[dream] the twelve powers (the angel city): the first summoning
Back in the city of the twelve powers. There is an afternoon light, striking white-grey between the buildings; many of them are outlined, undercast in a bluish stone, or else veiled in blue glass. The carvings are fanciful, deep, and irregular, layered over one another as if the sculptors were themselves dreaming, undirected.
The first person to find that they could summon an angel was a girl, around twenty, plain and peaceable. She had just finished a book, and in that moment, eyes closed, hands folded, the last words beating in the cage of her chest, her mouth opened slightly - and the angel issued forth like smoke.
He was silver light and faded color, the parts of him he passed before the window becoming nearly invisible. On the surface he strongly resembled the angel Shorn, with black hair pooling on the floor, the remote mouth, the wide-set eyes. Parts of him marked him as the girl's soul-creature; however, below the thigh, the legs faded into powerful flippers, like a seal's, and a six-chambered heart squirmed beneath the semitransparent skin of his chest, beating in a circle.
He could have been any member of the Host, long since gone from the world, with only the Twelve left behind; he could have been a fragment of one of the angels, divided among mankind, mixing and breeding with their soul-stuff. Or it could have been that the angels and man, letting their powers mingle for so long, were giving rise to a new life/magic form, experimental in its infancy, cast in the mold of its predecessors. There was no way for the girl to know.
Later, shut into a room with a handful of her friends, reluctantly, she showed them the angel; asked him to touch them to prove that he was real. Each time he was summoned, he gathered a little more substance, and could by now brush the girls' skin, mouth words they could not yet hear.
Some gasped, some nearly swayed with horror; one knelt and trembled until the girl took her hands, and whispered: "Remember the times of break-edge brightness, the echoed words, the afterwards: gather them in your chest, and open your mouth."