Ascension

Chapter 5

Falak and I exited the House of the Chriot just as evening meal bells begin to chime, the white streets and ivory buildings near blinding to my previously grey stricken eyes.

When leaving the Firmament, I didn't feel the general relief and happiness I did when normally reaching Heaven. 

All I could think of were Sister Murrays eyes, her pleading voice. 

Her boney thin hands clutching me. 

Something of the Sending had such an echo of wrongness to it.

My stomach churned, and despite it being evening meal time, I was not wishing to participate. I walked alongside Falak, silent and in thought. She said something, but I had trouble catching the light conversation and eventually we were both lapsed into an uneasy silence.

Did Principalities ever do a Sending? 

I rather doubted it. In Heaven, I had never witnessed a Sending. We would be announced of someone who had went to be with God, not to serve as a higher Angel, but as the spirit they had become. Then, in the following days prayer, everyone in attendance would do the prayer of a Sending. 

A shudder ran through me, as the large grey machine with the resounding sound of the door closing echoed in my mind-surely all the Firmament must have heard such a loud noise.

On Earth, all goodbyes had been that of caskets, and sand being dug deep to send the bodies to the Earth that they had resided their lives on. 

As we walk to The Church, my having claimed fasting as Falak ordered a variation of my earlier meal, I close my eyes, exhausted, as I recall the burial of my father. 

I had been very young, it was a sharp memory warped with time and of my age then, but I still could pull it if need be. 

The hills had backed our city, purple as they always were, an evening sun setting an angry emerald between the mounds of sand. The yellow sands of our lands also were what made up that of our villages, and it served doubly that day to house my father for eternity. 

I had dim memories of my father- most of my time spent with my mother and her sister. I recall his soft voice, one that could coax an injured A'Antwanii back to the stables before vicious Ellocks could lay threat to any of their lives, of a time I had fallen-hard-and my arm had needed to be bound. 

Guilty, I realized it had been long since I had thought of him. No longer did I feel pain at his loss, much had happened since I had time to ponder, or even reason. Even my mother, with her sharp thin frame much like my own, dark eyes and darker hair rarely visited me in my thoughts.

Only the lessons she had grilled into me for as long as I could recall.

"They are not of human nature," she always whispered, always forbade my repeating of such thing in my lighter childish voice," you will know when you see them. And it is them you must assert yourself among, never be a sacrifice. Keep your wits about you- the Holy Water will do much to muddle you. If you do manage as such- you will need to exercise wit- a rarity of those in Heaven."

But where my mother had been sharp, commanding-almost angry, my father had been all her opposites.

His red hair had been thinner than her thick tresses, sprouting round his face and most his head forgetting the peak in a growing falter through the years. His arms were naturally wide as were his chest and cheeks, all terminally sucken in with the constant work and even more constant hunger.

"You are doing well - you are a natural Ayira," he had murmured to me often," you must have gentle hands to harness gentle creatures. But not so gentle that they do not convey what it is that needs to be done."