Angels After Man (Angels #3)

Chapter 1

From blood, there came fire. Nazarene man, God, the Son of God — find him feeding the flames.

Through a wound in his palm from a coarse hand drill, his red tears wept, then whipped hot unto themselves.

Cracks like those that rip open the Earth, like the breaking of bones.

Kneeling was as frail on him as the flutters of oranges, yellows, whites that bloomed bright over a desert-baked, middle-aging face.

The shades of Hell, see, cast over the Son of God, the Nazarene man, with a shadow cast behind himself in the shape of death.

A misplaced past; what will happen has already happened.

Above, the mother moon is shattered into silver pieces to trade for a kiss.

But never was it the silver that rewarded the crucifixion.

Death was death’s reward, and it was a kiss for a kiss.

From God, the Son of God, ancient eyes opening in a manger. Incarnation to know to be wretched.

Silence, Nazarene man. Watch the bygone approach, enshrouded in veil and robe, a sentenced stranger without shape.

The damned one spoke serpentine, asking if it had been forty days, forty mornings and nights, that they had spent here in silence, in starving.

With each footstep, the Nazarene never stirred to the sound of marches between his own nor to each hiss between his prayers.

Yet, prayer is pleading; what Son of God implores for his Father to listen?

The carpentry in his blood must have boiled; it believed love must be beat and sawed and nailed to be built.

In the temple, the child had touched the wood of a wall, and he had breathed in the dust and hacked it out.

No breath of life, see. The Lord’s sighs into the mouths of man were absent in the teeth of a Nazarene boy.

Hear his mother. She chased her lost son, and she had not found him but an ingrown body of grandeur dreams.

Son of God? You are no Son of God. Pre-determined mad man.

Had the Nazarene come to the desert to die from the drought drying the skin of his tongue, or to collapse from the pulses of heat in his divine skull?

Or had he come to drown in his animal sweat and find purpose there?

Hours past, the man had searched in the sea of sand for all the drowned of an earlier apocalypse.

Fingers had bore holes in the ground like those that would tear into hands and feet, pressed to wood the Nazarene man knew the scrape of before his own God-given, mother-ridden name.

First, the devil took a stone and threw it at the man’s feet. He said, If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into bread.

But, Satan, it is written: Man shall not live on bread alone.

Then, the mocking devil said, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself from the high temple. It is written that He will command His angels concerning you, and they will lift you up into their hands, so that you will not strike a foot against a stone.

It is written: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Thus the devil brought God, the Son of God, with him to see all the kingdoms of the world and answered, All this I will give you, if you bow down and worship me.

It is written that the Nazarene man will die to the crucifix, and it is written that God is alone. He will walk with twelve alone, and he will break bread alone. He was born alone, and he will carry the bleeding of whips and a cross on his back alone. God, the Son of God, will be worshiped alone.

The devil has and will watch God die in tortured agony. In wretchedness. His final miracle.

The Lord will say: Lord, why have you forsaken me?

The Lord will say: Lord, to you, I hand over my spirit.

The Lord will say, It is finished. I have done it.

Write this for they are His final words.

I have found purpose through death and only death.

It is only through suffering that I have found meaning to being here.

God is dead; He has killed Himself. It is only like this that He could save us.