(Untitled)

[joiningyousoon]

(Perfect clarity. Frightening clarity.

I stood in a wasteland. It was)

A ruin.

A graveyard.

A battlefield.

Colossal monuments of steel all around; fallen, twisted up, tangled up in each other under a thick blanket of snow til it is impossible to tell where one stops and another begins.

No bodies.

(It was as if some cruel god had been

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[theredstars]

Turn around, Maya.

In the middle of this wasteland, by the burned-out hulk of a krawl, a woman is standing. Shining, pure, warm and vital -- and, perhaps, familiar.

[joiningyousoon]

An angel of mercy.

She smiles like she's known Maya for a thousand years. She speaks and Maya's heart thuds in her chest; tears spring to her eyes and roll, slow and hot and unnoticed, down her cheeks.

Maya feels smaller than she has in years, standing among the snow-covered crawls, the field lit by the stars

(burning too bright to be smoke-enthralled Nokgorka)

and the soft glow of the angel of mercy

(Alex Goncharova would kick anyone in the shins who ever tried to call her an angel).

Maya feels more innocent than she has in years; safer.

[theredstars]

"Pray for the living, Maya."

That golden, hearthside glow may have little to do with the Alexandra Goncharova of life. But the crooked half-smile and the patiently exasperated fondness -- those are all Alex, even if it's a softer mood than she allowed almost anyone to see.

"Pray for the living."

[joiningyousoon]

The little girl with the armful of red roses stares up at her. Her clothes are shapeless and colorless; brown and gray, battered and patched and thin, little protection against the cold.

The hood covers her head, but a shock of yellow bangs are a spot of bright color. So are her eyes, too blue and too old for her years, no matter her age.

(She said she would never leave me.)

[theredstars]

Alex crouches over, hand on knees, to smile at the little girl from closer to her level. It's a mother's pose, or an aunt's; a friend's.

"It's not my choice, really." Her smile is an apologetic quirk, friend to understanding friend, though her eyes are warm and solemn. "I have to go."

[joiningyousoon]

Maya is too old to cry.

"Is there anything I can do so you can stay?" she asks; quiet, plaintive, despite all attempts to be big and brave.

[theredstars]

"Remember."

Alex of the waking world, Alex of brash life, showed this lopsided fond smile in brief flashes, usually followed by affectionate profanity. Here and now, it's warm and loving and clear, and it hasn't faded yet.

"You can always remember."

[joiningyousoon]

"I will," she says, quiet and firm at once; fiercely determined. She will remember. She will not forget.

(She is always the one left to remember.)
She holds a flower out to the angel, her arm outstretched, mitten-wearing fist wrapped tight 'round the stem. Her hand is smaller than the perfect red rose; her face upturned with a child's solemn eyes. The little girl who knows the way that things are, and wishes more than anything that they could be different.

[theredstars]

"With you?" Alexandra snorts. "That's for sure."

She takes the rose from Maya, her gloved soldier's hands delicate now, careful and gentle as an angel's. Cradled in her fingers, it takes on the same golden glow.

"You have to leave, though. It's too dangerous for you to stay."

"But Maya, there is something you should know. And when I tell you, I don't want to see any more of your living in the past." She leans over again, green eyes bright and serious. "If you keep it up, you sentimentalist witch, I swear I'll haunt you off a damn cliff!"

[joiningyousoon]

Maya looks up at her silently; it's impossible to say, now, if she is a girl with an armful of dying flowers or a woman on her knees in the snow, but either way, tears are freezing on her face as the sky turns.

(A storm began.

The sky opened, calling the angel home.

As the angel of mercy faded away, her words were the storm.)

[theredstars]

The angel begins to turn away. Rain lashes around them, leaving her untouched.

"Before I died that day," she says over her shoulder, "I promised you that I would tell Marcus how much you've missed him.

(She spoke thunder.)

"But it's strange, really."

A leaf is fluttering down through the rain: flame-gold, impossibly shining.

"I've searched for him, and I've searched for him."

(She spoke rain

and fire)

[joiningyousoon]

(From an impossible distance.

From the heart of the storm.

A savior

appears.

A man, surrounded by flames that lick and dance but do not burn; his hand upon the haft of a great Hook. His head is ringed by brilliant, blinding white light; his face is featureless in the light, one arm extended as if lifting what looks like a sheet of paper covered in illegible handwriting --

And the specter is gone just as swiftly as it had appeared, leaving only the rent sky, and the fading figure of the angel, and Maya.

[theredstars]

"He isn't here, Maya."

Lightning cracks, a blue-white bolt, blinding, and in its radiance the angel is gone. Nothing remains of the red-haired smiling woman, or the rose in her hand; nothing remains of the specter of the far-off savior but the eye-searing flare of lightning. The falling leaf is a bird of flame, rising, rising in glory, and everything drowns in that brilliance: golden flame, white electricity, and always the rain sizzling across both.

Alexandra Goncharova's voice echoes through the storm, under and in the boom of thunder, an angel's now for true, an angel of mercy saying fear not in the midst of the storm of mercy's departure. "Marcus isn't here."

[joiningyousoon]

Maya wakes hollow and tangled in the sheets, the afterimage of too-bright light throbbing across the backs of her eyelids.