Angel of Mercy

The floor tumbled away in a cloud of dust, a gaping maw revealed below, the crash of the falling stone echoing around the dark and empty church.

Sledgehammer weighing heavy in his hand, a tell-tale dusting of powder from the broken floor still covering its head, he cringed involuntarily. Contrary to what others thought of him, he didn’t relish the act of desecration he’d just committed. He knew his reputation; a conspiracy theorist, believer in the more outlandish notions of history, chaser of prophets… He readily admitted to this. In his opinion, it was his duty to look to the fringe. He had to be the believer, the voice of doubt that looked where others didn’t, who chased leads others were too afraid to follow for fear of what it would do to their standing. If he didn’t, who knew what could be missed because no one would take the chance to truly investigate? Everyone had laughed at Columbus, but didn’t he change the world?

Unfortunately, statistically such events proved few and far between, and this stance had caused him far more embarrassment than it had glory. Worse, it called into doubt his professionalism, and his peers seemed to think him heavy-handed, lacking the light touch required of a so-called ‘real’ archaeologist. His greatest concern was that when he did finally uncover something noteworthy, they’d dismiss it as fabricated, or the result of site contamination; a false-discovery, ‘unearthed’ because he’d inadvertently walked it in himself on the heel of his boot. They’d ignore his find, and tell him to go back to chasing prophets and hearsay before he interfered with genuine work.

As the reverberations of the destruction bounced off the walls and filled the room, he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty for playing into their hands. However, he also knew that he would never be given consent to conduct the investigation he’d been planning, and that necessitated this midnight indiscretion; he didn’t have the luxury of time, and sometimes it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Gazing at the dark hole at his feet, he dared to hope that it would be worth it.

The church, a crumbling relic from the middle ages, was not supposed to have anything beneath it, yet there it was, just as his research had suggested it would be. He licked his lips, offering a silent prayer that the previously concealed space would prove noteworthy; a catacomb perhaps, or a hidden cache. Uncovering a simple basement, empty and long forgotten, would hardly earn the forgiveness of those that owned and maintained the site.

Igniting his head-mounted flashlight with a trembling hand, he eased himself into the hole, confident the light, which he feared would alert others to his trespass, would be contained and hidden beneath the thick stone. Shifting his body, he wormed his way through the opening, careful to protect the camera mounted on his chest from the hard edges of the floor, aware of how vital it was to keep the footage recorded clean and uninterrupted.

Touching down on a soft dirt base, he tried to contain his angst; he told himself that just because the space below the church was not built with sufficient purpose or care to warrant a proper stone floor, it didn’t mean it wasn’t important. It may have simply been constructed in haste…

He tried to repeat this as a mantra of sorts, reassure himself of the value of his find, even as his light swept over blank walls and dull surfaces.

He felt his spirits sink; had he simply unearthed a level of the building’s foundations, somehow left off the church’s official plans and documentation? Such a find would be beyond worthless; he’d be ridiculed, not to mention penalised for the damage wrought to the centuries old floor above his head.

He was verging on despair when the beam of his torch swept over a small object nestled against one of the walls. Snapping his head back, he focused his gaze on this tiny respite from the grey monotony of the otherwise blank surroundings. Swallowing, he took a hesitant step closer.

Nearing the object, he felt his heart thump within his chest; it was an urn. Small, and outwardly unimpressive perhaps, but an urn nonetheless! The ashen remains of someone entombed beneath the church, buried in the holiest of places, the sanctified soil surrounding it and enveloping it in its cool embrace.

He felt the elation rise within his blood, his head swimming, his mind running away with him; sure, it could simply be a wealthy donor, someone contributing to the construction of the church and holding sufficient sway to secure themselves a burial plot below it, but what if it was a noteworthy figure within the church itself? What if it was a bishop, or a saint even? How many resting places of truly historic religious figures were shrouded in mystery? What if he had actually located one such hidden and most holy of burial grounds?

He knew he should hold back, call in his find and await support, but a nagging part of him pushed him forward; he couldn’t risk that he’d simply be crying wolf, he needed something more concrete, more vindicating. Confirming the camera on his chest was still recording, he reached forward with a shaking brush and prepared to lightly dust the surface of the urn, remove the very first layer of obscuring dirt from his discovery…

The second the bristles connected with the object a wave of invisible force slammed into him, knocking him to his back and sending him sprawling him across the floor. His eyes burned in the brightness of a sea of light, and he wondered for a moment if his head lamp had somehow been angled down into his eyes, but the glare was too intense. A surge of panic washed through him, fear that the light would be spotted and bring the authorities down on him overpowering the suddent pain he felt running up his spine.

This was dispelled when he heard the voice, its touch sending electricity crackling over him.

“I am free, at last.”

Gasping, a huge pressure pushing down on him, he squinted into the light, aware that something of such intense brightness could not possibly be coming from his tiny head-torch. Even as he did so, before his eyes it began to fade.

His vision dancing before him, spots and blotches from the vanishing glare taking their own time to disappear, he did his best to take in his surroundings and identify the stranger who must have somehow stumbled upon him. He thought at any moment the haze in his eyes would clear and he’d find himself staring up at a night watchman, the superior beam of their torch responsible for his temporary blindness, their arm flexing from the act of throwing him to the floor.

Instead, he found the previously blank walls adorned in runes, and a dark figure standing before him. He felt his jaw drop, his words failing him. Far from the nightwatchman he expected, his visitor was something else entirely.

A darkened shroud cloaked their head, a gleaming bodice hugged their figure, and most astonishing of all, a pair of gossamer wings spread wide behind their back, flexing powerfully despite the tight confines of the space. Gazing at their face, he saw a mask of silver, pale and flawless flesh complementing eerily beautiful facial features, and eyes which burned as though containing brilliant supernovae, celestial flames of blue and white staring down at him.

“What… what are you?” he stammered, knowing that no mere costume could hope to replicate what stood before him.

The figure smiled benevolently. “I am the Angel of Mercy.”

The words seemed to somehow bypass his ears, filling his head without touching his auditory canal, the weight of them throbbing within his skull. He grit his teeth, cringing against the unnatural sensation.

“An angel?” he asked, his mind racing, a pit forming in his stomach, a vast invisible weight pinning him to the ground. “If you are an angel, why… why do I feel this way?” The words were an effort, the strain of moving his chest growing by the second. A thousand needles pierced his lungs, his head gripped as though it were placed within a vice.

The self-proclaimed angel looked down at him beatifically. “Because there is something you mortals have never understood,” she said serenely. “There are no such things as demons, there is only us.”

His chest tightened, the pressure growing, his lungs struggling to even draw breath. He sipped the stale and dusty air of the crypt and struggled to maintain his focus as his vision swam.

“Do you know what it’s like to live for an eternity?” the angel continued, disinterested in his plight. “It’s dull, on a scale unfathomable to your kind. So we occasionally tire of the façade, and give in to our baser pleasures.”

She waved a hand, her wings darkening to a pitch the colour of night.

“You referred to us as Fallen,” she sighed, her words honeyed and sublime, yet her tone somehow repulsed. “We would have had you slave beneath us, toys for our own amusement, yet our own brethren turned against us and supported you. I was the Angel of Mercy, for I granted generously swift deaths to those that stood before me.”

Her eyes sparked, glimmering in the darkness of the enclosed space. “But you had the audacity to oppose me.”

She gestured to the walls, indicating a series of pictograms just on the edges of his line of sight. Rolling his head, the sensation of grinding gravel shuddering through his spine, and studied the figures she’d highlighted. The walls, their message hitherto hidden by the deep grime of the centuries, now revealed a grisly tale of conflict and war…

“You sealed me away; me and the rest of my compatriots,” the angel smiled, her face radiant, her voice divine. “But the barriers are weakened now, your ignorance and blasphemy surrendering your guardians to the sands of time.”

Stroking the air in front of her, he felt the touch of her hand upon his face, her fingers tracing acid across his skin.

“All I needed was a human’s touch, the final vestiges of my prison stripped away by your own doing, and I am free once more,” she beamed, the transcendent radiance of her eyes clashing with the daggers in her words and the lick of pain still blossoming across his cheek.
“And as you once made me suffer in darkness, so shall I to all of your kind,” she concluded, her hand tightening into a fist.

His world blinked into night, an echoing snap lancing across his brain as he felt something tear deep within. The pressure vanished from his chest, but he realised with a panic that he could see nothing but darkness before him, deep and all-consuming. Reaching his hands out gropingly in the black, he noticed the absence of the familiar and mundane rustle of his clothing. Clapping his hands together, he despaired at the lack of sound, and rubbing at his eyes he wept into the dark. The angel had robbed him of his eyes and his ears, rendering him blind and deaf, leaving him to grope feebly in a world of darkness.

She was gone, he knew that somehow, the overwhelming sense of her presence vanished from the crypt, but he shuddered at the thought of what he had unwittingly unleashed, and what she had promised to all of humanity.

“Dear God,” he whispered, the words slipping soundlessly from between his lips, his ears registering nothing. “What have I done?”