual displacement into constitutional monarchy did not troubled its citizens. However, no matter cities if regardless sizes, were preoccupied with their war with the Prussians. Perhaps, that was why the government was so inclined to possess the mythical monster of Fire so desperately.

Degaliel belonged to the infantile ranks of the Great Cherubims, had never set foot in the realm of mortal sins before, was fascinated with the tragedies beneath each human creature she encountered. In the mortal world, happiness unlike in Heaven was not a basic attribute but a far twisted version of emotion which could only be place with the likes of self gratification and delusive assurance. It was more of a process of in which its environment and the human culture abused its beings to the breaking point where they could only appreciate random things like sunlight, music and even feed off each other's tragedies. Perhaps that was why these mortal folks looked up to their kind whom could rise beyond their personal miseries, and not to be castrated by their wretched destinies and miserable backgrounds.

They said the world had become a more and more difficult place to survive, despite the advancement of its technology and science. It was their spirituality that requires saving. Yahweh had left his creations to their own devices, and it had proved such heartbreaking impacts in their lives. It was true that they had gotten more convenient and smarter, but they walked around with holes in their hearts. They couldn't sleep with ease in most nights and they thought about ending their lives every single day.

Degaliel found a pair of lovebirds in the gloom of a park. Agenthe, the girl which looked no more past her sixteen birthday was laying on the thighs of an older man, Emil.  Degalial sat with them, attempting to learn what was making the smiles on their faces. The nearby lamp was rock of glow with little moths hanging around it like stars to the moon. Apparently, the lovebirds had spent the entire night, probably talking away until the dawn cracked.

Degalial looked at Emil. She realised that Emil was married and that he hadn't told his naive girlfriend. And Agenthe was so in love with the two timing Emil! Degaliel could make Agenthe learnt the truth with a snap of her fingers. Degaliel squirmed and looked into their futures; after Agenthe knew that Emil was married, she was so obsessed with the loss of her innocence, that she harassed Emil and his family again and again until she appeared one day in their doorstep, doused in pig blood and hung herself in front of Emil's wife and children.

Degaliel was a little surprised by the course of events that could led to upon a simple truth. Degaliel looked into the possible future if she had made Emil eloped with Agenthe to a faraway place where their love could sustain; the youngest of Emil's son would grow up in void of love and full of poverty, engaged in a terrible heist on the date of his fourteen birthday with his friends and a gun that would take the lives of five innocent people, furthering altering and endangering fifty other lives in their network of collision.

Degaliel walked on the soft mud of the park to the lamp and plucked away a brown moth to examine the tiny creature. What if? Degaliel thought, if she had made Emil and Agenthe upon unsuspenion, as if waking up in amnesia, believed that they had never fall in love before and then leave each other forever. Degaliel looked again and realised that they would meet again as strangers three years later in this park and became lovers all over again. Such verbosity of the nature in love! Degaliel looked into their fates and counted that it would take at least a hundred bouts of divinity interventions and at least two disasters of huge proportions that would implicate more than a thousand lives to stop them from falling in love. And one of that disasters involved apocalypse in which Hell will engulf lives on Earth.

Degaliel smiled with a sighed and placed the brown insect back to the surface of the air. Perhaps in their short fervent lives, lying with each other in the park was the ultimate happiness that humans could wish to obtain, and this was everything to them. Not wanting to ruin that, Degaliel did not alter the lovers' fate in any way. Degaliel wanted to explore the rest of the city, but she wanted to sit with the lovers, busking in the maddeningly glister of the love. Degaliel split herself into two entities, with one sitting in the park with Emil and Agenthe, while the other self explored the morning city.

Degaliel passed rows of dew moisten windows along the blocks of buildings down the turn of the street. The mail office, the grocery store, the dance school and other quiescent architectures of a singular pattern cambered beneath the distant half light of an impotent sun. It's shadow was the township's surname with breaths so poignant and immutable. Degaliel skipped in front of her reflection through the glass window and was amused by it. The Silver City was practically raised on glass, yet the hosts never spared a thought for their reflections. It was refreshing to learn that how some creatures of this world could triumph or decline just by mere aging skins and bones. Degaliel paused in her play and listened in the paralyzed echo of this funny little world. She was not entirely alone on Earth.

Degaliel's twin had stopped wondering about the affection between Emil and Agenthe and went further deep into the somber park. She returned with a shard of glass and a can of morning dew. With an angle facing the lovebirds, she projected their shapes into the morning dew in which their fuzzy images came to motion in the can. Degaliel's twin could watch the romanticism of Emil and Agenthe as if they had been unsuspended. Under the indecency of sunlight through the trees in the park, she watched the lovebirds reacted their passion with kisses and muted whispers that drew secret giggles. She watched Emil's burly hand over Agenthe's waist and the maiden's fingers running along her lover's beard. She observed as Emil sighed with an invisible burden and Agenthe's pristine comfort that was selfless and divine, as if her bosom was a blanket of a clear sky and her lips sang the hymns of gallantry. Agenthe's face was the morning sun in which would drive away the doloriferous veils from the dusk and bring forth the light into Emil's heavy heart.

Degaliel's twin wondered about the mysteries of their languages and the sensation that their touch brought and gratified their souls. Her curiosity grew with passing moment, intensifying so greatly that she had to act upon it. Degaliel's twin began to snap the shard of glass into dust and sprinkled into the morning dew. She then proceeded to mould medium sized figurines with mud, dead leaves and branches like a sculptor. Degaliel's twin pressed her dolls into the features of Emil and Agenthe. Upon satisfaction, she brought the mud figurines to animation with the drain of the morning dew on their faces.

Degaliel's twin folded her legs like a child and watched earnestly as her figurines staged out Emil and Agenthe's love in dreamy declarations and unbridled exuberance.

After a stretch of time unmarked by the frozen dusk, Degaliel's twin was not satisfied with just watching and listening to the clay borne lovers caught in the twilight moment of mortal euphoria. Degaliel's twin needed the participation, she needed to feel what the Emil and Agenthe went through. She mashed up the mud figurines and gathered more dirt in her arms. She went to a strong and sturdy maple tree and plastered the earth on its trunk. Upon completion, Degaliel's twin hugged the tree tightly with fingers clawing into the wood, her tears bursting through her sore eyes and her heart wanting to feel love.

For Yahweh had absconded for too long.

With a long deep sigh, Degaliel's twin pulled out a radiant creation of a man from the tree who was designed to love her and nothing else.  The twin then flew her lover into the mist of the trees and settled on a nice brunch. She felt the lines in his palm, tracing to the popping veins at his wrist into the dale of the forearm. She felt him brushing away the fringes of her golden locks, his eyelashes to her eyelashes and their pupils met with constrictions of attention. The hearts were in their lips as she heard him whispering his first words in her ears. The message formidable and stung the flesh of the ear gently. Her heart was in her ear and his was in his words. Their toes greeted with passion in a smaller wars of their own. Her lover held her from behind and rested his forehead between her scapulae, the weight of his shoulder pressing and his warmth suppressing the coldness of the marrow.

The twilight blinkered.

Degaliel who was standing outside the soda shop peering her sight through the morning crowd to see what was moving towards her. Could Oriaries' enchantment over the mortal plane be altered? Degaliel braced herself to a stroke of posture as she prepared herself for battle. To the end of the street, the flawless Degaliel ventured, with her proud wings spanned willowy despite the suspended breeze.

It was a whimpering fox, leaving a braze of blood trail in its wake. It cawed softly to the angel. Degaliel turned quickly to look at the town, as if expecting the spell to be broken and its people awaken to witness her. But the sleepy town remained frozen with only two creatures breathing at this moment. The magic was flawed! But Oriaries had been powerful beyond her worlds, either it would take a higher divine intervention to crack her charm, or that Oriaries was in too deep with the troubles in Hell so much that the distance was cutting her off from her instructions. Degaliel held the dying fox in her arms, with an understanding that the fox must have free itself from a hunter's trap in the local woods but had grew delirious from its mortal injuries and wandered into the town. If only it had the intelligence to appreciated the suspension of Earth's nature, for the townsmen, if unsuspended would care less for the little dying beast.

When Degaliel healed the fox's wound, the winds of the world restored. Soon, a flood of strong breeze found its way into every corner of the world. It tipped the hats and scarves off the human beings and rocked the boats wobbling in its still waters. The winds made sounds from dry throats and hollow caves. Degaliel thought its revival had to do with her intervening from saving the fox's life. Then it produced more. The skies moved by the carrion of winds, swollen with darker clouds and flashes of lightnings swam among them. Degaliel saw a pair of shooting stars drawn from the horizon to the darkness of the fall. The winds determined to cracked open the harden seas and exploded splinters of ice shards all over. The skies was red and unbearable. Blood red. It wasn't her doing, Degaliel decided. Something was happening to The Silver City. She felt that the rest of the Cherubims reacting. She had to fall in with them. The skies looked as if it would burst any moment now. Degaliel had to get to her twin first. She let go of the whining fox and proceeded on her way.

Degaliel reached the shadowy park where she left her twin with Emil and Agenthe. Her twin was laid dead on the floor of the dirt with a heap of smitten clay mess all over. Emil and Agenthe sat in their bench, with frozen eyes admiring each other, unaffected by the deaths. Degaliel held her dead twin in her arms, her twin had been crying when she died. Degaliel touched the forehead of her twin and learnt the wilful story of their creation and love.

'You wanted to feel the mortal love. And mortal love hurts most in all realms combined.' Said Degaliel softly to her twin, as if reciting a eulogy. 'Creation is never difficult. To emulate Father in his works is a dream shared by all worlds. Mortal love is a self abused addiction. Perhaps that's why Father had left in the first place. And you have learnt it in its hardest way.'

The heart broken twin swayed by the overbearing winds and blew into dust on the heap of her lover's clay torso. The skies were brimming with murder. Degaliel hasten her pace to her kinsmen.



To Be Continued...