On Idol Shoulders

There is an angel.

He stands arrayed in argent mail, the lights of vanished suns smoldering in the plates of his armor. He bears neither wings nor halo, but he walks the void on roads none can trace and his footfalls sound in no ear but the ear of Time. His eyes are deep and pale. His name is known only to his mistress.

In the high vaults beyond the cirque of stars there sits a goddess. She is seated upon a dais carven from matter primordial and her gaze is cast ever down upon the fields of man. She has ruled from before light was born and she will abide when all light dies.

Of her face the angel knows only what he sees. Her focus cast across the stars, and his own only to her. In her towering form all he sees is the crescent of light that slides from the corner of one eye to the corner of her lips, leaving the other side unknown to him but a light shone down that give its light for all else.

He has knelt before her for cycles beyond count, and her eyes have never lowered to meet his. It is for this that he serves. In him bellows a love so dread and vast it would rive the stars and their spheres were it loosed.

She commands him. And he descends. She bids him to scour the world for idols, for relics steeped in blasphemous reverence, the works of prophets false and mighty who claimed dominion over mortal souls.

These things he gathers. He brings them before the goddess. She lays her silence upon them and renders them powerless, and the angel returns these objects unto mankind, remade, sanctified, purged of confusion and heresy, that man may not lose himself in shadows and mold of his own casting.

But though he bears dominion over winds and seasons and the cunning of all living things, yet one dominion eludes him: the knowledge of the goddess’s gaze. He burns to see her. He dares not beg audience. His love is the love of a seraph for a force immeasurable, and he knows himself unworthy.

Each journey is not free. Each journey is a life. It sheds him of flesh’s, blood, and tears. Each time he returns to her court, he returns lesser. First, he bent the bones of his feet. The rocks of worlds, and heat of the stars, each and all take their pound of flesh, and he leaves behind him the tracks of the blood he does not need. He does not flinch.

He kneels upright before her, soaking the marbled plinth where she abides, and departs again without hesitation.

A cycle unbroken by mercy nor by time, he pares away his legs, inch upon inch, until he stands a lower in her presence with each meeting. And with each shortening, he perceives a fraction more of her visage. The bloom of nebulae coursing like blossoms across her skin. And he feels no pain then, nor weariness, for he has seen worlds in the curve of her jaw, and that is enough to send him again into the abyss for her sake.

Years spool. The angel’s limbs dwindle. His gait grows halting. The sands of desert places cling to his stumps. His flesh blackens where old wounds will not close. He is become a thing half-shorn of form, a creature half spirit and half ruin, but still he holds himself upright in the presence of his sovereign mistress.

At last there comes a time when he cannot walk. He has been gone many centuries. He returns borne aloft upon the shoulders of the idol he was sent to seize. The idol is wrought in gold and lapis, bearing the face of a thousand kings. Its eyes are blank and blind, and it staggers beneath the weight of the angel, who has shorn himself down to a trunk and trembling arms, reigning the idol as his steed.

They come before the goddess. From this mount, the angel can see. His blasphemous pedestal brings him where he’d never before considered. He is level with his goddess. He lifts his eyes to the goddess. He at last, beholds her full face.

He sees her profile carved of perfect symmetry. Her posture is high with eternal purpose. She moves not. Her eyes glint. Her gaze, fixed down at the cosmos for all eternity. The angel ride his steed around her to see her hair fall into void, or perhaps become it. He orbits to her side he’s never seen. He weeps.

There is now a moment the angel decides if he is to know the thing he has so long believed. He may see her as she may see herself. This, he knows from his many lives, and sacrifices, is the cause of such idols as he wrangles. For to know one’s self is to doubt anything more.

The angel brings his steed to the bosom of his goddess. And he saw her eyes. Each one perfect. Each one beautiful. Both containing infinitude and singularity at once. But she cannot see him where he looks at her. She extends her palm in ceremony for her reception. As he proceeded back on his steed, he could never meet her gaze. Her eyes did see all, but they were crossed. Each cast over the bridge of her perfect nose, cast across the opposite expanse. She gazes upon the whole of creation like this. She sees all things. And she sees nothing at once.

The angel takes the first pause he has ever needed. He slides from the idol’s back like a man cast down from a gibbet, and he lays hold of the idol’s throat and strangles the life from it, delivering the good soldier for his sanctification. The idol topples with a hollow booming, and the angel kneels beside its fallen hulk.

He lifts his eyes to the goddess. And once again he can see across the bridge of her nose.

The angel knows in that instant that she has never seen him. Nor the labor of his centuries. Nor the wounds that have cost him so dearly. She has commanded him, but she has never known him. She lifts a hand like a queen deigning to anoint, and she bids him journey once again. The angel turns back on bloodied trunk, and uses his palms drags himself to the next world as the journey requires.