Recall

There’s a shock in her system that permanently stiffens her body.

It leaves her eye wide, bottom lip quivering as the breathing escaping her mouth was turning shallow. She recalls hands pressed together, gold crossed signs and voices falling over each other. She was looking into the sky, the same way praying fingers would, trying to avoid His eyes despite being gifted with His sight. He was looking back into her, waiting for their visions to cross paths once more, because it will, because it was going to. Fire, iron and weak breaths fill her senses harshly, making her shut away the tears in her eye, making her sob, making her agonize even further.

“Why?” She asks, chest so riddled with holes that she wheezed it out.

“You know why.” He answers.

Hands pressed together. Gold crossed signs. Fallen voices that overlapped onto one another. To whom it may have concerned, she wondered if she could see him if she looked far enough into the sky. She knew one thing when it came to these rituals; the words they passed on were meant to be secrets sworn by the people, words of relief, words of pleasure, words of the blessed, thanking everyday for a gift that couldn’t be beyond that.

Routine.

Curiosity.

Confusion.

That was her childhood. From the day she was born, to the bellowing screams that echoed throughout time and space, an eye that took over a quarter of her skull and a pair of wings on her head, childhood filled with dilapidated roofs, wide eyed stares, and the dark— she was made to be a gift among men.

“The outside world isn’t a place meant for someone like you.” Her mother said, reaching to scratch under the surface of her wings before looking to the little altar they made in the corner of the room. God had a woman who watched them all the time, that part was true. She watched everything that happened in that house, bared witness to a birth of what they thought was a monster to seeing her nearly get killed. Mother Mary had a veil on her head, and when they would take their daughter out to the village she would have a veil over her face too. “It will protect you from the other angels,” her father said, “don’t let them bring you back to heaven.”

Don’t let them bring you back to heaven.

She didn’t really know what that meant— for it to be good, bad, or more than that, but that phrase stuck to her as they prayed to the shrines where he in the heavens heard from the farthest away. She knew what heaven was— what angels were, what the cost of going against the Lord meant, but it didn’t touch her like it did her family, the people around her. It was simply as natural as a breath, to be able to speak of someone so highly like this. They did this with the king, and they did this with her.

She wondered if he had a face, just like the rest of them would.

She had a talent with the sword. With every single vantage point at her disposal, her eye would catch the weak point of her opponent with ease and dig her blade straight to where she needed it— past the important parts, in order to keep the men alive. She learned how to flap her wings and take herself high enough to plunge down with a strength that terrified her men to-be. Wings spread, eye wide open, she saw the weaknesses and strengths of every opponent and soon, the palace they trained in. Prayers became training, hiding became showing off. She would fly high into the sky to scope out the location for their next raid and helped the army embrace the land in order to win over hundreds of times.

Nobody really took interest in her the same way she wasn’t interested in them. It wasn’t her who established the connections for everybody to work with one another after all; but she pretended that wasn’t something to think about. He was another, however much lower, general, unusual in his shiny dark skin and blue eyes. An immigrant from the farthest islands where no winters existed, living in a perpetual summer that traded with rich fibers from their native trees. She had no idea what the name as called— hadn’t asked to, really, but to know he was a good fighter, and that he spent many years in his teenhood here had been a cause for interest especially when he didn’t look right, just as she did.

“You wanted to see me, general?” She asked him one day, knee pressed against the floor while the other raised to keep her balanced. Her sword was placed in front of her as she waited for his next command.

“I know you are different.” He said, slowly walking towards her, “I know how others perceive you as a monster, despite being a gift from God Himself.”

“… Yes,” she replied, tilting her head up curiously, “what of it?”

“I think that deserves to change.”

“How?”

“I want to,” he began, drawing until he was right in front of her, “see what you are capable of.” He went down to her level, reached out to touch her shoulder and squeezed it, “General.”

She was a general at as young as 22. A leader of the army, a keeper of citizen’s lives; it was one of the greatest honors for them to bestow upon her shoulders and she carried it with her easily. Battles were won, there were many who survived, and soon they continued to build the empire and their trade routes had spread. Though, despite it all, she hadn’t spoken to many of those people between the raids. In order to keep herself company, she thought of mother, she thought of father.

Sometimes, she thought of him, but never considered a conversation. To her, they’d always been divided by a window: seeing each other, but not quite. Unable to really meet paths as the glass continued to stain. Her fingers would tentatively grace their presence onto the surface, but nothing more had come toward it as she continued to look forward.

The window would always follow her. So did his eyes.

“May I sit with you?” He asked, approaching her as she sat alone in front of a fire. She remembered how the light of the flames reflected on his skin rather than absorbed, how there were visible, unnatural rings in his dark eyes that nearly glowed in the dark. She blinked under her veil, then shuffled in her seat on the log to make space for him to sit down next to her.

“It seems my choices went down the right path.” He commented, playing with a knife in his hand. His eyes flickered back to her. “Are you holding up alright, general?”

She exhaled, thinking for a moment, then tilted her head forward, “how could I not?”

His smile was soft. Peace-loving. “Good.”

He seemed content with the nothing their conversation was carrying. She hugged her knees towards herself, leaning her head against the tops as she faced him. The veil draped to the side.

“Do you have anybody at home for you?” he asked.

“I am not married, no. But I have parents who fuss about several things. And you?”

He looked at her. “Nothing for me to come home to. You seem as if you’re getting married with that thing.”

“Do I?”

“I can imagine it.” He said, “there’s no need to hide.”

“I’d rather not have the eyes of everyone on me.”

“I’ve seen your face. You’re beautiful.”

“My, my,” She faced him, eye visible through the veil, “attempting to seduce your general?”

He chuckled. “I’m simply stating a fact.”

For it was difference that allowed her to see such beauty. She found him beautiful too, but she was never really willing to say it— they made her a general, so she was acting like it all the way through. For years they fought alongside each other, drank together, spoke of long, deep conversations in the dark of the night where they were alone. Strangely, however, she would never find him outside of the warzone. Every instance she tried to search for him in the villages, the city, it seemed as if he disappeared without a trace. She tried using her eye, only to find nothing.

In her return home, she was given gold and silver, enough to compensate for the lifetime of war she lived through, enough for her family to live another good decade. Her parents embraced her, Mary baring witness once more, as her mother cried out: “Our gift has blessed us yet again!”

Her eye twitched, to her own surprise.

But in that stark realization, in blessing her own family, in blessing the military, being blessed had caused her to understand what it must have been like to be God— but perhaps that wasn’t the case.

Perhaps she was indeed, God.

And that’s what she told him the next time they met for another war— the military campaign against Halych.

“It makes sense, does it not?” She asked, smiling back at him as she held his hands in hers. She pulled him under the moonlight as she kept herself light on her feet. It was an exciting— an alien feeling. Something that made her heart race, the glory of the answers given to her finally making sense in her own world. She wasn’t just made to be the gift of The eye that had taken up most of her skull finally had its answers, and it was then that she realized that it belonged to God that way: that it belonged to Her, that She was the one they were worshiping all along.

He looked at her, pursing his lips in a doubtful manner, but upon recalling it she should have known that it was a temptation to disprove her theory.

“What are you going to make of it then?” He asked.

“I shall continue to bless the people around me with this eye of god. I was born with it for a reason— I was born for a reason! I have to continue my purpose and that is to serve! I can't be brought back to heaven!”

He looked at her with a small smile, then. She was happy to serve and be served; to be something that everybody else made her be rather than something she would build up for herself.

It was disappointing.

But what good would a creation be without having to serve?

She tried it. She really did. He had to give her the benefit of it, after all, but he knew what was going to happen if she strayed down this path.

Raising the halberd in his hand, he pierced it into the sky and she dropped like a dying bird.

And that’s where they are now. With her men dead, her lungs pierced with several more spears, she realizes that as she sees into the sky that there was no God that was meant to be looked for.

With the sun in His hair, the sky in his eyes, he looked down into her own eye as he began to strip from the facade of the mortal she grew to love. Her body trembled under His hold. For the first time, she was seeing God, up close and personal.

At that moment, she knew why He had to take her.

All she had to do was recall.