WATCHER

“To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.”    Alphonse de Lamartine

Chapter 1

Angel

I watched you.

            I have watched you for twenty-three years and still you are only but a child in my shadow. You are today the same curly headed little blonde girl that used to run around in the ancient woods as I would invisibly watch you play.  I have stared directly into your glacial blue eyes as you pondered earths curiosities without you ever knowing my stare. 

I.

I have been present to you for twenty-three years and you have but seen me only once.  The day that God-our Father; fused my wings and I together I was elated to finally be given my first soul bearer assignment, the assignment that was you.  You and your immutable talking for the first thirteen years of your life.  If not for thy heavenly duty to Father there are times I would have escorted you to his Gates of Grace myself.

            The very first time I saw you will forever be intertwined within the seven prongs of my ever-reaching soul.  I was carried to you directly in the hands of God as are all Angels of my order for our debriding.  I spotted you from the cusp of Fathers hands, you were but a wee babe suckling upon your mother’s milk swollen breast. At that moment, as if my holy instinct took over, I hypnotically reached out beyond the shelter of Fathers grasp and ever so gently placed my hand upon your meager baby girl head. Your giant puppish eyes opened ever so slightly and stared straight into me. 

Me.

That was the instant my soul became ours.  A soul that is nothing but a borrowed vessel of light; light blessed upon us by Father however, only bonded to you through the conduction of I. For at that very moment WE grew into you. My light and your soul were paired.

            The second I felt your mortal existence underneath my clean untainted palm I was filled with every feeling that would ever exist in you.  Every heart break; every life altering decision that you would ever feel I too felt.  I saw your life from beginning to end within a quintillionth of a second.  I saw all of your good times and felt all of your bad.  I dwelled within your daily wrongs as you would grow into adult hood. I felt your first mortal pain and even the premature slipping of your loved ones vanishing from the world that had come to surround you.  I saw who you would become and what was going to take place on your journey there.  Yet I knew through all of this I would stand watch over you as if a sentinel protecting a Jade Palace.  And through all of that I never questioned Father once until now, now as you lay in the inescapable clutch of sickness, a finite victim of time infinite.

            I watched you moribund in your stick dwelling shrouded in the glow of the suns setting reds and oranges, straining against the sickness that is attempting to claim your time ridden mortality; clinging to a life that never fully was yours but always coveted by thee.  For it is my light you so desperately clasp to but for the sake of me I am clueless as to why you must grasp despairingly to a swift retreating phantom of a light that livith in my brethren and I.  A light we are tasked with blessing forth onto Fathers ill encumbered concept of existence as part of the code of our sworn Angelic order.

Father created you in his image, an image filled with pain and disappointment and dishonesty and sickness and famine and plague and disaster-yet still you cling to your terse Angel fueled light of a life.

            I watch as you struggle to expand your chest and deepen your last rasping yet oddly everlasting breath. I watch idly as your eyes search the sun shadowed surroundings desperately for the ghost of me that you do not even know you know. 

I watch.

I.

My ever-present sentinel self.

I watch and that is all.  Not permitted to cure or save or heal or impede on Fathers design of free will in any way out of fear of being cast from heavens graces.  I watch, only allowed to curse you with time; something that would only further your mortal pain and suffering at this point in your life.  No.  I understand it is time for our bonded light to perish into the visceral releasing us from our perpetuum bond.

            Your eyes begin to slowly dim but just before you abandon your place in this reality-ready to skate across the dreamscape of time you see me seeing you as I hesitantly reach into your soul and release back to the heavens above that which has truly never been ours to share; the light.  My light.  Your eyes fall hollow of existence as I watch you slip onto the dreamscape that parallels our realities.

I watch.

And you go.

Chapter 2

Daemon

I wandered.

I wandered lightless for so many years after your death.  Faithlessly drifting through the paradox called time that you once thrived in.  However, now my once glorious proud vestiges of flight, love and being were replaced with the rippled and sullied scarring in the place my wings once bloomed from within my back to flourish in Earths presence.  Now marked not as an Angel but a Daemon, one who has fallen from faith and lost the light.  I am the left-over byproduct of an Angel exiled from Heaven as I silently and diligently observe the human condition of Father’s beautifully flawed creation inside of said paradox.  A paradox that is the human experience.

Once you perished as another victim to time the light was released from your sickness eaten existence as I too was absolved from our adamantine bond arriving back at the Gates of Grace.  The moment of which I should have received the light back from your death I was left vacant. 

Empty.

Faithless.

At that very Gate I kneeled in solitude to Fathers mercy for nine thousand and eighteen years-years of which I prayed in hallowed silence for nothing but the light to come back to me.  And for all those destitute years I was left scorned, for Fathers light lent onto an Angel is faith and consciousness in its purest form.  When I released my light from the mortal soul of your earthly being I was supposed to inherit it, the light; back into my Angelic existence upon my arrival at the omniscient Gates of Grace-Fathers gates, thus leaving me hollow.

Lightless.

Broken.

            On day one of my nine thousandth and nine-tenth year in hallowed solitude to my ever absent and negligible Father I was summoned above his Gates to the Angel ascendancy from which I originated for a meeting to be conveyed by my order, The Order of Protectors.  An order of the highest and most powerful Angels in the dominion who are as strict as they are punishing.  It is an order given name by Father-God himself, to protect and give faith to his six-day creation.  The creation that is man.

            At my summoning I was subject to trial.  For our order was young and I was but one of the first anomalies in our order to never receive the light back after one of our charges had perished.  Lucifer was the first Angel to be cast down from our dominion, but I was the first to be thrown down by my own kind.  I was deemed unfit to remain a part of the Angel dominion.  For how could I exist and dwell as an Angel without my light?  To have light was to have faith and to have faith was to be Angelic.  I was disowned by my order and stripped of my beautifully radiant wings and cast down from Fathers Gates to the earth of his mortal experiment as a Daemon.  Cursed to no longer see those of my former kind.

Banished.

Broken.

Faithless.

To earth I had plummeted.  Existing on the fringes of the human world; silently observing all its atrocities.  It seemed for everything that was good there was always so much more that was corrupt.  In time as I drifted as weightless as the winds of life I became just as desolate as those I had once been sworn to protect.  For you, a mere obtuse outgrowth of Fathers imagination had taken my light, and my order had taken my wings as punishment for allowing my light to be sinfully coveted by a time be sworn mortal.

I watched.

I watched as Fathers creation raped and pillaged itself.  I watched as it barbarically ended the light that is life with no regard, no reason other than the fault of man.  A fault my Father purposely presented in you.  The fault of man I began to hate him for, a benign and needless fault.  I began to hate him deep within my hollowed being for what he had cursed mortality with.  An awareness given to man that was primal on the highest fathomable level without man being called beast. 

He had made this beautiful creation only to curse it with his image, an image of sin and hate and self-destruction.  An image of a holy plague known as awareness and time infesting all of man.  For eons, my Father sat idle as I spent my banishment to Daemon hood holding the hands of his dying creation as they crossed over onto the dreamscape of time.  As an Angel I could not be seen but as a daemon it was up to me if I wanted to appear.

I remember the very first time I held the hand of a dying child.  A being that had only just been shown his light.  He was a boy, a boy I had watched since his conception.  A boy I watched as his beautifully red blessed hair burst forth from his mother’s swollen blood-soaked vagina during birth, a day he did not ask for to parents who were far less than desirable.  His mother fallen onto the crutch of what is addiction and his father a most accurate portrayal of the qualms of man. 

This poor child of children; blessed to a life of daily beatings, neglect and starvation by the very mortals that were supposed to protect, love and cherish him.  I watched this wide eyed and rosy cheeked fire-haired boy as he disintegrated from existence in front of my very eyes.

I watched him for three years as he was repeatedly beaten and forced to dwell in a pit of mud.  A pit strewn with his own urine and feces, starved into a lust of thirst and hunger that would drive him in the last days of his life to attempt ingestion of said substances.  A toddler dying upon the cold hard surface of Gods Earth with nothing but a dirt crusted and flea infected pelt for comfort and warmth and love. 

I watched as this boy-this sweet, promising, innocent creation of Fathers had the key to his flourishment thrown away before the petals of his borrowed and blessed soul even had a chance to blossom in the light of faith given onto him by an Angel of my old order.

I.

A Daemon cast to earth showed this boy my presence on his last day.  On the day he was to die I took the boy and I held him, cradled within my comforting touch as he cried in a murdering thirst to his mother, the one who starved him, and to his father, the one who repeatedly beat him and to our Father, God, the one who abandoned him. 

I held him and comforted him on this day as I looked into his toddler aged, sea green eyes, and kissed him upon his feverish forehead as he slipped onto the dreamscape beyond my reach.  He was the first being of Fathers creation I ever showed myself to willingly. I did not know it at the time, but he would also be the driving force of my summoning to the void known as the below.  To a summoning with my Fathers first born and first fallen, the one who is known as Lucifer.

Chapter 3

Grim

The Below.

A place not of fire and brimstone and three horned beasts, no-rather it is an infinite realm of time everlasting.  Nothing ever progresses, for an Angel or Daemon have no binding to mortal time, we have always existed across the dreamscape and we will forever exist even once mankind has succumb to the intricacies that come with being a time bound entity.    

A place where human souls unable to break their bond with an Angels light are destined to spend eternity.  To perilously watch the world and the ones they know and love become victims of their own mortals time.  A place where the eternally hinged of Angelic light spend the rest of existence, living in an unmoving perpetual fractal of a timeless time. 

The Below.

My summoning.

            Lucifer, my brother and I spent an Enoch of mortal time in a great debate of the faults of man and the abandonment of our Father and worse yet your Father.  So great was He and Is’ arguing that the earth was befallen to the mercy of our immature bickering. 

Both of us being of the oldest Angles, Lucifer the first and I one of the founders of the original order of protectors.  He and I stubbornly and egotistically talked and shook your earth through ages of dark and yelled it through earthquakes, hurricanes, and typhoons, unintentionally killing much of what we had once been sworn to protect.  Inadvertently we caused our own small Armageddon upon your lands arguing for the earthly remnants of Fathers creation with no place to go after death.  Remnants of souls unable to successfully cross the dreamscape of time through the gates of grace due to their unfortunate and haphazard melding in death to an Angels light.  Remnants left to drift amongst the living with no other place to go to pass what would forever remain of an eternity.

Upon Lucifer and Is’ consensus we reached a bargain.  A bargain of which I would be tasked collecting Fathers light cursed creation that are destined to dutifully drift Earths domain as great beings once had fought, clinging to the last decayed and rotting shards of their mortality. An eternity to be forever wrought in Lucifers’ domain, that which you know of as hell.

  And he, Lucifer, would open his domain to all fallen Angels cursed into Daemon hood by my order for not receiving back from Fathers creation our mortally tainted light.   

Yes, he and I had reached an agreement of which I would become an escort of the deceased beings that wandered unpermitted and left over in the mortal realm.  A reaper of Angel hinged remnants and recruiter of Daemons into the below.  A place a fallen Angel could call their own or join ranks with me in the reaping of Earth wandering lost souls, and I as their Grim.

For the Above and the Below are not as you have been taught.  The Above, a place where all mortal souls go upon death and their unhinging of the light regardless of how they lived their life.  The Below, a home Lucifer created for himself out of desperation to avoid the species known as man that he was cursed to live amongst after questioning Father about his abandonment toward the time cursed mortals. 

Now, however the below due to brother Lucifer and Is’ compromise is where the regretfully light hinged remnants of mortals and Daemons are now destined to spend the rest of an eternity of timelessness.  Not to be punished for lack of, but to adhere to the code enacted by Father-that no human shall permanently taint an Angels light causing the two existences to become eternally intertwined within one another until stucken down by the order of protectors..

………..

Timelessness.

At first my reaping was perilous.  Charged with collecting soul remnants that had been drifting for thousands of years, most of which being children.  For children to become unbound with their Angels light is a hard feat due to the living that seem to ceaselessly be pining and yearning for the return of their prematurely taken offspring. 

I remember the first newly crossed over child from mortal to immortal that I had to help slip across the dreamscape and into the time continuum of the Below.  From that moment I came to know that mothers would be the worst to pull the dead from.

This mother.  My first mother, my recollections will never stray far from.  She was beautiful.  So beautiful in a flawed creation that I could not help but sit back and watch as she held her dying child tightly in her arms.  Without fear of illness she clasped her child’s plague-ridden body as tears began to flood forth from her radiant eyes.  She knew her child was slipping by the mortal clocks seconds from her reality-yet still she hoped and prayed to no avail for a miracle.  A miracle I could give with one touch of my palm to the child’s hair matted head, a miracle however I was not permitted to give.  For there are rules in this great magnificence regardless of how much I accept them or not.  I instead sat in silence and waited for the small four-year-old child to fade from his mother’s plain onto mine.

“Please God no, No, NO.  Not my baby.  NO!  I will do anything you want.  Please take Me instead!  PLEASE…NO…NO…nooo…”

The pleas to an absent God of a mother desperately begging carried on until nothing remained of the woman but the cold lifeless body clutched perilously to her life cursed heaving chest.  Tears wetting the childs pale face as his mother planted her last desperate time escaping kisses onto his lips.  The last kisses she would get before his corpse would be pulled apart from hers for its burning.  I watched until the young boy crossed from life to death and found me waiting.

…….

Crossing.

“Mommy?”  A confusion of speak as he attempted to comfort and hug his mother to no use.

For every time he attempted a hurt stifling comforting touch upon his mother’s saddened body he would vanish until his fruitless attempt would cease.  The boy, looking back at my shimmering black robe shrouded figure – “mommy?”—Reaching out my hand the small boy hesitated with one last glance at his mortal weeping mother, the person he loved more than anything during all of his premature departed life and excepted my out reached hand.

 Together he and I began our journey across the dreamscape to the timeless Below.  A place now for the light hinged, Daemons and Reapers and I, Lucifer’s second in command The Grim of all of Grims.

I, the Grim Reaper dutifully reaping the Earth wandering to Lucifers’ domain—the Below, where I shall suffer with all mortals and brethren alike.  To forever be nothing but the hint of an afterthought to Gods time cursed existence—heaven and that which you know of as hell.

“Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.”

-Epicurus-

FINISHED