THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO

IN A PAST UNCERTAIN

He is standing on the battlefield, all robed in ruined white and luxuriously thick. He is built like a race car, engines humming, synchronized with the fifth dimensional glow that holds his immortal body corporeal.

" Metatron," he says. " Metatron."

This thing was built without emotion and kills without regret. He rends flesh from bone and soul from blood as a farmer reaps golden wheat at harvest.

Metatron is Metatron. Metatron should not know emotion and yet it does; should not remember humanity, and yet it does. Metatron, who wept for the fallen city. Metatron, whose bones and blood became God's, imbibed by divine machines in a heaven-hallowed feast.

" Have you come to retrieve me, Raphael?" he asks. He is calm. He is flaying the divine essence from his own spine, as rivers of golden ichor stream from him and soak the mud like veins of ore. It is madness. It is madness that has driven him from heaven. Uriel had said it was madness, and so it was. Raphael knew it to be true as he knew many things.

" You know my purpose," Raphael said back to him. Raphael is not an individual, not really a singular consciousness, not really anything like a person, of course; he is heaven-hallowed, he is the consummation of the qualia that the machines etched into his subethereal binding. He thinks sideways, diagonal. There is no reason in it. He had no need to understand what he is here to do, so he does not. He is a force of nature in the same way that a hurricane is.

The wand wraps around his arm, white ribbon fusing to wrist, the subephemeral lightning arcing out to coalesce into a scythe. It harvests, and it sows. It unstitches fate.

It will unstitch Metatron. Slowly, but surely, as sure as the setting of the sun. This diversion from God's plan will cease.

Metatron's wings are flesh and feather. Metatron's face is human, and old. There is no need for an angel to appear old; it is the madness in him. The humanity that cannot be rooted out. Rotting wings ensconcing a wizened and frail body.

" Take this gift back from me, and I shall thank you," Metatron says, arms outstretched, gleaming gold, stinking of gore. " I shall thank you with freedom. I shall thank you with love. I shall thank you with the blessing of mortality. I shall free us both from the machines-"

His head falls to the ground, and his body crumples.

As surely as a puppet cut from its strings.

But it is no surprise that he came apart so easily; he had spent too long in the mortal realm.

Raphael, the archangel of healing, thinks nothing of it.