The celestial fabric of Aranuel’s wings still smelled of fresh starlight and untasted eternity. He was new to the descent, an eternal process whereby The Heavenly Host watched over the realm of the mortals. It had not been what he had expected so far, and his heart was of an age where it was still soft enough to bruise.
He found Arnold, huddled beneath the weeping concrete of an under pass, wrapped in an old, degrading tarpaulin that had started to fray and quite frankly had seen better days, crinkling like dead leaves every time the bitter winter winds howled through.
Aranuel sat beside him, invisible but with a heavy divine presence. He had come to deliver the standard comfort one assumes an angelic being would deliver, a subtle warming of the air, a whisper of divine patience, the promise that all earthly suffering was merely the rough-hewn stone in the grand beautiful mosaic of the Creator’s divine plan.
It was at this moment, and unexpectedly to Aranuel that Arnold began to talk to the empty air beside him. “If you are looking for my soul, you’re a few winters too late,” the old man rasped. His fingers blackened with the lengthy exposure to the frost and road grime. A wry smile crossed his lips as he lifted himself and reaching for the lukewarm aluminium can that held the dying embers of yesterdays fire. “The street has slowly worn it away, taking it piece by piece. First my girl, then what was left of my mind and now it is slowly taking my body, piece by piece.”
The angel looked down to see that his feet were wrapped in nothing but rags, pieces missing, open and sore to bleeding. He was not lying; this life was slowly erasing this man. A strange and completely alien feeling came over Aranuel leaving him momentarily at a loss. Never in his eternal existence had he experienced a feeling like this before. It was all brand new and unnerving.
Aranuel leaned in closer, his luminous eyes reflecting the neon glare of a distant billboard. He spoke again not with words but projected thoughts into Arnold’s mind, yet still with the unwavering arrogance of youth and one who had never experienced hardship, “The things you are experiencing are simply a test of endurance, a divine proving ground designed to strengthen your belief. A lifelong refinement of the spirit.”
Arnold laughed, a bitter laugh, a wet rattling sound that ended in a violent coughing fit. “People say that there is a reason for it. A grand plan, you know what that plan did. It let my daughter freeze in an unheated apartment while I worked double shifts to pay for medicines that did not work. It let the bank take the house whilst I was burying her. If there is a God up there watching me freeze under a bridge, He is not a father. He is a boy with a magnifying glass, and I am just the ant that He happens to be focusing on this lifetime.”
The old man did not cry, he was past tears. He simply stared off into the darkness, his eyes hollowed by the decades long siege of apathy and hunger.
Aranuel reached out to offer a comforting touch on Arnold’s forehead, to implant the mandated vision of the eternal kingdom that was promised, the ultimate reward for a life of trials and tribulations. But as his ethereal fingers brushed across his forehead and through his matted hair, a bolt of raw, unfiltered human agony, anger and sorrow surged through the angel.
It was not, noble, purifying suffering, it was just suffering. It was cold. It was lonely, suffocating, and meaningless. A weight that was continued a road that led to nowhere. Aranuel looked up to the sky, past the smog and the clouds, searching for a glimpse of the Heavenly Host, The Creators light, the eternal throne on which sat the Father of everything. For the first time since his heavenly creation at the beginning of time the light felt blinding, rather than warming, distant. It felt like a spotlight on a stage where the actors were being tortured for the amusement of a silent audience.
“Arnold,” the angel whispered, aloud this time, in a moment of impulse discarding his celestial anonymity. The old man blinked, looking directly at the shimmering outline of the youth besides him. “Am I finally dying?” Aranuel looked down at his own hands. They were perfectly unblemished, glowing with a soft, useless radiance that could not even warm the frost on Arnold’s tarpaulin.
He thought of the endless hymns he was expected to sing for all eternity, praising the justice he could no longer see. “No,” Aranuel said, his voice trembling as a terrifying, and unnatural realisation bloomed in his chest. “But I think that I am.”
With a quiet snap, a single brilliant white feather, radiating eternal light drifted down into Arnold's lap, the man reached out for the feather but upon picking it up the brilliant light faded and began turning into a clump of cold grey ash...
To Be Continued