Angel Tongue

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Outside, it was getting dark. The sunset's russet hues had long melted away, giving into the dark blue and indigo that now streaked across the sky, a sure sign of how much time had passed since he locked himself in his room. The wide window's view was divided into two, the top half of it drenched in the deep colors of the evening, and the lower half bathed in shadow, dark and cold, just like how he felt. The unassuming fireplace at the far end of the chamber was lit for the first time ever, and he was witness to how it had suddenly glowed, undisturbed, as though noticing how down he was. The gentle warmth that it exuded however, went unnoticed by Isaac, who felt nothing but the eerie combination of freezing cold and searing heat that permeated his entire being. Neither did he take notice of the sights outside, for though he was in that room physically, his mind was in a different place.

It was in that space of a moment, suspended in the air, reliving how the light hit the lines of his sight, how the cold and heat invaded him even then. It was floating in nothingness, milling about the universe in its annihilated state, its broken pieces pulling him in all different directions. It was several days ago, shrouded by the shadows of a dim hallway, looking into a scene it was not supposed to be seeing into.

And then the light shifted, and it glared down on him like a vengeful host of fire from the heavens, and the faun looked upon him, the disdain clearly painted on the creases of his expression, thick strokes of disgust, of undiluted accusation that cracked as he bared his long arbored teeth. Then he was being pinned to a wall, and he could feel the ghost of his windpipe closing, struggling to pull air into his system. But that was merely a ghost. It was now with a distracted disinterest that that he regarded this. It was the words though, that escaped the creature's mouth that chilled his bones.

"I can smell the darkness in you. Do not deny it."

He watched the faun's lips move, hard with tempered rage, as the cold spread in his toes, rendering them useless, and the fire lit itself in his heart, creating a burning that ate through his insides and left him hollow, a shell of a body, not even human, not even one being.

He knew. Aesculus knew all along. He saw right through the elaborate, twisting lie that even Isaac believed, the lie that fooled even the smartest of the Manus Dei, that fooled even the man and woman who raised him from infancy. He wondered if it was Haniel who wove it into being, if beneath the golden curls that were matted with rain, she hid a dark core that connived to overthrow everything else around it.

But who was he? What was he?

His mind wandered again, pulling him into the confines of the cell that had plagued his dreams repeatedly. It was as cold as ever, as dark, as grimy as it had always been. The sound of dripping fluid still echoed through its four walls, but now, there was no movement that signified the presence of a prisoner. Dark red pools of blood emerged from the damp of the ground, but there was no source in sight: no feet so filled with blisters that there was barely any skin left, no legs so thin that they were basically a collection of bones draped with sheets of skin, no more tattered cloth, no more dented armor.

Was there really anymore an Isaac? Did he even exist at all? Or was he just another lie, another mystery that was taught to walk and live and feel and made to think itself human?

Blood of an angel. Blood of a demon. Blood of a bargaining chip.

A little more than a week ago, if somebody had told him that there was a world aside from what he knew, a world where the Scripture was fact and not just a collection of dusty metaphors for virtue, where good and evil were real, were tangible creations, where humans were not the most destructive beings that walked the earth, he would have happily disproved every claim with logic. Because logically, it could never had happened the way it was said to, despite what the rest of the people believed. Logically, demons and angels and devils and a superior race of humans gifted with supernatural abilities by He Himself were not supposed to exist. The faun that knew he was dark from the start was not supposed to exist. The Sanctuary itself was not supposed to exist in the way it did.