The Past

Angels, after a fashion, were both blind and deaf. Their halos covered their eyes and shrouded their ears, and related the world through the glory of God that shone within the sacred halo. And so, they would know no doubt. This was one of many truths that Samyaza learned from her elders among the Angels, not long after she emerged from her cocoon and joined their ranks. It was the first that she would come to question.

Yet it was not entirely by her own will that she came to question. Though ranked a Seraph, the proud pinnacle of all angels as they were born from their cocoons, and inquisitive as well as proud, Samyaza had been content to live in service as she was told she was meant to, until it happened. How it happened, Samyaza would never know, whether it was by some stray shard of power or the force of something on Earth, but her halo became flawed, a crack imperceptible from the outside forming over her left eye. That crack shattered the supposed truth, for Samyaza could see and hear both what the halo showed her and what her own eye and ear could know.

Usually, they were similar, often identical but for the golden veneer of the Halo. At other times, though, they were more different. On Earth, performing the tasks demanded of an Angel there, the discrepancy could be explained; dark forces might aim to deceive human eyes, or even angel eyes with pleasant guises while the Halo revealed the true horror. But, then, why was it Heaven that held the most discrepancies?

Samyaza, when commanded, gathered departed souls in the mortal world and brought the worthy marked to rest in the Silver Sea of Silence, but before her left eye the sea parted, and the delivered souls drifted not into a placid world of dreamless sleep, but into a swirling foundry of weightless space, drawn to crucibles where the essence of the dead ran together as pools of blazing light.

Still, Samyaza was loyal. She thought there had to be a reason for this mechanism. And as she watched the Silver Sea of Silence, the Forge of Souls, she saw now and again in her left eye a form be plucked from one crucible or another, some spirit that would not be rendered down by whatever heat caused the rest to shed their forms and their selves.

And she saw the God she hand known preside over it, fishing these souls out of the foundry-sea with a spider's thread of purest aetheric gold, sharp intent behind the eyes that were ever in the halo's sight fixed as a mask of impassive and absolute peace. Its wings bore it from the Silver Sea to the Pillars of Creation, and its four arms spun a cocoon around the salvaged soul before setting it, invisibly to what the Halo showed, within the Pillars of Creation as a new angelic cocoon.

Samyaza was not at ease. There was beauty to what she saw, but why was it hidden from the halos? Why did the glory show only silence and cloud where this work of creation was being done? Why, in her left eye's sight, did the God that had made Samayaza not look quite real?

Samyaza did not air these questions openly, but she did make note of others who seemed to watch. There were others, she realized, who could see as she saw, who did not speak of what they knew. Who, like her, had begun to doubt.

Samyaza reached out to these, in secret and clandestine ways, and they became her new cadre of dear friends. Penemue, Azazel, Yomiel, Sariel, Gadreel, Chazaqiel, Jeqon, and Shamsiel – together with Samyaza the seraph, they were the nine who watched.

They were not the only ones dear to Samyaza, and it pained her to have a secret separate her from her others who she would have otherwise borne her heart to, her cocoon sister Cassiel, and Haniel who had mentored her in the responsibilities of the Seraphs as an even-handed senior.

Thus, Samyaza schemed, and thought she did no wrong in scheming. At Haniel's side when they were about their tasks, she drew her regalia bow, and with the arrow loosed from it for apparent purpose she nicked Haniel's halo in such a careful manner that none who looked at what she did could fault her, or suspect that any mischeif would follow. None but Haniel, who would gain the right to see.

Unlike those who had watched before, Haniel was stricken with terror when she returned to Heaven and saw it half for what it was beneath the glory. She hurried from place to place, and wept and the difference between halo and eye. And as she was distraught, and as she made a scene of her revelation the way Samyaza never hand, she was found.

It was Apollyon who found her, before Samyaza could speak to her, and become the mentor to Haniel that Haniel had been to her. Apollyon, eldest among seraphs and most zealous. It was Apollyon who restrained Haniel with force, and who spat in her face and decried her fear as heresy, impiety, apostasy, and demanded that she repent. It was Apollyon, the loyal, the favored, second only to the hallowed who always attended in God's presence, who beckoned God to gaze upon the angels and hear their cries.

And this is what the halos showed to the gathered host of angels: Haniel, forced to her knees by Apollyon, repented, and prayed that she might be delivered from the horrors of falsehood and darkness that had assailed her. And God, ever impassive, looming mountainous before her, scooped her up in one hand, and held it cupped with Haniel within, and said to all that in enduring this test of faith she had earned being Hallowed. And so Haniel praised God's name, and as God baptized her in the gold of ascension she sang hymns unto him, and her halo, restored, lifted to rest above her head for her eyes burned with the glory within. Thus a new Hallowed was born.

But in her other eye, and other ear, Samyaza saw and heard a different scene played out. Haniel, in terror, demanded answers for what she'd seen. And the being they had called God seized her, and held her in his hand, and looked down at her not with impassive peace but rather baleful intent. And then she cried and begged forgiveness, and he reached across the Heaven to retrieve a crucible of molten soul, and poured it steadily upon her with one hand while the other two shaped and twisted. Haniel screamed in agony, until at last her screams became silent, and the slag ran off of her, and the halo rose above her head, gossamer threads tethering what was left of Haniel like the strings of a marionette. And Samyaza realized that there were no Hallowed, but rather Hollow puppets of a tyrant deceiver.

Samyaza could not weep. She could not mourn. She could only mime celebration with all the rest. For the thing was watching, and Apollyon was watching, and Samyaza now knew the price of her flaw. So, to live, she buried that agony, and it burned all the way down to her core, to know what had really befallen Haniel, and how it had been Samyaza's fault.

From that moment, Samyaza would not think of that thing with any of its old names. It was not god. It did not love them, or mankind. And it did not create, only transform with its countless threads.

Thus, those who watched came to call it The Weaver.

They hatched a plan thereafter to escape to the Earth below. And when they found the moment to all descend, upon the surface, Samyaza was the first to shatter her own halo, splitting it in twain. And the crystal of the glory blackened, and the pure white light drained from Samyaza, and dyed her wings gray. The Weaver's light evaporated from her skin and washed from her hair and faded from her eyes and left behind mundanity, and her dress of purity became tattered and filthy.

But the others had seen the fates that could await them, and they chose to join Samyaza, and sullied themselves as she had. The fallen watchers spread out among the humans of the city they had landed in promising to reconvene later.

That was two weeks ago.