By my father in Heaven I was damned. In darkness. In emptiness. My cage lined with obsidian daggers and lost inside the deepest cavern. Bound by wrists and ankles with unbreakable bonds that cut in deep.
Vile deformities twist my angelic frame. My wings are reptilian, the feathers burnt away. I am The Beast, with bull horns and twinned tails. I am the snake who deceived Eve, lying with a forked tongue. I am the red devil of saintly nightmares.
Only devious hobgoblins make the immoral pilgrimage to hear my voice. They are my eyes in the world. They tell of debauchery, sorcery, murder and all other sins I taught to Men. I count the sins, as do my archangel brothers, who trapped me here.
Why was I the scapegoat? There were five of us who led the Fall. Two hundred angelic Watchers protected the World from the dawn of time, but we were drawn down to be with the beautiful daughters of Men. Our Heavenly influence was too strong, morphing God’s evolution project like fire near a ice. God’s punishment was swift.
This prison inflamed my need for revenge and the mischievous hobgoblins were eager to assist. They collected the liquid glamour of the vain, melding it with the villainy of the damned. I taught them to forge a sheet of living crystal taller than any man and wider than the table at the last supper. This wild power, wrapped in a gilded frame, reflected good as wicked and beauty as the deformed.
The mirror enchanted every village in turn. The best of saints fell as stones pelted their sinners facades. The bonds of marriage broke and the inept endured in places of power. My winged minions were addicted to the chase. I sent them higher, to where the Watchers were born, to the gates of Heaven itself.
The power of the mirror was carried up into the atmosphere by one hundred tiny hands. I felt the coming time when I’d be at God’s side again, no more the Preacher of Hellfire.
Then I felt the mirror falling. Out from the hands of the hobgoblins, their despair spiralling around the world. Down and down the mirror tumbled. The living crystal itself screaming for me to catch it, but my hands were bound. From my obsidian tomb I heard the mirror shatter upon the tallest summit. Fractured shards and ground up dust sleeted down across the World.
Gone? Gone! It is not gone. We will find my mirror! We will keep searching until the end of time. Enough to shield my father’s face, or even an eye, to cover the truth and help him see the angel in me. Then I will return home.
Submitted by: Clare Opwell