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The church.
It was quiet, peaceful, ethereal, still. Daylight streaked through the stained glass in perfect rays, falling in horizontal streaks of light within the hallowed chamber. The pews, even in their dusty and untouched state, seemed to carry the quality of faultlessness. Whomsoever walked between them did so with or without reverence for the musky smell, sighing floorboards and yellowed-eared Bibles. This foundation of religion seemed to care little, and was silent in its indifference.
What came next was no natural act. The silence, which had laid unmolested for so long, was broken by nothing short of an act of God. The air thickened as if damp with a summer’s storm, and the place that rested at the altars’ feet became blurred. Time itself seemed to drag its feet across the plush red carpet that lined the path from the doors to the pulpit.
Between ten twenty-sevenths of a second and ten forty-sevenths of a second, an angel fell from heaven to earth. The air about the altar was pulled inward and propelled outward in those fleeting, once insignificant moments; leaving in its wake the kneeling image of a man bathed in naught but white, his head bowed in supplication; grand wings of white splayed in adoration.
The church.
It was radiant, alive, touched by God and housing a pure angel of heaven most high. A chorus sang from a brilliant light that filtered from the pinnacle of the church’s ceiling, touching the crown of the winged man who knelt before it. Under his curled fist appears a sword, absorbing daylight instead of reflecting it.
Impossible it is to describe the full grandeur of such a site. It is a vision holy men pray too and philosophers question. Any man or beast holding witness could no longer question the validity of heaven or hell, of God or the Devil. There in a radiance of bathed light was truth, unblemished of sin and mortality.
The second passed, complete. The light went out with such a sudden ferocity that one might have cried out in surprise, and wonder if it had ever been there at all. The man at the altar, however, said nothing. For indeed, now, there was nothing there but a man; clad in clothes of white and tan, his hair no longer blonde but black, his wings no longer completely pure but white with tips of gray and black; and they too disappeared with the chorus that fell silent.
Icarus opened his pale blue eyes. He did not breathe, he did not speak. He only wept a single tear that glinted like the sword briefly in the daylight, and all was still.
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