She emerged from the tremors in a light that was as dark as it was blinding. Her form lurched forward unwavering, oblivious to the boisterous gales that emerged from the tears in the clouds and began howling across the ravine. A pair of wings, unyielding and fit for a being twice her size, held at full span and alleviated her descent.

The thundering bellows of the black heavens reverberated between the particles around me. I could feel my cells shiver and grow skittish as they shifted in their atomic positions. Clouds began to swell and congeal, growing wet and inky in appearance—a state of matter that defied all understanding of what a state of matter should be. 

And as the sky transformed, the thundering, arid bellows resorted to rigid vibrations against globulated surfaces—fearsome screeches and abyssal wails that dug deep through my chest and disturbed my core, threatening the presence of all that made me human.

I stood firm, no longer by unruly desire but by sentient terror—a force that sought to sink its claws into the unexplored depths of my being by command from the woman above. She had come for me. I felt it in every part of my body, every state of mind, every reality I could live—she had come for me. 

As she approached, the black clouds began to disperse in a nature akin to the force that rooted me where I stood. In them was the will of the angel and the power that she wielded. The inky matter funneled itself into mesmerizing displays of interweaving tubules, each tracing its own delicately rehearsed path through the air to create a choreographed rainfall; some collided in uninterrupted fervor while others split into numerous branches that offered hypnotic dances of their own.

***

She was closer now. And as the world trembled and mutated, she remained constant. Her form unaffected still by the squall around her as if she were in a reality separate from the one she chose to bend and rupture—a being painted by a dimension untamed. I could feel my blood begin to blister.

The wings that grew from her shoulders, while fiendish in shape, were covered in thick, weathered patches of wine-stained feathers, displaying a lustrous array of dark reds and browns touched by the faintest strands of pulsating gold. Her once-lavish white vestments, now mangled and bloodstained, draped over the curves of her maidenly figure, loose-fitting and deviant in display, she bore the body of an angel coveted by demons. Faded silvery-blonde hair drenched in coagulated blood and fertile earth fell in every direction below her shoulders, sticking to her ashen skin. 

Legs gently bent at the knee, her feet were suspended like she had been an offering to something that was feared more than herself. A pair of soot-smeared arms fell to her hips, hands open and inviting, as innocent and chastened as her lower half. Another set of arms raised to either side of her head, palms facing to her rear while taloned fingers contorted and performed a series of hexing motions.

***

She harbored the face of a woman moulded by the heavens but sculpted by darkness. And I’d have believed she were only a dream had it not been for the eyes that gazed upon me. Outlined by dried cruor darker than crimson, her pupils were the color of saturated ash and the irises glinted of dormant embers, ready to bring about a conflagration to the world around her. They called out to me in tongues of fire and blood. With every flash came a deepening lust to replace my reality with hers, though I did not know from what reality she was born. 

Her advance turned disbelief to understanding, fear to sympathy. As I looked into her eyes my desire to escape shifted to one of embrace. I witnessed her pain and turmoil as if they were mine—a woman of grace tormented by animus...but empowered by it. For it was now I realized that perhaps she was not in shackles but unbound and all-taking; perhaps she was the darkness and I was her sculpture. The writhing tentacles of her psyche had subjugated my consciousness as her thoughts...her voice...her very existence—obscured my own.

Ixh’reya.

Her name shook the fibers of my mind just as her will had shaken the matter around me. She was the angel of blood, and she had come for me.