This Isn't About Reya

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Shadow in the Woods watched Reya reenter the city gates.

Then, he slithered back into the shade of the trees. His cloak melded with the darkness; he became the forest once again.

Flitting between the trees, formless and unshapen, he considered his options.

They were close. It was nearly time. But they needed to wait for Michael.

But they were so very close.

Azrael stood in the center of his clearing, tall and obsidian, a monolith to the snow. 

He reached up with his taloned hands, gingerly hooking the cloak around his human face. He pulled it back; his gnashing, scything mandibles jittered their way out of the cloth. He felt the air spike his bony head with cold, and it invigorated him.

He stared down at the snow beneath him. The cloak fell to the ground in a heap. 

He let the cold air permeate his body. 

A deep inhalation. The smell of pine, cold, the rotting bodies of the spiders, iron blood, and something else. Olives?

Azrael looked down at the cloak on the snowy forest floor. Slowly, it sunk through the snow, melting through and around it. It disappeared under the cover of white.

Azrael's human face smiled with delight.

Then, as the cloak before him, he sunk silently through the snow.

All that remained in the clearing were corpses.

******

The silence in the woods remained.

The stillness, however, did not.

The clouds shifted overhead, a ceaseless, churning mass of particles, insectoid, parasitic. They cast waves of shadows on the sparkling snow of the clearing.

The setting sun never truly appeared, but its dull light sometimes seeped through a few layers of cloud cover, making some spots a little brighter than others.

The pale spiders steamed in the snow.

Without noise, the clearing awoke.

Dozens of ghostly black forms melted upwards through the snow. They swam through the air as shades, converging on the bodies of the spiders. They were massive, hulking like their father. They had no mandibles, but black horns curled upward from their heads; their human faces contorted wordlessly.

They had far too many fingers on their hands.

The snow did not shift. And as the shades reached the corpses - as their bony fingers ripped into the carapaces, through the shell, into the squishing meat of the spiders - the wind did not answer them.

The forest feasted. Blue blood spattered the snow. Slowly, it melted below the surface; the snow remained undisturbed. 

Nothing spoke in the woods.

Not even the air stirred.

The shades silently devoured. Then, they sank below the snow once again.

The clearing in the middle of the forest was clean.

There was no sign of the horror that had just occurred.

Dragotsennost' slept, and the forest did not quiver.

Instead, only space wept quietly into the dawning night.

******

Azrael perched amongst the branches of his tallest trees, bathing himself in the cloud-filtered moonlight that appeared between snowing gusts. The night was total, now. 

His eyes perused the great walls of Dragotsennost', stalwart defenders against the threats of Aquilo-Nix.

His amusement was plain to behold.

He flexed his mandibles against the night air. 

His path was simple now.

The girl had to die.

But how to draw her back out of the city?

"The timing must be perfect," Azrael said to the night and to the trees. "She must arrive as Michael topples the Five. When the Five are dethroned, then we can invade the Cold Place."

His explanation carried on the wind, and the wind went nowhere that the Nephilim did not heed it fly.

Instead, it sank to the clearing beneath him. It, too, melted into the snow. Below it.

"And when we invade the Cold Place," Azrael hummed, "then we will unbury our reckoning."

The night air churned around him like an ocean, fumbling over itself in waves of snow and wind.

"We will use the girl to bait Michael, and once we slay him, nothing will halt us from awaking the First."

Beneath him, the clearing began to chatter. Whispers of the conquest to come filtered up through the branches and the breeze. 

The Nephilim hungered. 

Azrael's eyes locked onto the gates of the city, closed for the night. 

"And so," he said, "we begin."

He leapt from his perch like a bolt of lightning, dark and intangible, streaking out of the woods and into the snow drifts ahead of the gates.

His powers grew every day. He was inescapable, now.

He clambered over the wall like a shadow and dropped into an alley in the poor district. He allowed his aura to seep into the city, and in no time, he found the essence of a suitable host.

It was in the upper district, but not far. 

Excellent.

He performed his task with efficiency and was soon clambering back over the wall with his newest addition.

The boy was about the same age as the girl, with a flop of blond hair and milky green eyes.

Azrael brought him back to the clearing and laid him in the center of the circle of snow.

He watched the boy's unconscious body sink through the ground.

He heard the chitters of approval from below.

And he smiled.