The only inevitability is the fall from grace. More often, just the fall. A world once brimming with possibility was now narrow, offering only highways of escape, exchanging paths with fellow travelers until the end of time. Coya’s was coming soon. It was in the air of Manaus, no longer rich with the scent of the earth, forced up from the silty waters of the Rio Negro— as it had been the first time she visited, a few hundred years ago— but now tainted with the acrid notes of boiling rubber, plastic, molten steel, and imported chemicals. Factories and highrises. A tumor pressing against the edge of the Amazon.
She hadn’t always hated people, but resentment brings pressure like the mantle beneath the crust. So much had been taken that it seemed impossible—impossible as the death of the Sun—yet it had happened; her father Inti slain like Zeus, Osiris, and Tsukuyomi: gutted by a flaming sword and left to rot as carrion upon the land of mortals.
“¿Estás bien?” the man asked.
Pulled from reverie and back to the bar, Coya turned to the man who’d bought her last three drinks. Fresh beads of sweat clung to his chest, and dried stains marred the lettering of his company cap. Cargill.
“Sí. What were you saying?” she asked.
He shook his arm to show off his gold watch again. “That my guy’s probably not gonna make it.” He took a long drink. “Bushmasters are nasty sons of bitches. Ever been out there?”
“I’ve spent some time—”
He interrupted with a grin. “Honestly, if people knew what the jungle was really like, my crew and I would be taking home medals for each acre we chop.”
Maybe someday they would. Time chooses strange victors.
“What happens when you run out of trees?” she asked.
He laughed. “You plant more. By the way, have I told you you’re glowing?”
By nature, the sun had touched her with radiance, but fate had turned it dun. A slight sting prodded her eyes as she watched a couple dance in the open space of the bar.
“Want to dance?” the man asked.
“I can’t.”
He smirked. “Everyone can dance.”
Dance was a celebration of life—past, present, and future—none of which she could claim. To claim was to embrace, and embracing what she was meant calling the devil from the clouds. Her feet were not for dancing but for running. Coya looked from the man’s grin to the golden crucifix on his chest.
“Are you a religious man?” she asked.
He flicked the pendant. “Just covering my bases. You?”
A strange cold pervaded the air. She thought of Hercules, Cú Chulainn, Karna—men who had proclaimed their fathers’ divinity and met the same gory ends. She still saw Inti’s glory in her dreams. It was one of the many reasons she tried not to sleep.
“No.”
He took a mouthful of light beer. “We’ll see how long you hold out.”
“Meaning?” Coya asked.
“When you’re belly up, staring at the angels, who keeps thinking there’s nothing?”
She looked around at the smiling faces, lost in liquor, thinking themselves tiny gods.
“How much longer are you in town?” he asked.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
A peal of lightning shook the firmament. Coya glanced at the black clouds rolling over Manaus, where the sky had been clear just moments ago. A knot twisted in her throat. She turned to see the man frozen in time, beer bottle raised mid-sip, patrons halted mid-conversation, jaws slack, and the bartender's pour suspended mid-air—mescal solid like amber in the glass.
“Ahí estás,” a hellish voice boomed from beyond. “No more hiding.”
Fear gripped her heart, and gooseflesh rose over her trembling hands. There was only one way. Coya threw open the window and reached into the cursed part of herself. Structure followed the image in her mind as she leapt from the seventh-story window, pulling her skeleton inward, reshaping flesh to feather. On eagle’s wings, she cut through the downpour, flying between towers toward the convergence of the Río Negro and the Amazon. Why had she run? Had she thought anything could shield her better than the stones and magic of her dead people?
Thunder snarled through the clouds as afreets streaked after her. A flash illuminated the sky: an ancient cherub wielding a flaming sword.
Coya fought against the winds, wings beating furiously. A spear of lightning flashed. She rolled instinctively, and the bolt crashed into the river. Another snapped into the forest, igniting sparks and flame. Sucking damp air, she twisted and dove, but the celestial strikes closed in. Darkness engulfed the horizon. She knew she would never make it.
Weakness seized her for a moment—then came a flashing lance. White agony seared her back, and Coya plummeted, feathers aflame, crashing into the river.
Beneath the murky current, feathers smoothed to scales, her trachea opened to gills, and her legs pinched into a powerful tail. A missile through the water, she shot down the river, but from the depths loomed death.
Coya veered sharply from the sudden emergence, a great caiman cloaked by darkness. The beast snapped a vortex of bubbles, and in her turn, she fell right into the path of another. With no vocal cords to scream, she could only thrash blood into the water as it clamped and ripped a chunk from her belly. Desperation drove her toward the shore, a throng of reptilian monsters close in her wake.
She shot like an arrow from the water and onto the muddy shore. Still torn wide at the ribs, she imagined her form and scales softened to spotted fur, fins to paws, and teeth to feline fangs. She limped into the forest, the caimans struggling until the trees halted their pursuit.
Blood loss clouded her mind, but instinct drove her west. Even with the eyes of a jaguar, the forest was dark and unforgiving. What seemed like a mass of shadow suddenly lunged. A thick serpent reeking of death. Its teeth sunk into her throat, and helpless to its jaws, the constrictor wrapped its body in coils around.
Skull ready to pop under the pressure, something primeval awoke. The form arose on its own, something monstrous, not bear, not primate, not dragon, but something in between. With serrated fangs she tore through its flesh and with steel hands she squeezed its head into pulp.
Bleeding and broken, she limped on through the jungle, bouncing off of trees and shivering from blood loss. A break came in the forest. A small village. Sheet metal shacks and flickering lights shining the downpour.
She started through the streets and saw within the meager homes the frozen faces of rural townspeople around their tables. Amongst the homes, only one structure was built to last, a small cathedral of clay, divine light shimmering through the windows. Something ethereal told her what was waiting. In the face of that fear she thought only of flight. Tears of dread streamed with the rain. Her eyes fell shut. There was no denying the inevitable. Only pain in running. She’d never see Cuzco again, not as it was when she was a child those centuries ago, nor what it had become. Not without seeing what lay in that church.
She opened the doors and him kneeling at the altar, his claymore sheathed at his side, feathered wings retracted and adorned in golden armor. He rose to his full height over the space, turned, and gestured to a blanket on the rear pew.
“You knew it was coming,” Michael said, standing firm atop the steps with his arms crossed behind his back.
Coya wrapped herself tight. Through mangled vocal cords, she said, “What have I done?”
“Some debts are inherited.”
“Isn’t your Lord one of forgiveness?”
“Your father was of a breed before the Old Covenant, let alone the new. And whether you like it or not, he’s your Lord too.”
“I’ve never received the waters.”
“That only means you’ll burn.”
A shudder ran down her spine. Thoughts of the eternity beyond had been hidden beneath the ever-stretching road of escape. She’d seen almighty forces other than Yahweh, but the fact that they’d all fallen brought to mind the question of what constituted divine authority.
“What gives you the right?” she asked. “What makes you so much better than us?”
“I claim no ground above you, no righteousness of my own. I am an agent to truth.”
“So it's ‘truth’ to cut down anyone that has divine blood? To slay the only beings who interacted with those they claimed to serve? Where’s your god Michael? How can he be just when his people suffer?”
“To intervene is to strip mankind of will. They have their choices, and it’s not always the mover who feels movement.”
“Is that an excuse for war? For pain? At least my father tried to help the people who turned to him. At least Thor protected his realm. At least—”
“I didn’t come to discuss ethics with the spawn of a fallen angel!” Michael said, taking one step down, his eyes alight with blue flame. “Your father, like all the rest, chose to make contact. To receive praise when his charge was to give it. They knew what happened to Lucifer. They were even given a chance to repent. But they decided on their own, and in that, he decided for you. If you hold grievance, hold it with your father for abandoning his duty, your mother for taking a devil into her legs, your people for not smothering you earlier.
“The Lord has tasked me with cleansing all traces of the defectors from the earth and idolatrous love from the hearts of man. I take no joy in cutting down the kin of my brethren, but I don’t turn my back.”
Coya looked to the floor and sat at the edge of the back pew. “So that’s it. Your Lord is afraid… scared of losing the love of mankind. It doesn’t want to be forgotten.”
Michael reached the bottom step, eyes flickering with white flame, heat lines rising off his body.
Coya looked up. “What happens when the Lord is forgotten?”
“The Lord will never be forgotten.”
She grinned. “Then you don’t know the world.”
“No, girl. You don’t know,” he said, pacing down the aisle. “My God needs no believers, no faith, so long as there is light, dark, a single pebble, or stray feeling, the question will always return. ‘Where did this come from?’”
To this he drew a towering greatsword of black steel caught within a nimbus of flame.
“Your father might have been a ‘god’ of answers, but like I said, mine is one of truth, and the truth is we’re too small to understand Her ways. The Lord puts no stake in strength or cunning, had She, these lofty souls made famous on earth would know peace in life and death. But peace is for the faithful, the accepting, the chosen.”
“You sound afraid.”
A somberness softened his countenance. “I am. As all should be.”
He stopped before the pew. The flickering of the sword’s flame played tricks in the moment, lulling with mysterious patterns which distracted from what it coated. Eyes rolling to the back of her head and blood pooling at her feet, Coya considered a stand. A last fight for her people. In times past, she’d been able to call on the strength of ancestors whose echos remained hidden in the ether of reality. But the fact suddenly illuminated something she’d chosen to overlook. Slain or not, they were there. So the real question reared, what was she fighting to be?
Coya rose on trembling legs and dropped the blanket. Bare before the angel, she thought of those distant sunlit memories, the warmth of the earth, the roads of Cuzco, and sharp peaks beyond the city. The warm love of a fallen angel and days where things seemed simple. Time had taken assurances, but had too splayed with possibility. There was no fighting some things. Water or fire, each moment was endured and at afar, endured together. Wherever she went, she wasn’t alone, and so long as there was more than one, there was infinite. In sight of the raised claymore, she closed her eyes and smiled at the blank nirvana of endless ways.
What a life.
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