an abridged history of castiel
Rating: PG
Word count: 872
Characters: Castiel
Warnings: esoteric thoughts about angels, obnoxious symbolism
In which I read grimoires and write accordingly.
***
Castiel was a guardian once. His likeness was etched in clay tablets and the bark of date palms. He flanked gates with twin faces, white eyes still rough with stone and vast arc of his wings pinned in bas-relief, as if struggling. When his teeth crumbled, the rain dragged the bleached diorite bones through wheat fields and down the banks of the Euphrates so that the very silt knew his name. Lammasu, Papsukkal, messenger. He was the lion's dusty flank and the eagle's wing flashing gold over terracotta roofs. He recalls when prayers were spilled blood on the edge of his grace, and the predator still rattled fierce and dispassionate in the vault of his body. He was so much space, once, but now there is dust settling between the memories, souls winking in his gut, and he is full.
They called him Shedu, and he brought down storms on the south wind, riding a swell of rain and heat until the fields bloomed and he fell kicking from the sky to trample the wet earth under his hoofs. He smelled of saffron and ozone and sand, but death too: knew to breathe plague over the land when Asasiel miscounted and the streets grew gray with waste. He was prophesied in a curl of smoke or in the parting of the clouds. Immaculate.
The script changed, scratched between thick leather covers in sigils that stirred ancient recognition within him. Castiel. He unfurled four wings to cross the baked red deserts of Mathey, this time, and the hundred eyes flashing between the feathers and hooks of his body saw colors torn from the earth in kaleidoscopic facets. He thought in multiples. To what advantage? asked the eagle, while storms whispered into nothing and the ox wondered, On what principle? The lion said very little, for it had already forgotten the date palms and sand of its youth, gone blind and deaf and docile. Its mouth was open but slack, black lips loose around a mouthful of teeth like antique weaponry. Sometimes, a rumble would rise in the gaps between them, and old joints that had been lashed tight for centuries would creak and flex against the hardening creature of Castiel's faith. He was possessed of great discipline, of course.
The sphere of Jupiter, called Zebul, was Castiel's domain. It was very cold and very pale, and frost burgeoned in his grace when he soared too close to the sixth gate. The hymns of phoenixes and the seven silver cherubim appointed by Sachiel rose all around him. The eagle flourished here, shimmering at the seams with light. Exalted, he told Dante, and his many voices still trembled with love for his Father.
The fifth earth was not Castiel's home but it became his station. Anael loved the plains and took care in their tending, and when the nights grew longer she would draw herself near to the yellow light flickering on the horizon, where Azazel and his Watchers were said to roost on the spine of a dune. Castiel sat with her on these nights. Together, they would wait on the edge of this desolate sweep of land as it purpled under the evening sky, and Castiel would whisper the Lord's praises while Anael wept. The southwest wind caught in her hair smelled of snow lotus and want. Castiel could not soothe her.
Castiel skirted the corpse of a fallen sister (vast and charred like a forest struck down) to catch the fray of Dean Winchester's soul. Demons gnawed at his wings and belly and sought even to rip out the swollen ache of his grace, rent him open and let his sulfur-blighted blood. He tucked his charge into that hemorrhaging light and let the man drink. There was so much damage. When Castiel limped from Hell, the hand print seemed a fair indulgence. Let you be marked as I have been, he hummed, and the fire roared greedily under his skin. He wrote his name in freckles across Dean's back, cut it into his hips and the whorl of his hair. A beautiful creation, and already falling apart. For months after that, panic seized Castiel at the thought.
Castiel's first human vessel brought with it a rash of complications. This body was at once limiting - Castiel was far too many wings and teeth folded imperfectly within Jimmy Novak's skull and it was at first an effort just to restrain his manifestation - and prone to bucking his control of it. Castiel had taken what he could of Dean's pain, and then the memories laid down roots in his veins, threatening to burst from his fingertips and push their stems out through his mouth. Still, he could not hope for it to be enough. Falling, dying, all variations on a theme. God is not enough. Faith is not enough. Zebul was no longer cold but frigid.
He feels a thrum of renewal now, emotions quiet under the noise of so many held within him. Castiel, Castiel, Castiel. The name hisses along the sharpened edge of his grace, but it is no longer his own. Angel, Lammasu, guardian. The lion licks its lips.