Time has not been on my side during my week here. I have yet to complete my ultimate task. It isn’t that it’s too difficult, nor is it that I don’t wish to do it. It’s much more trivial than that.
I sighed and flipped the page. Repositioning myself, I continued to read, letting my eyes sweep down the horribly bland and error ridden page of the twentieth essay of the afternoon.
My time has been unwaveringly consumed by these terribly tedious human tasks.
I finished the last page, flipped the stapled paper to the front and promptly scribbled a large F on the top. I placed it on the pile I dubbed “finished” on the right side of the desk and began the next one.
I don’t understand why humans teach their young this way. Keeping them cooped up and making them write down their unimportant thoughts that only one person besides themselves will ever read. My kind take our young at the age of about eight human years to Acerbus, a wasteland island, in groups of about thirty and leave them there for the equivalent of five human years. Then we return and if our child survived, they are considered Vixi; able to survive on their own and have their own children. And then the cycle continues.
I believe that here it is called learning the hard way.
“Mr. Malum?”
I looked up from the current paper.
“Um,” The student shifted their backpack stuffed with textbooks to the other shoulder, “You said that the quiz grade would be online yesterday and I checked last night and it wasn’t.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. Yet another thing I had forgotten to do.
I smiled charmingly, “I will do it tonight. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.”
The student nodded and left.
The solitude of the suddenly empty room and the lulling mixture of sounds of life passing by down the hallway as the students were set free drew my mind back to Ducis, and the old familiar grand, white marble hall. The sunlight was warm through the massive stained glass windows. The ceiling arched majestically multiple times, high above my head.
“You’re sending me to earth?” I asked him, my words echoing in the immense empty space.
“You are to utilize this human’s body to seek out, collect and destroy The Exordium. He is the most resourceful host we could find. He happens to have a key to the room in which it is kept. Simple enough?”
The Exordium was known by the humans as the Book of the Angels. Written in Enochian, they hadn’t yet deciphered it, but were they ever to, they would be able to travel to what they call Heaven without leaving their shells; their bodies. It was written before it was decided that all angels would be marked with Clavis, the key, upon their arm. That decision rendered the book unnecessary.
I accepted my task.
Time folded and unfolded and by the time my mind stopped wandering, I was ascending the steps to my house. Upon entering the living room and hanging my keys up by the coats, I saw, reclining on my couch, Ducis himself.
He swirled a glass of something, wine perhaps.
“I’m starting to think I should have chosen a different person for this task.”
I sighed, flipped open my messenger bag and carefully removed a dust-jacket covered book kept sealed in yet another plastic cover. Bound thickly and heavy though it had few pages packed with tight script; unmistakably antique.
He lifted his eyebrows and sipped his drink with a grin, “So you managed it after all.”
“Indeed.” I handed it delicately to him and took a seat across from him.
