Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us—
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Edith Sitwell
I have lost a soul.
You say how easy a thing that must be, for souls are lost every day and there, across the Chasm, all souls are lost. They are infinite in number. Cast off, burning. You say that if they are lost, it is just. The definition of justice, of division, as sure and absolute as a line of black void that separates those whom we have thrown down, from those whom we clasp close to our bosom. It is not, you say so much that we cast them, as that they turned away.
I say this: fuck you.
Fuck you because every single one of them was crafted in His image and every single one of them is deserving - even more so capable - of redemption.
So, this stubborn vigil. On the edge of the world that is, looking into the world that is not, turning the curve of my ear away from the music of the spheres, the chorus of the host, to those lost, those gone, those who have been cast or turned away.
In time I will find him.
In time I will once more take justice into my own hands and make it a shape that perhaps no one above or below wants, or intended.
Let them come to me and voice a complaint of it.
Let them.
x
Of all sounds, rumor carries best.
Not from before me but behind me, whispers of a new prince among the legion, a rising star among those fallen, one more cruel, more perverse than all the rest. Slave become master, prisoner become gaoler.
Some unwilling recognition stirs in me. I recognize this; what remains when the rest is stripped away; a stubborn fury. A fury greater than the fires of Gehenna itself. This is raw will, which will somehow find a way to go on, blindly. Not by faith, not by hope but because it simply knows no other way, and that will be the thing that saves him.
Rumor sharpens into surety.
I wait, as some fisherman on a lonely shore.
Patient, looking for some telltale ripple, some gold sheen of recognition. Something, anything.
Instead I know where he is by the keening, by the hopeless, sorrowing sounds of those who have come under his hand. Some part of me should recoil. This is everything I am not. This is everything I stand against. This is what I put aside, what I and mine cast down.
But instead I reach my hand.
I grasp a shape that is inherently my own, for we are all stars falling.
I raise him.
I raise him.
x
Lazarus.
His form is stone, his face is fire and also frost. While he has not yet waked I can clasp him to me, and still feel the humanity of him in my arms.
x
In the quiet, I whisper his name but he is a shape of angry red ribbons, tattered and burning, and when he wakes, it is his first and only intent to end me. He is strong; he always was. But while he was there, he has become stronger. He has gone past the line we drew and become a thing made new again, in a different image. He has forsaken his true form, our true form. He has bathed in the blood of innocents and drunk suffering deep into him. It's not the first time this has happened. It's not the first time that falling, someone turned the fire of the lake to his own ends, and even as he burned, forged himself a sword.
He comes at me livid.
FEAR NOT I say, but it's lost on the wind of him as he rushes at me, and I will not lift my hand
I will not lift my hand
And that is how I am, for the first time, nailed to the concrete by my wings and feet and he is dragging my entrails from the wound in my side.
That is how he devours me.
x
So it now becomes my torment.
His hunger is endless.
He is wrath, embodied.
My unwillingness to die, my unwillingness to yield enrages him.
My unwillingness to rise and fight him enrages him even more.
These are the skills he has learned, and how he traversed from destroyed to destroyer. If it was this alone that kept whole a body and soul through those fires, then so be it.
I lift no hand, I make no protest. Yet for that he cannot bind me, for few things can and the most powerful of his magics are lost to him. Days, weeks, months pass as he tears at me, fruitless handfuls of flesh and feathers pooling light all around.
"Die," he commands me, when my suffering yields him nothing.
I can't, I tell him and whisper his name again. Soft.
I am rent one limb from the others, torn and cut and finally even if he fails to see the futility in it, I can, and I seize him in arms that are still strong and enfold him in wings still wide and perfect, and trap him in this embrace as he burns and rages, and whisper again
Dean
As if in naming him I can save him.