Disclaimer: I do not own FMA.
Author's Note: Huh, the first chapter was supposed to be a stand-alone, but then I got this idea, and I already have the next idea planned. Look forward for the Walking Ruins, if you enjoy these tales. Feel free to come up with whatever conclusions you make about these stories.
For as long as the collective memory of the World can recall, there has been a statue on the outskirts of the village without a name. They say it depicts an angel.
It is a very sophisticated and beautiful thing, fashioned of steel formed by loving hands, no detail forsaken. It is a tragic thing. The angel is beautiful even with his face twisted into a final snarl of defiance. His wings, once surely grand and imposing, are crippled and twisted, coming to droop to the ground with strange angles. It looks as if the angel is making an effort to keep them raised but is failing. It lunges forward, its right arm, which morphs seamlessly into a deadly blade, poised back and ready to strike in a way reminiscent of a scorpion tail.
The eyes of the angel are hollow and nicked up. Once could come to the conclusion that whatever once graced those desolately empty sockets was valuable.
The statue is frequently on the minds of the villagers, and they are always prepared to discuss it at a moment's notice. There is something that sets them on edge about it, anticipation, crouching on a razor-thin precipice over nothing with a fire spurning one forth from the back.
They are all ignorant. The villagers have never known anything. They claim the World as the World, lofting it up, but they force the blindfolds to remain on.
For all their efforts however, the blindfolds sometimes slip.
They see pure nuggets, perfectly round. They sit there, acting as the eyes of the angel. Those eyes are not pure, but the villagers never could and never will be able to tell the difference.
Nobody sees the eyes come into being. When they are there, the nicks around the sockets are mysteriously absent. They praise them, and claim that their village, the World, is watched over and protected.
At the witching hour, sometimes two red glows glare at the village from the direction of the statue. Everybody knows not to investigate it. But a boy did once, and he claimed that the eyes had been replaced by the reddest stones he had ever seen, lit from within by a chillingly magnificent light of their own. He said that he might have seen blood pouring down from beneath the feathers of those mutilated wings.
The statue is not alive. It never was nor will it ever be.
Gold, like the eyes the angel possesses sometimes, is ancient. When has human not thought of it, if not in metal, then in another form? It has seen the passing of superfluous mortal history, passive and above it all. At twilight's time though, gold glints as it receives the blame. Gold is synonymous with greed, but it cannot be greed.
Red like blood. How much has been shed, and how much more will be shed? What have the midnight eyes of an angel captured in dead metal witnessed?
But the statue is not alive. It never was nor will it ever be, and could never have seen anything. It is more ignorant than a newborn, reveling in a bliss nothing living could ever even hope to achieve.
It has witnessed the rise of the World and, when its end comes, the angel statue is all that remains. It is still poised to launch a final attack that will never come, at an enemy that has never existed.
Only when it is alone does its visage relax, rage seeping away in a red mist as the face slips into an expression of melancholy.
The gold during the change comes to be replaced by the red stones, which twinkle like evil stars alone in the void, finally free to be released and kept hidden from the sights of any others.