She stood in front of the full length mirror, as she always did at times like these. Her riding boots had been kicked off at the door. Slowly, she pealed her leather pants from her shapely legs. Her trademark leather jacket fell next with a soft thwump on the carpeted bedroom floor. Next the badly torn red blouse was removed and dropped in a pile with the rest. Finally, her black bra fell to the ground freeing her pert, full breasts resembling ripe melons dipped in chocolate and tipped in Hershey’s kisses.
Snow surveyed her cuts and bruises across her torso and arms with disdain. There were more on her back that she could feel but not see. She hadn’t earned these. These markings were only the result of an explosion she did not sense would happen soon enough. The others would call her careless, possibly even sloppy, but she didn’t care. The others hadn’t been trapped here in this place. The others hadn’t been chained to a reality for time untold.
She closed her eyes and murmured a few indistinguishable words into the silence of her large, empty home. There was nothing in this particularly large room save a remarkably large, lavish bed adorned in all white, and this one mirror. The sizzling and crackling of burning flesh soon replaced the silence and echoed throughout the space. Her wounds burned, glowed bright white and sealed perfectly as if they were never there. She inhaled deeply and exhaled.
With the expulsion of her breath, intricate curled and curved patterns glowed whitest white against her dark skin like celestial flame, moving and breathing with a life all their own before settling like a full body tattoo. That was much better. With a long, deep stretch, she unfolded her shimmering, majestic wings into this reality. They were the same stark white of her markings, gleaming with their own natural light. She cherished her natural form, or as close to it as she could get in this horrible place.
“You should close the windows dearest Hasira, before you spread your wings.” A calm, assuring voice evaded her space and her mind simultaneously.
“Have you not heard Faraji? I am called Snow White in this lifetime.”
A man appeared just behind her in the reflection of the mirror. He towered over her frame. His body was marked with similar patterns to Hasira’s. His however were etched in the onyx, and gleamed like hot stone against his mahogany skin. His pupils glowed with the same onyx heat. Many thin locks fell down his back and swayed between his broad shoulders, literally weaved with the purest of gold that there was no description for in the many tongues of man. His sinewy, muscled body was covered only by a black wrap hung low around his hips.
“Only in your labors are you called by that name. It has not been many lifetimes since I have seen you last, and I have kept watch as I always do.” Faraji said in a voice so soothing that Snow must fight the urge to wrap herself in her many feathered wings and fall asleep. She stifled a yawn, but only just barely.
“You are in need of rest.” Faraji’s voice was laden with sorrow.
“Clearly” she quipped at the winged apparition, opposite her in almost every way.
“Why are you here Faraji? What business does and angel of peace have with an angel of war in these times? You were named for comfort, I was named for wrath. Unless you are here to release me from my sentence, I can’t imagine what you want.” Her annoyance was clear, and all the more painful for Faraji. Had she truly forgotten his purpose?
Faraji heaved a slow, and always placid, sigh. “Must we always dance this dance Hasira? I know what you are as you know what I am. We both have our duties. You were never meant to be left here, but is an honorable duty no less.”
“Says the one whose body has not been susceptible to the lusts of flesh and all that it encompasses for the last several millennia. I have been stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, drowned, burned and suffocated, all without the ability to die. You know that while we are here we can feel as they do. You have no idea what it means to war for these beings.”
Faraji offered a knowing smile, “No, I do not. That is not my duty. I exists to help them find peace. You war for their right to exist Hasira, but you enjoy it. You are a warrior Angel. You grow stronger with each battle. You destroy darkness with no effort. You exist to deliver wrath wherever you are sent. Let us not also forget, that had it not been for your own decision so long ago, you would not have been left here.”
Hasira rubbed the image of an apple seared to her neck. It was her torment. Depending on where and when on this Earth she resided, the image would morph and change into that society’s interpretation of her shame. In times past it was a jar, and then it was a box. It had been many forms of fruit throughout the ages, but here in America of the new millennium, it was an apple.
She was a warrior angel; she and her brother in arms Sefu were charged with protecting the Garden and its inhabitants. They had failed. Ever since those early days, when this Earth was still young, the Congo, as it was now called, was a very dangerous place to be for beings both spiritual and of the flesh.
Sefu had been bound to the Garden for so long as it existed, fighting off all the darkness that filtered into this world through it and through that first, oh cursed of trees. Hasira had been bound to war with any and all that escaped her brother’s axe, and there were many, despite his valiance. He was simply outnumbered. She was saddened by remembering his burden and just how great it was.
“Do not mourn for your brother Hasira. It was he who caused the distraction that led you here. Despite his indiscretions, the light has also found pity upon him and has sent him comfort over the years.”
“I know” Hasira sealed her dark brown eyes.
Like all of her kind, she could sense the presence and exact location of an angel, freshly born into this reality. It was meant as a safety net of protection in the beginning of days.
“I can feel her when she comes to him. It is of great benefit to them both that the descended ones dare not return to the site of their demise until the very end. This is why I take such pains to cover myself in the essence of this world. I make it harder for them to find me. We will have our day of reckoning in the end, but I will not be the one to prematurely start the final battle after having failed so badly once before.” Many of her kind had fallen, and they too could sense an angel hidden amongst men.
Faraji rested his large palm on her shoulder, and by rote she folded her wings and leaned into his touch.
“At first maybe, dear one, but now you revel in their weaknesses because you are angry, and bitter with this world and this life. You are bitter with a people you give blood time and again to protect, but continue to dig themselves deeper into the pit you try and pull them from.” His voice was soothing despite the subtle chastisement of his words.
“And do not believe that I cannot see how you enjoy the pleasures of this life. The drunkenness, the debauchery, the lovers whose ability to please you is so limited: you enjoy these things. The pain and sorrow of this world are becoming too much, so you retreat behind your violence and decadence. Look at this place?”
Faraji says motioning with his arm around the luxury of her Palos Verdes home. It was grandiose, but in a simple, empty way. Her bedroom balcony opened to a seaside cliff view that was just breathtaking. Hasira shrugged. There were few other places in Los Angeles that she could freely spread her wings and fly aside from over the open ocean at night.
“I have lived enough lifetimes here to have honestly amassed the finances needed to live in such a place. Should I be denied the comforts that my work has afforded me?”
“That is why I was sent to you again. I am here to be your comfort.”Faraji murmured against her ear while sliding his large hands around her small waist, igniting each bright pattern that he touched. A violent tremor coursed through her ethereal body. They were linked. They had always been since the beginning of the beginning. He was her mate. It was in the order of the Ascended.
All things were created in pairs; every cell, every creature and being had its complementary opposite. Without this there was no balance. For every angel of war, there was an angel of peace; otherwise the celestials would be in chaos.
The Almighty Ascended was alone, so he created the Universe in his image to compliment his own might. Like He, It was without beginning or end. Like He, It was limitless power. Like He, It would create in Its own image, a reflection of the Almighty Ascended. Their bond was eternal and the Great They would evolve around it for all of time. It was the dance of the eternal that it seemed all beings shared alike, until the advent of man.
Hasira turned into the embrace of her mate and allowed her arms to slide up the expanse of his chest and curl around the sinews of his neck.
“I must admit, dearest warrior mine, I do enjoy the physical sensations of this plane that my form does not need or know elsewhere.” Faraji confessed as his eyes slid to hlf mast at the sensation of her bare, erect breast skimming over the skin of his chest, igniting his ebony markers into glowing. His mate’s lips curl in an all too knowing smile.
“I have explained this to you when you came to me before my beloved.”
“Yes, but what you do not know is that once we leave this plane, we leave all knowledge of its sensations here with it. You have never returned, so you do not know the peace of shedding it all. Each time I return, the sensations are brand new to me.” His voice was heavy, as were his loins.
Hasira stroked his face gently, running her thin fingers over the fullness of his lips. “Let me explain it to you again. What you are feeling now, beloved Faraji, is lust. What you will feel soon will be passion. What you feel last, I can assure you, will be satisfaction.”
“Come then valiant warrior and barer of my joy, come to me and find your peace.”
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