these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—
There is no place from the stench of death, but this place reeks so terribly of it that he can hardly breathe around it.
It is a place laid to waste.
It is a place all full of wreckage.
If he could, he would press his mouth to the earth and heal it. He would say a prayer for the souls lost here. But he cannot heal this earth and he no longer knows how to pray.
The grass is sparse, dead, and his heart clenches like a fist as he drifts across the landscape.
He will leave no mark here, this angel crafted from ice. This place will not remember him, though he will come to visit it often in his dreams. If he turned all of the devastation within him into a place, certainly it would resemble this. A land of ruin, marked by a chaos long since passed.
He draws in a long breath, remembering the way the big cat had sunk its teeth into his throat. How the ice had rushed to heal him so quickly that it didn’t even scar.
(Why? Why does he think of this as he drifts across the plain?
Why does he remember his own death?)
The water rises, hungry, and he watches a long moment before turning from it again. Turning to study the ruins. There had been a civilization here once, he thinks, and he wonders what it was that destroyed them.
