Exposition

No father enjoys the sight of his daughter in tears. Dackorec Seraph is no exception, of course… but in this case, anger and frustration outweigh his deep, heart- destroying sadness.
 “How could you?! How could you?!”
 Gael, of course. For the fourth hour in a row. Kneeling on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, refusing to even look at her father.
 Dackorec, who had stalled for nearly the entire day before answering Gael’s call and coming home, paces back and forth across his spacious parlor, fists clenched with irritation. “Gael, as your father I demand that you compose yourself! This has gone on long enough!”
 Ignoring him, Gael instead stands and screams even louder, probably alerting the neighbors. Everyone already knows, of course, everyone reads the newsfeeds, but he winces at the prospect of people knowing that he’s home.
 “Gael,”
 “I don’t care whose father you are! You were Elenor’s father and you killed her!”
 “You know perfectly well why that had to happen,”
 “Dear gods, you probably used that hideous spear!” Gael’s wet eyes fall on the elegant, broad-headed weapon, hanging above the shrine as always, indeed the very weapon Dackorec had destroyed the girl and her consort with. “And brought it home, nice and clean, and told me she’d run away!”
 Dackorec clutches a relic on his tea table and grits his teeth. “She ran from the faith. What I told you was true… from a certain point of view.”
 “You’ve got to be kidding me! You’re sick!”
 “I am your father and this world’s spiritual leader. You are not to doubt me,”
 “SHUT UP!” Gael shrieks, and the room comes to a frightening silence. Dackorec pauses in mid stride, dark eyes narrowing at his daughter’s petulance, and very slowly turns to face her.
 For the first, impossible time, the thought crosses Gael’s mind that she may be about to die. After all, he murdered his child once, why would he hesitate to do so again, and perhaps lie about it –
 But instead, the towering man seems to deflate somewhat as he staggers towards the family shrine. Pictures of everyone except the lost Elenor adorn the multi-tiered structure, among relics that stand as offerings and reminders of the gods. Dackorec ignores all this, and reaches for the spear.
 Gael shrinks back against the wall, but her father ignores her, too, and makes his way out the front door.
 She hears wings beat, and the slightest sound, like a groan of agony, and her father is gone. Sliding down the wall, her wings all kinds of tangled and messed by friction, Gael collapses to the soft carpet and cries for a girl she hasn’t seen in twenty years.
 And never will again.

* * *

 “It’s getting kind of late,” Evan calls, hoping his voice carries over the glittering hillock in the vast plain, to the other side where Aelia is changing clothes. “We ought to think about heading back.”
 A muffled “oof” wanders over the hill, and Evan smiles. She’s usually so graceful, but she must have fallen over trying to pull on a boot or something. Sure enough, she responds, sounding embarassed.
 “We still haven’t found your sword, have we?”
 “Obviously not. But I don’t seem to need it to fight the machines. And we don’t want to get stranded out here at sunset.”
 Aelia appears over the hill, her backpack much smaller. Instead of the shapeless, heavy black dress, she wears a t-shirt with some kind of Pteros writing on it, khaki capri pants with small armored plates, and combat boots. A belt with twin baldrics holds her sheathed long knives. Evan feels a strange jealousy at that.
 “We won’t,” Aelia assures him. “There’s plenty of time. You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”
 “What’s that?”
 “You’re used to an hour-long sunset. Haven’t you noticed that Fallen’s mornings and evenings last a long time, and the full day is quite short?”
 “Um,” Evan mutters. “I wasn’t exactly a weatherman on Earth. What’s your point?”
 “My point is, something about the orbit of our planet makes sunrise and sunset last like three hours. It may look like the sun is going down, but we have a good hour and a half before the Dusk Sister shows up. No worries.”
 Evan looks at the deepening blue sky, one side of which is already speckled with stars. “If you say so.”
 They continue the search. It’s not hard to find the old Seraph camps, the people are clearly unaccustomed to covering their tracks. Square patches of bare dirt mark the spots where tents were pitched, and little craters indicate fire pits. Evan scowls at the glittering sand accumulating around the latest campsite, all that remains of the strange and menacing beings which sent the Seraphs packing in the first place. “This whole situation is damned strange.”
 “Um… you’re right about that. Look.”
 Evan turns from examining a tattered bit of tent fabric to look at where Aelia is pointing, and barely keeps himself from shouting in surprise.
 A short distance away, perhaps the length of a football field, is a disturbingly familiar sight. Black light, twisting and writhing like thick, living smoke, lances towards the western sky in a meter-wide column. The source is concealed behind a dune, the highest place for some distance.
 He looks to Aelia, who nods, and they start a cautious jog towards the strange display, Evan’s sword forgotten. As they draw closer to the fountain of blackness, whispers and hisses seem to fill the air, speaking sibilant words that hover just outside of meaning.
 “Get down,” Aelia implores him, and they crawl the last few feet of the hill almost prostrate. Leaning slowly over a thicket of dead grass, Evan looks down on a bizarre situation.
 A Seraph man, tall and broad-shouldered, stands in the middle of a patch of lifeless sand, holding a jagged, twisted object above his head in his left hand, from which the black energy pours into the skies. Distracted by the wave of shadow, Evan takes a moment to realize what abysmal condition the man himself is in.
 The left arm and hand are withered and gray, clutching the black idol with skeletal fingers, and the man’s left wing is little more than a disturbing sort of flesh spike, most of the feathers gone. Upon closer examination, a great deal of his hair seems to be missing from the left side of his head, thickening towards a healthy white on the right.
 “What the hell am I looking at?” Evan whispers to a distraught-looking Aelia, never taking his eyes from the silent man or his hissing, black-burning item.
 “I have no idea. But it seems pretty obvious that he’s got something to do with those machines.”
 “How is that obvious?” Evan asks, startled, having a hard time hearing her over the strange whispers wafting through the air.
 “That thing is pointed straight at where the Dusk Sister is going to be. I think… he’s calling them somehow. Maybe this guy is the source of it. Or maybe not him, but that thing he’s got.”
 “It doesn’t seem to be doing him any good.” Evan mutters, now noticing that the man seems to be carrying all his weight on his right leg. Indeed, something resembling a crutch lies in the glittering dirt, waiting for him to finish his calamitous work.
 “No, he looks awful, doesn’t he?”
 They watch a few seconds longer in silence, then Evan shakes his head. “Well, if it is him calling those machines, he obviously needs to be stopped. Let’s go talk to him.”
 “What do you mean talk?” Aelia asks nervously, looking like she’d rather leave.
 Evan’s eyes flash bright, then dim to a sky-blue glow, casting his face in a somewhat soothing light. His voice comes a little deeper, a little more commanding, with the power. “We ask what he’s up to. And if it’s machine-related, we take him out.”
 Suddenly, the black pillar spirals into wisps, and then nothingness, and the whispers cease. Evan and Aelia hurriedly look down at the man-
 -who is looking directly back at them, an expression of rage on his face.
 For a long moment, everyone looks at each other. Evan feels an insane urge to laugh at the tension. A nervous response. The mangled Seraph continues to stare, black-gold eyes inscrutable, withered lips snarling. Evan finally looks over at Aelia. “Do you think we ought to-“
 Crack!
 Evan barely acknowledges the bolt of black light before it explodes against his face, hurling him several feet back from the dune and almost knocking him out. Only a thin shield of blue-white energy protects his skin, apparently enough to stop the damage of the attack if not neccesarily the impact.
 He tries to sit up, dizzy, and sees several of Aelia running to him, an expression of horror on her pale face.
 “Are you okay?!”
 “When?”
 “What?”
 Evan shakes his head, looking around for the strange Seraph with the shadow magic. “I don’t… got all dizzy. Head hurts.”
 “How are you still channeling?”
 “I what?” Evan mumbles, lifting a heavy hand to look at. Starlight courses across his skin, looking strangely like the shimmering reflected light of a pool of water. “Huh.”
 An odd voice, as though speaking through a tinny, out-of tune radio, interrupts Evan’s muddled thoughts. “Go from here. This is not your concern.”
 It’s the Seraph man, limping over the dune and moving towards them, black idol clutched in his ruined left hand. Despite his awkward, pained gait, he covers ground surprisingly quickly.
 Aelia whirls to face him, drawing her knives. “Get back! Don’t come any closer!”
 The disturbing, synthetic-sounding voice seems to tear itself from his half-wrinkled throat. “Cannot allow you to interrupt my work.” His mouth moves almost imperceptibly out-of-sync with his words.
 “And I can’t allow you to keep hurting people.” Aelia calls, placing herself between the Seraph and Evan, who struggles to his feet against a wave of nausea. “You all right, Evan?”
 He stands, swaying a little. “Yeah, I think so. I feel kind of sick.”
 “Only one of the myriad failures of the flesh,” the Seraph mutters, having stopped several feet from the pair. “Our frailty is an affront to the Gods. It disgusts them to see.”
 “Always about gods with you people,” Evan grumbles, glad to be rid of political correctness for a moment. “What are you trying to say?”
 The Seraph almost looks pleased. They generally do, Evan muses, when they get to preach. “I say that life is an aberration. Our unlimited flaws serve to demonstrate that the Gods had no hand in our genesis, and that as perfect beings, they are offended by our existence.”
 Aelia scoffs. “That’s a new perspective.”
 “And yet it makes more sense than any previous. Think on it, human. Why would the Gods allow bad things to happen to more or less righteous people? Why do they never show themselves to us, never intervene when we need them?”
 Evan has to admit he’s wondered many of those same things, even as a child. Of course he’d been raised to believe in a single God, on Earth, but the basic tenets and the bahavior of the faithful were much the same as those on Fallen.
 The damaged man continues, seeming euphoric. “The only logical conclusion is that the Gods hate us. We exist against their wishes. Therefore the only Godly act, the only way to curry favor with them, is to destroy the perversion of life, wherever it arises.”
 “Why not just start with yourself!” Aelia growls, eyes narrow and beginning to shine with a glimmer of blue-green light. Evan realizes this is about to become a nasty situation, and wishes yet again that he’d kept his sword.
 “I gladly would, child, but then who would continue my mission? There’s only one of me, and there is a great deal of extermination to accomplish in the time I have left.” He indicates the oil-black relic in his ruined hand. “And who could I ask to bear this cursed thing in my stead? As you can see, it doesn’t completely agree with me.”
 Evan laughs without humor. “Why do you care? You said everyone should die! So what difference does it make if someone gets hurt?”
 Something strange happens, then. The Seraph man’s right eye widens with what appears to be recognition, a moment of doubt…
 -then his head snaps to one side, seeming to shiver violently, with an electrical sound like a taser firing off in his brain. He rights himself after only a second, a sneer on the working side of his lips. “Irrelevant question. It is not our fault if your mind cannot grasp the scope of my beliefs.”
 Aelia and Evan look sideways at each other, confused. “What just happened there?” Evan whispers.
 “Crisis of faith? I don’t know.”
 “It seemed like he seizured himself out of thinking about what I said.”
 “IT IS UNWORTHY OF CONSIDERATION,” the man shouts, actually reverberating somewhat. A whine, like feedback, accompanies his voice, and his eyes flash black as he raises his uninjured hand.
 Evan flinches at the sound, and summons up a shield of blue-white energy just in time to block another blast of thundering black light. Sparks and little arcs of lightning explode from the point of impact, and Evan feels his feet slide backwards in the sand a few inches.
 “Our boy here’s a heavy hitter,” he mutters to Aelia, then looks back to the man. “Just for the record, who are you?”
 “My name is Noreus. I am… was… a soldier aboard the-“
 Another brief fit, with accompanying discharge noise, overtakes him. His mouth seems even more slack when he opens it again. “Irrelevant. I serve as the anchor, that is all.”
 “Anchor for what?” Evan asks.
 An answer comes in the form of thunder, and Evan looks up to see dozens of the green-burning fireballs streaking from the western sky, the newly-risen Dusk Sister serving as a backdrop. Noreus laughs metallically.
 “Every holocaust has to start somewhere,” the half-dead Seraph murmurs, reaching his right hand down towards the glittering sand. A column of metallic particles rises to meet his grasping hand, rapidly assembling into a long, jagged spear. “Do you know, I have never killed a human before?”
 Aelia crouches, knives ready, warily watching the tip of Noreus’s spear, and Evan begins circling around the man slowly, waiting for an opportunity to strike with an energy blast. Strangely, the arrival of the falling fireballs once again seems to empower his channeling, until so much power fills his body it feels like he might explode.
 Crackling blue-white arcs of power weave around his stretched fingertips. “Somehow I don’t think you’re going to, today.”
 “We will see,” Noreus growls, and lunges at Aelia, swinging his spear and cackling in the voice of a broken amplifier, as green fire rains down in every direction with malicious purpose.

* * *

 Sebastean sits on the rail surrounding the stern deck of the Elenor, looking off towards the shore. The familiar contours of Halfmoon’s cliffs are just visible in the distance, and Whitewall is well out of sight. Fallen’s long dusk is drawing to a close, leaving behind the pyrotechnic night sky.
 To his unique eyes, the night is barely darker than midday, perhaps best described as softer.
 Far below, the ocean thrashes and gleams with the blue-green bioluminescence of more than a hundred monsters. Sebastean smiles at the frothing waves, eager to put his plan into action.
 Very eager. The round, cool amulet seems to stick to his skin, an unpleasant and constant presence for a man who dislikes the cold. It’s gotten colder over the past year, seeming to feed on Sebastean’s own cold actions.
 He reaches into his shirt, stroking the medallion gently. His fingertips wither slightly at the touch, aging rapidly, rejuvenating quickly when he removes them. A disturbing feeling. He wonders if he would have survived the amulet’s leeching effects for this long, without the limited shapeshifting ability he inherited from his Pteros father. Probably not. Certainly he would never have been able to hide it’s effects on his appearance.
 He reflects on a frightening moment he’d had this afternoon, dressing for a meeting with his little army. Allowing himself to relax in his own cabin, he’d slipped into his look of decay, deep cracks of black light splitting his face, skin whitening and becoming dry and dead. He’d long since disposed of the mirror over his bathroom sink.
 He’d pulled on his long coat with the sewn-in armor plates, and halfway through buttoning the front his shoulders had grown ice cold. Lacking a mirror, it took him a moment to realize that the garment had begun to slide through him, sinking slowly through his torso in a ghostly, inconstant fashion.
 Several long minutes of careful channeling later, Sebastean had decided against mundane clothing from then on. It had taken every bit of his not-inconsiderable willpower to remove the coat without killing himself, and even then he’d had to devote nearly an hour of concentration and microscoping shapeshifting to heal fully.
 Not something he would want to deal with during a fight.
 Worst of all, the coat had snagged on the amulet on his chest, as though it was somehow more solid, more real, than his own body.
 As though, perhaps, he’s become a bit more shadow than flesh.
 With this in mind, he resolves to hasten his plans. All the evidence seems to suggest, he decides with a little thrill of anticipation, that he isn’t going to survive much longer.
 Irrelevant, he snaps at himself. There’s only one thing that matters, and I’m almost done.
 After that… it doesn’t matter what happens to me.