Surface Detail

You could not reason with people in the grip of such a faith. She had tried, but failed. The truth was that she could offer them release; she was an angel who, here, really did exist, and really could offer these people what they most desired. It was not even really faith; it was perfectly reasonable belief.

She climbed into the high, clear air, chewing on the still-warm haunch of the one she’d released only minutes earlier. The crowd gathering round the body was too small to see now, lost in the scabbed landscapes beneath the drifting clouds of smoke.

Way off in the distance, something shimmered in a way that she was not sure she had seen here, ever before. Something seemed almost to shine, way over there, towards a line of small mountains, tall cliffs and acid lakes. Not with flame; with what could almost be watery sunlight, if that wasn’t an absurd idea, here in Hell, where there contrived to be light without sun. It looked like a column, like a broad, silvery pillar, half invisible, between land and cloud.

She took one last gulping bite, then dropped the haunch-bone and struck off for the distant anomaly.

The column only grew more mysterious the closer she got. It was like a strange irregular curtain of silver draped over the land; a few kilometres across, maybe one deep; a sort of semi-regular shape of what looked like a pure mirror. It had no light of its own, but seemed to reflect all light that touched it. Flying close, she saw her own dark, elongated shape flickering liquidly across its surface.

She went up through the clouds to see that the pillar extended all the way to the iron sky, tens of kilometres above. The effort made it feel like her muscles were on fire.

She dropped back through the cloud, landed. Her feet, her legs, all hurt, protesting, as they took her weight. They always did. Her legs hurt when she was on the ground, her wings ached when she was flying, and her whole body grumbled distantly when she hung upside down to rest. She just tried not to think about it.

There were some chopped-up bodies lying right beside the shimmering curtain of silver, where it met the ground. It looked as though they had been cut with a very sharp blade.

She picked up a sliced-off leg lying on the ground, threw it at the silvery barrier. It bounced off, as though it had hit solid metal. She picked the leg back up, prodded the barrier. Felt solid. She touched it with one talon. Very solid; iron solid. To the touch, it was a little cold. Again, as cold as iron or steel would have felt.

One cowering creature nearby squealed as she dragged it from the poison bush it had been trying to hide within. Its pelt was already starting to blister. The little male was emaciated; missing one trunk, one eye, his face badly scarred by tooth marks.

“Did you see this happen?” she demanded, shaking him towards the silent mirror-barrier.

“It just happened!” he wailed. “All of a sudden! Without warning! Please, ma’am; are you the one who releases us?”

“Yes. Has anything like this happened here before?” she said, still not letting him go. She knew this area a little. She tried to recall its details. Cliffs; mountains. A munitions factory set into the cliffs… over there. She could see the road that had served it, lined with petrified, very quietly shrieking statues.

“No! Never seen anything like it! Nobody here has! Please, sacred lady; take me; release me; kill me, please!”

She looked round. There were a few others, she could see now, all cowering behind whatever cover they could find.

She let the male go. “I can’t help you,” she told him. “I’ve already killed today.”

“Tomorrow, then! I’ll wait here tomorrow!” He fell kneeling at her feet, supplicating.

“I don’t make fucking appointments!” she roared.

The male stayed where he was, quivering. She gazed up at the shimmering, reflecting curtain, wondering what to make of it.

Still, she flew back there the next day.

The mirror curtain was gone. So was the geography she remembered from before it had been there; a barren dusty plain, rising smoothly, replaced everything that had been within the boundary of the shimmering curtain. It joined as best it could with the cliffs and mountains beyond where the mirror-barrier had been, but it looked dropped-in, added-on somehow. A patch.

She didn’t know what to make of it.

The scarred male from the day before was still there, where she’d left him, pleading to be released. She sighed, landed, took him into her wings and let his spirit go, taking on yet another additional pain.

Glitches in Hell. Fucking appointments in fucking Hell. Whatever fucking next?

“This place is definitely coarsening me,” she muttered to herself as she flew off, clutching another torn-off haunch.