Knight of Nights

THE RULE OF THREE

My name is Galea and I love apples. In thinking about this, it may be better to say that I liked to eat apples. I haven’t had one for centuries, ever since my human organs started to turn into stone. But more about that later. 

My name is Galea and I loved to eat apples. 

As I look through the window of the small apartment, the open bags of honey crisps stare back at me from the small, unattractive night table that stands next to the bed. I succumb to my senses, and elated in my own illusion, I let the vision of apples transport me to the pleasure of food I cannot eat. Choosing to follow my fantasy, I know the journey there is meant to be quick. I start by admiring the fruit’s roundness. I see in it the promise of delight that is contained within the skin’s shiny and delicate wax that won’t give away its riches until the crunchiness of the first bite dives into it. I can taste nature's silky elixir coating my tongue, mitigating my thirst with a bittersweet juiciness. My tongue’s reaction to the remnant strands of memory makes my mouth moist in ecstasy. The pleasure that comes with only one small bite, a pleasure that is no longer mine to experience.  

Call me Galea; I am the winged angel who cannot eat nor fly anymore. 

Sometimes I doubt that I ever could do the latter. It’s been centuries since I saw this world from the sky. I envy the worms that eat apples. I envy the birds that fly and eat the worms. I envy. 

My name is Galea and I wait outside the apartment with the room full of apples. The room that faces the alley where I stand unseen, where the misty air makes my hair fall unruly on my shoulders and on my wings. I wait there like I have waited in front of thousands of other rooms and alleys. No matter how far, I transport my energy through land, sea and air. I always wait.

Inside the apartment, only one candle illuminates the room. This only draws me closer to the window. It is through the weak and warm intensity of the candlelight that my eyes catch him staring in from outside. I do not move, blink, or question if he can see me; I know he can’t. Not in my own dimension, not while it is my will to not be seen. He holds a woman’s hand while she sleeps. His sight is directed toward me but fixated on the emptiness of the night that works in my favor by keeping me sheltered in its darkness.

Time passes by but not for me. At last, I am invited to come inside. Words are nonexistent; it is but a gentle pull that drags me toward the bed where she lays. The candle flickers but my coming goes unnoticed. Standing next to the woman who rests in bed, I look at her surroundings feeding my curiosity on the life that is about to cease. Then, the Rule of Three starts.

They all see me in their last three seconds in this dimension, when I am real enough for humans to fully accept my coming. 

One. the time dimension stops existing and the veil between us retreats. I feel the opening of my dimension door calling me to do my eternal job. The woman is able to see me now and she smiles. I pity her. I pity humans and their smiles of acceptance. I pity their primal need to see before believing that I am not a monster in a dark cloth, I am not the night that creeps into their dreams, I am not a lifeless skeleton out of their old tales and legends. 

Two. It is her deep breath that gives me the cue. It is at this moment when my eternal job begins and ends. With the veil gone, I reach to her, and my own self becomes lighter than light itself transporting inside her mind, her body, like a treasure hunter that swiftly collects everything she ever was, everything she could have been. Every joyful, sad moment from the day she arrived, every act of kindness, every selfish one, every dream, every desire, every memory. I scoop her spirit like taking a seed out of an empty shell. 

Three. I leave the shell as it exhales its final breath. I exist shapeless in my own space, I hold her, protect her from lingering between dimension veils until something more powerful and more infinite than me strips my being from her essence and takes her away. 

This cleans me of her, and I open my eyes. And I am once again Galea, the angel of death. 

GALEA

My name is Galea, I am the angel of death. I am one of many who wander this world doing the dirty work of emptying human spirits from their bodies. It takes me sixty earthy seconds to recover from seeing, feeling, and extracting an entire human life in a span of three seconds. That was just one soul of the hundreds from this day. The cleanse is supposed to take every human memory and feeling with it, but from time to time, the process fails and miniature fragments of who those people were when alive cling to me and become part of me.

My cravings for apples didn’t start until after I took an apple farmer whose love for apples could be traced back through his family’s history. But craving for the taste of the fruit is not the only human feeling that sticks around. The loneliness feeling was a recent one, the need of not wanting to be alone had taken over my existence was something I had just started to experience over the past twenty years. Also, human traumas have found a way to linger in myself. I know my eternal purpose will be my demise. This job is the price I pay for an eternal existence. The more I feel like a human, with these feelings, traumas, and pleasure cravings, the more I feel my insides turning into stone making me heavy, too heavy to fly the skies. I can only assume the end; my infinite end draws nearer. It is said, an angel can never become human. This is true. 

Death is never welcomed through the front door of any human home. I leave the apartment the same way I arrived. I walk through the window to the alley that offers shelter in the night. The recent job leaves me feeling dirty, so I change myself into visible matter manifesting outside. The mist from before had opened the way to light rain, and I let it pour on me and wash me from today. I see my wings brushing the wet ground; their tips peek out from my coat and turn brown with mud. I keep walking. My unearthly senses alert me that a man has just been stabbed three blocks from where I stand, but I am not called for that job. I am Galea, Angel of Death and one of many others rumoring this dimension. I keep moving, and in the coldness of the night, I feel my wet wings dragging me down. 

 I hear a series of rhythmic splashes behind me, and I come to a stop. With the rain pouring down, visibility is poor. I pay no attention to the sound and keep moving. It is not until I hear steps again that I realize I am being followed.

“I saw you, just now, in the house. I saw you,” a voice behind me says. 

 Intrigued, I turn, feeling sorry for the poor soul that follows death. I see a silhouette of a man. Only a heavy rain serves as a veil between us now. 
“Can you, can you see me?” he says, waving his hand frantically at me. 

I don’t know why, but I also lift and waving my hand, imitating the same frantic emotion. 

“She, my mother, knew you’d come. She knew you’d be there,” he continues. “She asked me to get the apples. She wanted to be taken by the one who liked apples just like she did. She thought it would make her feel more at ease to know that you and her had something in common.” 

“Do you know if… was she at ease?” 

I don’t move and just stare at him, listening. 

 “It is... it was her superstition, the apple thing, but she believed in it. My family, they, I guess they’ve always had an interest in your kind” he tells me with some doubtfulness in his voice.

I understand what he tells me, yet I do not know how to speak his language or any human language. All I can do is listen to what he says and accept that I am, for the very first time in my eternal life, being seen. 

Slowly he reaches down and picks up something from the pavement. The man extends his arm toward me and I flinch. I pull back as if my own self was poison. The truth is, outside of the Rule of Three, I’ve never physically felt anyone, and I worry. For the first time I worry that by touching him I may take him away before his time.    

“I’m not afraid,” he tells me, suspecting my fear. “It’s not my time; I am too young.” 

 I am not sure if I am in awe because I have a human standing in front of me or because such a human has shown to be so conceited about his own perceived knowledge of life.  

“This is yours, isn't it?” and he comes closer with his hand extended toward me.

I focus on the question, and in forgetting my own limitations, I say, “Yes.” It only takes the human a second to cover his ears. I cannot tell what my voice and words must have sounded like to him, but I see him cover his ears as if fighting an uncontrollable pain. Knowing I have caused physical harm, I start retreating. 

“I am not afraid!” he tells me after the pain has left him. “Here,” and again his hand comes toward me, ready to release what it is mine. I meet him halfway, opening my own palm. It only takes a moment for my feather to fall onto my opened palm, dissolving and merging into my being as it touches my hand. 

A faint smile appears on his mouth. 

I turn and take my leave. I walk across paved walkways in nice neighborhoods, I walk on soundless streets by the pier and then through empty allies downtown. I walk while being pulled by a mystery force that guides death toward its next destination.

 I walk, and he follows. Eventually he starts talking, telling me about his life when he was a kid and almost drowned. When everything went black and quiet, the loneliness he felt stemmed from knowing he was lost from his own life. How equally terrifying it was to be abruptly pulled back into this world with a burning pain in his lungs that were full of water like a full well after winter’s rain. He tells me about his pains and desires as a teenager, he talks about his anger and helplessness in his world. He tells me about the many girls he liked, but I only hear him mention the name of the one he loves. He tells me about the first time he made love and about the times he had drunk sex. Through his life stories, he was giving meaning to the thousands of memories I see when I scoop someone’s essence. When I get pulled to exercise the Rule of Three, he waits for me outside. And when I’m done, the human shadow continues to follow me through the night. He talks to me as if he knew me, as if I was a long-distance friend, one who he lost throughout the years of his youth and found again now that he is a man. 

We walk all night, and as twilight starts, the pier that had been so dreadful during the night became alive. The soundless streets are awoken by fisherman and opportunistic seagulls searching for their morning bite. I see my human companion stopping by the ocean overlook. I could keep on going and leave him there, but I don’t. I stand next to him, watching the ocean... and for the first time in centuries, I wasn’t alone when the sun rose. 

“No one else can see you, can’t they?” he asks me.

I shake my head. 

He smirks back at me, “Sorry, that was a stupid question. The lack of sleep is getting to me. I mean, their eyes...” he says while pointing to the people on the pier, “wouldn’t look so apathetic if they were able to see this… six, seven foot... person next to me... who, who drops a few feathers here and there.” He tells me with a controlled laugh, “God, this is crazy! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t say God’s name in vain and all that, but I mean, she, my mother… she told me you would come for her. She told me stories about you! I never asked how she knew about you or these stories, and I didn’t doubt her either. I can’t even understand my own life sometimes, why pretend I understand anything outside of what I see or don’t see?” He breathes in the coastal air, pushing it deep into his lungs like a thirsty man gulping water in a desert. 

We stare at the sea otters being cradled by the current and at the pelicans diving into the water. After a long silence, he talks again, “I followed you all night trying to find the purpose of me seeing you. And... and I don’t know if there is one, but I do know that you now know about my life better than anyone, better that any closer friend or lover will ever, and for that, I am grateful.” 

“Here,” he tells me, letting some more of my feathers fall onto my hand, disappearing again at my immediate touch. “I’ve been picking them up all night; I stopped counting after I got to one hundred. Are you...” he stops, staring down deeply into the water, as if he was choosing his words carefully “Can... Death stop existing?” 

I already know the answer, but when it comes to dying. the action, the verb, it is a serious matter for any human, and although I cannot speak to this human, I want him to understand that I haven’t taken his questions lightly, so I place my hand on my chin and think about it. 

“Can Death stop existing?” I think to myself. A world without it would only be an empty space full of chaotic, unstable energy without space for life itself. So no, death, the opposite to life, cannot stop existing.

 I shake my head in a ‘no.’ 

“Can you stop existing?” he asks me next. 

“Am I dying?” I ask myself. I can’t be dying, I am Death. Yet, every moment that passes by, I feel like a shattered vase whose pieces have started to fall day after day without anything to hold it together. I crave food yet cannot eat, I don’t have intestines, but I feel them twisting, hardening, like a cement inside me. My feathers drop like a dandelion drops its pappi when the wind blows. It doesn’t matter where I choose to set my existence, my dimension, his dimension; I feel the same. Unhinged over my own existence but yet undead, I can only transcend. 

I nod my head in a ‘yes.’

I wish to tell him that nothing is immortal but immortality itself. Immortality, the being of many faces and names. Me existing the way I do now is only endurance’s will. 

He looks at me for a little while and asks, “When?” 

I smile at him with compassion, unable to predict a satisfactory answer. 

“Thank you,” he tells me, “for allowing me to follow you. I hope you too see me now as a friend or at least... an acquaintance.” He leans down and picks up some more of my feathers. “I don’t think these belong to the seagulls; they are too large for them.” he says, smiling and proceeding to walk away from the pier.

I saw him look back just before turning the corner, but his eyes looked confused and unfocused. I was standing where he had left me, but I knew he could not see me anymore.

THE ANGEL

Sixty human years go by. Dragged from place to place, I’ve been operating in a stoic state of indifference. Tired, I am pulled to a place where fluorescent lights flicker, where excitement and pain are present all around me. I see nurses and doctors come in and out of rooms. The pull drags me toward a room in the far corner where I find an old man lying on a bed.  

The Rule of Three starts. One.

“I asked them to get the apples,” a coarse, old voice whispers, looking toward the door where I stand. “They laughed at me. But... I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be my friend who takes me away. I am afraid. I don’t want to drown.” 

Machines beep uncontrollably, and the green room fills with medical staff. Two. The veil between his dimension and mine retreats; human time stops existing.

“I am Galea,” I say to him, “the angel of death,” knowing that with the veil gone, we finally speak the same language. “Do not be afraid, old friend. I will not let you get lost.” 

I notice a very faint smile on his face, and I let him breathe me, transport me inside his mind and body. As I transverse through his existence, I vividly see all the images of the stories he told me about and many others that came after. I see the night we walked together, I feel what it meant for him to have met me and all the love and appreciation he had for my existence. I scoop his spirit in my arms, and fragments of the man he was insert into me. For the first time in centuries, I feel... loved. 

 Three. I leave the shell as he exhales. I exist shapeless in my own dimension, protecting him from getting lost between dimensions. Then, something more powerful and more infinite than me strips my being from his essence, taking him away but not the love. The love he felt for me stays with me, and because of this power, I transcend. 

When I open my eyes, I am not in the human dimension or mine anymore. I am somewhere else. I know that I haven’t died, as immortality takes on many faces; I have, however, transcended, and now I am Galea, the loved one. Galea, the angel. 

The End.

Cover by: Nina Gvozdeva
Copyright © 2021 All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, writing, or other electronic, mechanical or manual methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. This work is fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual humans (alive or dead), events, or places is entirely coincidental.