A thousand years since this day, as I face you here, an angel toppled down right next to me.
Well not right next to me. Close enough. Far too close enough.
Spring came early that year. I remember that because the moor was a sea of slush, bracken, the occasional salt-rock. At night the moon punctured the sky with stars, like a milk-faced fisherman flailing the sea with a glittering net. He made the sky bleed in golden pricks of blood. Sometimes these drip to the earth. Sometimes they drag down an angel with them.
But there, I jump ahead. Forgive me; I am not as young as I once was, and this tale has, in truth, never ceased to bewilder me. We speak of an angel—so I must describe the boy. I must speak of my grandson. And perhaps you will understand the correlation.
A strange child, who never resembled us. His hair black, unlike my son’s brown beard or his mother’s coppery locks. His face smooth as smear of oil, chiseled to angry angles—soft and sinister, unlike yours. And his eyes turned red, unlike any mortal being’s. Like something fallen from grace.
I visited them in their stone cottage at the brink of the Lowland’s village. Not often, because I couldn’t stand my son’s stubbornness and his wife’s sullenness. Not often, and I avoided my grandson’s eyes, for the first time afraid of what my own would see.
The boy did not know he had been adopted. He grew up herding goats in the blue-gray embrace of the moor. He carried neither pipes nor lute like other youths. He did not speak to his sheep, as most lonely shepherds do during their first weeks away from home. As a child, he rejected our arms, pulled himself up instead by a mule’s tail. He would try to ride the goats until they bucked and threw him, and he would crumple tearless to the ground and brood. He had a way of alienating others; the cousins who once visited refused to touch or then even look at him, too afraid even to taunt. Better for them, I suppose… red-rimmed eyes that neither cried nor smiled were poor company for the healthy souls of other youngsters. When taking the sheepskins to the town to sell, his father left him behind, telling him to guard against wolves and banshees, because (he said) he was the bravest boy a man could ask for. I knew it was because he was ashamed of the boy.
Changeling? I believed so. There could be no other answer. I could not see myself sharing the same blood with that creature. It didn’t even cross my mind, back then, that this had once been an angel.
I’ve grown since then, though it may have taken me eleven hundred years, immortal that I am. I see now that you cannot use your goodness unless you know of it.
And you cannot face the dark within you until you find it.
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