Angel's Delight
Somewhere in Africa, the world without shrimp 2022
As the night fell, Angel's sullen steps sulked into the moonlit clearing. The sand drizzled down the side of the dune, his feet heavy, he trudged over the slight increasing curve and stared out onto the horizon. Blinking on the surface was a flashing ball of red, a twinkle, a light in the darkness. Angel took a step forward. His heart thumped inside his chest - a feeling he never thought he would get used to - as watched the shadows form on the back of his hand.
Lifting his hand to shield his dark eyes, Angel watched as the light blinked rapidly before flickering out altogether. As the hazing light faded and a newer, blue light emerged from the darkness, Angel took this as his signal to move forward and began to trudge slowly through the night.
After a swift walk over the dune piles, a point so high that each step was like a stairway, he climbed higher and higher. In his years as human, nothing put him quite so out of breath as walking up those steep dunes. His eyes glazed over the top of the hill as he took one final step and checked his pulse - racing. He saw it. The entrance to the cave, the flickering blue light allowing his safe passage through to the other side. He was glad to have finally reached it, the journey being so long and arduous.
He'd left Cordy in the midst of her back-to-school rave as Niamh was in one of her teenage ruts about which binder to buy for the new semester. His life had surpassed the point of normalcy and his trek into the desert was almost divergent from his life now. The business was running smoothly, Alonna was about to start high school and Gunn was running around after her whilst also trying to work out the Christmas bonuses. Fred and Wesley were each working on separate papers, and publishing season was rearing its ugly head. Spike was in Rome on a mission, but he'd stopped by the LA office for long enough to give Angel the instructions for how to find the desert cave, to which he also left a warning:
Stop. Beware the darkness.
Beware the creature, the demon, the spook.
If I had not been so shook,
I would have strayed from the confines of home,
And so instead I run to Rome.
Angel shook his head and laughed as he'd read Spike's timeless efforts at poetry. Even with a soul, his rhyming needed some extended effort. Though Angel himself had to admit, Spike stills sells out the odd club downtown when he comes back to visit now and again. The Whirlwind days were long behind them, Angel supposed to himself as he walked beneath the cave's spiralling arch. The walls coated in a thick layer of what looked like pebble dash but was really sand blow up in strong winds and suckered to the sides of the thick dripping walls. The moisture was dense, it had a solid quality to it that constricted the throat, it was hard to breathe in such a place as this. But Angel trudged on, determined to reach his goal, determined to seek the counsel of the demon that lurked beyond the sticky stretch of wall.