Torn Cherub Wings
The Alchemy of an Encounter
Symbols marred the creature’s fair skin, black ink seemingly swirled beneath the high, chiseled cheekbones, descending all the way down into the darkness of its clothes. The writing was seemingly set ablaze as the black melted into searing white and then disappeared, leaving nothing but a pallor-stricken face of a boy behind. Those frightened eyes locked with mine in an eternal stare-down. Energy and life seeped from his glance and fire consumed my being with its comforting strength. Warmth, so much like the one of the Sun, the kind that had been forbidden for me to enjoy so long ago, webbed through the tiny veins and capillaries of my insides like living blood. I was in paradise. Lost.
Nothing but a limited, nocturnal street crawler, I did the only thing my mind was capable of at the moment, my lips parted and I took a mouthful of polluted air, then asked: “What are you?”
And then in a flash of an instant it seemed as if an arrow was shot through the stranger’s chest and the arrow were my words, spoken out of curiosity and somehow interpreted as an insult. The violet eyes glazed over and were now like sapphires as tears rushed down the being’s cheeks. My heart felt like burning parchment and I could almost smell my own ashes as if they were carried by the stinking city winds. I blinked away my own tears and in the next second – it was gone.
The world resumed its boring pace and crime and sin embraced me, pulling me deep into their whirlwind. I walked in an unknown direction towards an unknown destination with a mind so filled by questions and images of great white feathery wings and feelings of warmth that I thought I must have been going insane, to say the least. My back ached as bones and cartilage shifted beneath the filthy, unwashed skin, trying to bring back my former shape. But, alas, even my body had gone weary from trying to evoke even the shadow of a being I once was.
Wondering where I’d lost my past, I realized I did not know the answer to that or to any other question anymore. A shell now filled my shoes and my long flapping coat covered in grime, a shell with no happy memories or nostalgic recollections of the centuries gone by in aimless eternity. What good was immortality when one lived day by day, gathering no experience from one’s past failed endeavors to regain meaning? For my endeavors had all been failures, feeble attempts in philosophy or alchemy that all had the same goal – restore the image of life that once existed somewhere within my soul.
Why, yes, herein lays the answer to my pondering. I have no soul.
Nothing but a limited, nocturnal street crawler, I did the only thing my mind was capable of at the moment, my lips parted and I took a mouthful of polluted air, then asked: “What are you?”
And then in a flash of an instant it seemed as if an arrow was shot through the stranger’s chest and the arrow were my words, spoken out of curiosity and somehow interpreted as an insult. The violet eyes glazed over and were now like sapphires as tears rushed down the being’s cheeks. My heart felt like burning parchment and I could almost smell my own ashes as if they were carried by the stinking city winds. I blinked away my own tears and in the next second – it was gone.
The world resumed its boring pace and crime and sin embraced me, pulling me deep into their whirlwind. I walked in an unknown direction towards an unknown destination with a mind so filled by questions and images of great white feathery wings and feelings of warmth that I thought I must have been going insane, to say the least. My back ached as bones and cartilage shifted beneath the filthy, unwashed skin, trying to bring back my former shape. But, alas, even my body had gone weary from trying to evoke even the shadow of a being I once was.
Wondering where I’d lost my past, I realized I did not know the answer to that or to any other question anymore. A shell now filled my shoes and my long flapping coat covered in grime, a shell with no happy memories or nostalgic recollections of the centuries gone by in aimless eternity. What good was immortality when one lived day by day, gathering no experience from one’s past failed endeavors to regain meaning? For my endeavors had all been failures, feeble attempts in philosophy or alchemy that all had the same goal – restore the image of life that once existed somewhere within my soul.
Why, yes, herein lays the answer to my pondering. I have no soul.