In His Image: Askes and Armes
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In which an Indian goddess rebuilds something that used to be an archangel.
Kali, Gabriel.
askes [n] (Middle English): ashes.
armes [n] (Middle English, also spelt harmes): arms; weapons, either physical or spiritual, or means of spiritual defence; Christes armes: representations of objects associated with the Crucifixion (cross, crown of thorns, scourges, etc.) as holy items or relics, with the implication that in wounding Christ they brought about his triumph and resurrection.
A burnt feather. A vial of blood. Two archangel blades, one made manifest by an the hand of an archangel and one by the hand of a trickster from a can of diet orange Slice. And, least important, the lifeless body of a small man with eyes that had held something of the sun. The relics of an archangel.
Of course, Abraham’s religions had always set great store by relics.
It could work for her.
She smoothed the tiger skin under her bare knees with two hands, and reached for the blood and the feather with the other two.
A papal decree had been passed, back in the ninth century, stating that no Christian church could truly be a church unless there was a relic set in the altar. She had rarely left India in those days, but the trade routes to the West were long. She remembered the profits ingenious men had made of the sudden demand for fragments of their holy folk. Anyone who could spin a good story to a Westerner around a vial of dirty water (“the tears of Saint Faux when he looked upon the godless shores of the Orient!”), or a sliver of wood (“from the wheel of Saint Catherine, brought here in missionary zeal by Saint Bogus before he was slaughtered by heathens!”), could be a rich man for life. To her certain knowledge, Loki had set a few of those wild stories into circulation himself.
Every relic, they insisted, contained the complete saint by holy mystery. Even the body and blood of their Christ-prophet, according to the religion of Rome, was supposed to be literally and completely present in their holy bread, impossibly and absolutely present in every wafer in every church in Christendom and simultaneously entire and corporeal in Heaven at their God’s right hand.
Her skin glowed black.
There was a good deal more of the archangel left in one feather than there had ever been of Saint Bartholomew in the jawbone of a pig.
And he was bound to her by his blood. She might be a feeble shadow in this new world, but she had been Creator and Destroyer, ruler of time and death. They could bend for her a little today.
His blood was too hot as she tipped it into her mouth, more alive than the sun. It burned, too heavy, too great, past what she could be or encompass. But she was as she was, and she could endure the scourge and the boasts of Westerners’ blood-soaked religions.
She took the feather in her mouth, crushed it to bitter dust between her teeth and her tongue, and let the ashes mingle with the blood. It prickled and stung and squirmed. Blood lit her eyes red. She would not choke.
She took up the blades and danced.
She could barely tell the difference between the blades herself, even now she knew. But if she concentrated, one felt more powerful, more deep, more weighty, in a way that had nothing to do with the rules of the physical world.
That was the fake, naturally. The archangel’s sword was simply beyond her comprehension. That was the one that might help her survive the coming war.
She had known before she called him to Elysian Fields. She had been watching the human vessels, and her curiosity had been piqued by a familiar elusive presence always flickering nearby. Toying with powerful men through the mediæval relic trade was one thing - almost everything in Western culture had had some tie to religion until the last century or two, and the relic trade had been, at heart, pure commercialism. But Loki, so far as she knew, had always steered well clear of anything truly concerned with the religions centred on his father - Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and all their strange multifarious offshoots - and of the creatures at the heart of all of them. This showdown was the last thing she would have expected him to tamper with, if he had been only what he pretended to be.
She disliked debts.
Her bare feet twisted and spun, pressing soft and weighted into pale blue tiles. Old, old magic, far beyond the reach of human memory, her body describing shapes and sigils in three dimensions. The quiet, perilous rhythm of her feet seized time by the throat and bound it in counterpoint.
But the angel was older.
She reached out with the hands that were not holding his swords and pulled his empty body onto the skin of the tiger, between her naked legs. One foot by either lifeless hip, looking down at a mouth that ought to curl into smug, untrustworthy warmth, and eyes that used to shine like nothing she knew. She bent her knees, knelt over his ribs, and pushed his mouth open with her scorched and shuddering lips. The jawbone, stiffening into hardened muscle with the slow advance of death, creaked and surrendered to the inexorable press of her thumb under his ear. Blood, his and a little of hers, trickled into the gaped mouth.
A kiss to awaken a sleeping angel.
She drew back, pulled in air, then pressed forward into his useless mouth again and blew air and dust of feathers down his throat.
His chest heaved.
He hadn’t needed air before. But she could not create such a being.
His eyes, when they opened, were the dull colour of dirty old honey, and his voice was a rasp.
“Hello, sugar.”
Kali smiled, slow. “No.”
Loki - the angel - shifted a little between her knees, a stiff roll of the shoulders against cold tiles, testing his physicality. The movement was aborted with a grimace that almost resembled a casual grin. “Didn’t - didn’t expect to see you again.”
She studied him. His breathing was painful, a conscious drag of air into unfamiliar lungs. Blood was starting to move in his veins, sluggish at first. He’d be flooded with the sensation within a minute. An angel with pins and needles. Wasn’t that something.
“I’m sentimental.”
His mouth curved, properly this time, a faint echo of fond, familiar humour. “Oh, you really aren’t, honeycakes.”
There were depths within his eyes that she didn’t know.
And now all these memories of the religions of his Creator as something outside, something foreign and queer, they were all to be re-considered, all different, even in those centuries before they took her people from her. Because of him. He had been there all the time. There had been no golden age before her world was touched by them. If there was anything she could not forgive, it would be that.
He winced and squirmed again, as if his body was a strange thing.
She stared down at him, remote and dark. “Your God does not change.” There was something strange and quiet in her own voice that she did not mean to put there.
“Kali, am I... in pain?”
An archangel between her knees, asking her.
“You don’t know pain?”
Loki - he, it - gave her a martyred pout, almost playful. He was rebuilding his defences on the inside, becoming more familiar and less knowable. “It’s been a while. Doesn’t happen very often in my line.”
She ran her eyes over his body, finding herself unwilling to move off him and therefore remaining where she was, because nobody had ever made her do anything she did not want to do. The aura of pain clung to every limb, throbbing around the joints and pulsing strong around his head. The pain of returning life, perhaps of new limitations.
“Most beings would experience pain after being stabbed by your lamp-bearing brother.”
Most beings had, including some who were more hers than this one - the Liesmith - could ever be. The words came out bitter. Few gods ever truly died, but fewer still came back easily, or unchanged.
He stilled, tilted his head like a curious hawk and studied her. His eyes, even drawn in pain, were too inscrutably normal, too human, for her to guess at. But there was something of curious wonder in his voice. “You gave me back my blood.”
She had surprised him? Or he was letting her think it.
“I don’t want anything of yours, archangel. Not your blood. Not your debt. Not your... magnanimity.” She let the irony linger on her scalded tongue. From the Latin, the language dedicated to his god for longer than she had consciously existed. Greatness of soul. The one thing his father had denied his kind. And in its stead, grace - that she could never restore, and he knew it.
The rest of it - what he chose to be, what he chose to become, what he chose to rebuild - was entirely up to him. He would learn that for himself. In time.
Something tightened at the corner of his mouth, though it curved ironic and fond. “Sooo... how’s that whole Apocalypse shebang coming on?”
She smiled sweetly and ran her fingers over his bare shoulder, stilling the pain for a moment, then letting it flare brighter than before. A promise, or a warning, of what she was. Men had cowered before her and begged. He just looked up at her expectantly, bright and immortally mortal.
She aimed for contemptuous, and was not quite sure she managed it. “It’s your Apocalypse, my pet. You tell me.”
His eyes narrowed a little, although it might have been only another grimace - his voice was still light. “More than half of me is missing, Kali. I don’t even know where we are.”
She stood abruptly and stared down at him, sprawled on a tiger skin, barely in control of his own limbs. There was something very familiar about this - the powerful masculine being apparently helpless beneath her feet, her four arms curving without her intention into the familiar formal posture of victory in which she adorned so many temples. But in none of his forms was this being Shiva. This was one of the first sons of the Abrahamic father, all the more so because his face was now a perfect smug mask of Loki and she could see not a glimpse of the weight behind his eyes. He had not blown the horn, but neither had he stepped up against his brothers until it was too late, until he was compelled to it.
It was his Apocalypse. And he dared rebuke her.
She crossed her arms and stared back, cold as the souls locked outside Time.
“You think I can fashion one of your god’s archangels?”
“Hey.” His voice softened, rich and rough, and he made some attempt to push himself to sit up before giving up and just lifting a shaking arm toward her. “I missed you. And - thanks.”
I miss someone I never knew. Impulsive. Sentimental. Too much time spent around humans.
She inclined her head slightly, regal.
He grinned at her, bright and shameless. He hadn’t heard what she hadn’t said. He couldn’t, of course.
Loki - the angel, who wasn’t - grimaced, the showy expression of one resigning himself to something unpleasant, and turned on the roguish charm. “Sooo... since I’m guessing you and my little bro wouldn’t get on, give the Winchesters a yell for me, would you?”
He was no part of her world, but he and his would destroy it. They already had. And of course he turned to the angels as soon as he was restored.
Like father, like son, it seemed.
“It wasn’t your father who brought you back, Gabriel.”
She walked out and left him lying on an old tiger skin by a pile of disintegrating buoys, in an abandoned swimming complex in the middle of Alberta.
The swords of archangel and trickster she left on the chilly tiles behind her.
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