The Morningstar Brigade

Chapter 6

VI

URIEL

A.E.F. 175

Uriel's Bedroom, Sanctuary

Heat spiked through Uriel's frame as his eyes shot open, his body leaping to its feet on instinct alone. A piercing, desparate wail reverberated through the walls of his room and echoed in his skull. His arms tightened in anticipation, his still-ringing ears waiting to see if the grim cantata would see an encore.

Uriel was no longer the young boy he once was. The child that fell from the sky had grown into a seventeen-year-old male laden with a set of lean (if undeveloped) muscle and broadened shoulders. His head was covered with a shock of carefree brown hair hanging just above his eyes and just against his ears, though his streak of silver hair had stubbornly remained. The cool grey of his eyes shone brightly as the soft light of the evening streamed through his window and onto his face. That face, though tense with energy and dotted by sweat, still betrayed a good heart with its gentle features softening the hardened lines of jaw and cheek he had inherited with age. He was inexplicably the spitting and perhaps even haunting image of Eli, despite no blood running between the two. And yet even as he seemingly bore the Fisher's visage, this simple comparison missed a streak of something else, something distinct and set apart and wild running through his frame from head to toe. Despite this strain of other coursing through him, he was still like so many others: A boy standing somewhere in the gap between son and man.

A sharp yelp of pain once again pierced through the overwhelming silence of the night. It was the same shriek that had awoken Uriel from his slumber. It cut against the peace of the cool air with a screeching oppression, the shrill and then whimpering cry making Uriel's burning blood run cold. It was unlike any noise that Eden had heard; a pained scrape against the tranquil tapestry of the blank, black sky. On the third howl, Uriel quickly threw on a pair of pajama pants and cautiously opened his door, shuffling out into the parsonage hall to find the source of the dark chorus.

The passageways of the aging Sanctuary estate attached to the chapel were worn with time and draped in the night's shadows like a haunting costume. The sinister hour transformed banisters into prison bars and unlit lanterns into the inmates of these dour cells. The sound had clearly come from outside, but it had rung in Uriel's ear as if the beast was screeching right beside him. As if he was supposed to hear. And so Uriel crept carefully through the weary corridors of his home, those chambers now turned alien and cruel by the phantoms of the frightened mind. Each creak of the wood was an invitation to the monstrous, each ginger placement of the hand an invitation to attack. All the while, the pained cry repeated its cutting torture in Uriel's mind.

At last arriving at the doorframe just before Eli's room, Uriel paused. He breathed out slowly, feeling his pulse and shaking his head miserably at how he'd been reduced to a scared child crawling to his father's bedroom. He turned and cast an eye back towards his side of the home, considering that perhaps he was simply losing his mind or in some lucid nightmare. Then the feral shriek ripped through the silence yet again, assuring Uriel of his course. He reached for the knob and threw open the door, quickly sliding inside.

On the bed, as one would expect, lay Eli. He was bare, save for the fortunate placement of a sheet and pillow. The room was a torrent of disorder, and the chaotic cot was no exception. Cloths and clothes lay strewn all about the room, the blankets themselves nothing less than a maelstrom of gentle white silk whipped into a violent torrent encircling the Fisher's frame. Uriel paused as the soft light of evening fell over Eli's chest, the cool streaks of silver revealing a network of brutal punctures, cuts, burns and a host of unidentifiable wounds. The man's beaten body betrayed the kinder marks of a cheerful smile and the wrinkles of eager eyes. Uriel would find a time to ask about these wounds, these violent records that perhaps told more than any story from the past of this man he thought he knew, but now was not that moment.