for a_tricky_one
Who: God and Gabriel
When: Immediately after the events of "Hammer of the Gods"
What: Resurrection, and rare moments of active fatherhood.
With a snap and a twist, a Coyote falls dead. Anansi, the Raven, that old fool genius. The wingéd thing beyond time.
Death, it is said, is the only being older than the ever-powerful Almighty Himself. He and Death have sat down before, for the omnipotent immortal version of shooting the shit over beers, and after so much time the Horseman-who-is-so-much-more can't be said to remember whether he or the Alpha-Omega is older. There have been so many planets-galaxies-universes that the æons run together somewhat, and the original kernel of existence is but a mote in the unrelenting endlessness of time. If the Creator-that-may-not-be knows differently or can clearly recall who it was who first emerged to greet his other and equal, to begin that first of partnerships, He is not saying. Since beginningless time death has thrived in the voids and the darkness and the space between vibrant, thriving life, and God has long since forgotten how not to depend on that force which He considers to be His other half and perfect equal. By His own reckoning, He created Death, and Death will reap Him. So: nothing to remark upon. The trillions upon trillions upon countless, endless, nigh-meaningless deaths of His own worshipers and haters and the countless who never knew a kind of god have blurred into a dull throb that long since quieted to a constant, simmering, easily ignored presence. One more death, anywhere, of anything (no matter how large) is as a drop of water in the ocean.
Somewhere, Gabriel falls dead, and God takes notice.
There's a pause, a gasp, a record-scratch of time punctuated by a glass slipping from lax fingers and falling falling crash in a gorgeous Little Bang of shining glass and clear-as-crystal vodka. As a little bearded man drops His glass with a wholly ignored shatter a sheaf of papers falls from his hand, dropping neglected to the vodka spill and even a minute later, after clear alcohol has seeped into the pages and run the black ink beyond recognition He does nothing.
There's a sense of time to be understood here; a certain change of perspective part and parcel with omniscience. Time is a toy to be played with, a path to walk and cheat on and loop around, and sometimes to stop and sit in the dirt and play cards on. He is standing at a railing on the roof of a tower in a shining silver-steel-crystal city spun out into the sky where the atmosphere opens to the heaven, and Earth itself in this age is as limited as phones and radio and smoke signals once were in those sad little dark ages. It is the twilight of World War Ten and He is in the most beautiful city in the world since Pompeii; it's twenty minutes before the bars close on the eve of an election on a rainy autumn night in Bethlehem, and a baby is crying. At any moment there is Every moment, and is it a wonder that God stands to the side unmoving? To change one tiniest spark of action or thread of reality would cause a cataclysm of parental hovering and catastrophic I told you so and He can't. He was conscientiously objecting before the Quakers ever made it cool.
But in this moment a writer in Maryland stops and stares into cool nothingness, and feels a bright light go out like a physical pain that hits Him hard. Have you ever had an asthma attack? Have you ever been deprived of breath? Not just in the breathless, nervous-or-about-to-be-kissed sense; in the real, existentially terrifying sense of not knowing whether the next breath you take will be enough to keep you alive. It robs one of their feet, stability, their faith in their own body and their place in this universe, and this writer in Maryland feels that through to His bones and a deeper place that would drive most of us mad from the revelation.
Somewhere, Gabriel has died, and He has felt it. Once now He has felt and acted upon the death of an angelic child, but never- never did it feel like this, like the icy hand of death closing around his own lungs. Sometimes, interference is the only option.
He finds a thick, tangled, sticky rope of unreality and pulls.
When: Immediately after the events of "Hammer of the Gods"
What: Resurrection, and rare moments of active fatherhood.
With a snap and a twist, a Coyote falls dead. Anansi, the Raven, that old fool genius. The wingéd thing beyond time.
Death, it is said, is the only being older than the ever-powerful Almighty Himself. He and Death have sat down before, for the omnipotent immortal version of shooting the shit over beers, and after so much time the Horseman-who-is-so-much-more can't be said to remember whether he or the Alpha-Omega is older. There have been so many planets-galaxies-universes that the æons run together somewhat, and the original kernel of existence is but a mote in the unrelenting endlessness of time. If the Creator-that-may-not-be knows differently or can clearly recall who it was who first emerged to greet his other and equal, to begin that first of partnerships, He is not saying. Since beginningless time death has thrived in the voids and the darkness and the space between vibrant, thriving life, and God has long since forgotten how not to depend on that force which He considers to be His other half and perfect equal. By His own reckoning, He created Death, and Death will reap Him. So: nothing to remark upon. The trillions upon trillions upon countless, endless, nigh-meaningless deaths of His own worshipers and haters and the countless who never knew a kind of god have blurred into a dull throb that long since quieted to a constant, simmering, easily ignored presence. One more death, anywhere, of anything (no matter how large) is as a drop of water in the ocean.
Somewhere, Gabriel falls dead, and God takes notice.
There's a pause, a gasp, a record-scratch of time punctuated by a glass slipping from lax fingers and falling falling crash in a gorgeous Little Bang of shining glass and clear-as-crystal vodka. As a little bearded man drops His glass with a wholly ignored shatter a sheaf of papers falls from his hand, dropping neglected to the vodka spill and even a minute later, after clear alcohol has seeped into the pages and run the black ink beyond recognition He does nothing.
There's a sense of time to be understood here; a certain change of perspective part and parcel with omniscience. Time is a toy to be played with, a path to walk and cheat on and loop around, and sometimes to stop and sit in the dirt and play cards on. He is standing at a railing on the roof of a tower in a shining silver-steel-crystal city spun out into the sky where the atmosphere opens to the heaven, and Earth itself in this age is as limited as phones and radio and smoke signals once were in those sad little dark ages. It is the twilight of World War Ten and He is in the most beautiful city in the world since Pompeii; it's twenty minutes before the bars close on the eve of an election on a rainy autumn night in Bethlehem, and a baby is crying. At any moment there is Every moment, and is it a wonder that God stands to the side unmoving? To change one tiniest spark of action or thread of reality would cause a cataclysm of parental hovering and catastrophic I told you so and He can't. He was conscientiously objecting before the Quakers ever made it cool.
But in this moment a writer in Maryland stops and stares into cool nothingness, and feels a bright light go out like a physical pain that hits Him hard. Have you ever had an asthma attack? Have you ever been deprived of breath? Not just in the breathless, nervous-or-about-to-be-kissed sense; in the real, existentially terrifying sense of not knowing whether the next breath you take will be enough to keep you alive. It robs one of their feet, stability, their faith in their own body and their place in this universe, and this writer in Maryland feels that through to His bones and a deeper place that would drive most of us mad from the revelation.
Somewhere, Gabriel has died, and He has felt it. Once now He has felt and acted upon the death of an angelic child, but never- never did it feel like this, like the icy hand of death closing around his own lungs. Sometimes, interference is the only option.
He finds a thick, tangled, sticky rope of unreality and pulls.