Beginnings (2 of 5)

"...And God said unto Michael 'I have given you the gift of seeing my face. Unlike Man, you will never doubt that I exist..."

Dante paced slowly around the statue. Anyone else would have questioned why such a statue was in the small room at the top of St Mark's clock tower. They may have wondered at the signs that the statue had only recently arrived and why it had been placed on top of the bell rope. Or, this individual may have marveled at the statue itself - carved from a single block of marble the size of a car, detail so fine you could see fractured bones, tears and drops of blood. Or maybe this absent observer would have asked why someone would have made such a graphic likeness of a slain angel.

But not Dante. In fact, he was reasonably sure he knew the answers to most of those questions.

"...I have given you the gift of serving me directly. You are my tools for creating everything, and you will be my agents in all matters..."

As he paced, he kept himself at arms length from the angel. While the floorboards had held this long, he wasn't putting any faith in them. The figure appeared to have been involved in a brutal fight - a fact reflected in the room. There was broken masonry, damaged beams, and even a large crack in the bell above.

"...But I shall give you a third gift. You and your kind have seen the beginning of my work, and so you shall see the end of it..."

There were two things in the room that held Dante's interest - what looked like claw marks gouged into the wooden beams above, and the 8 foot long spear that was currently embedded through the chest of the creature.

"...Until the end of time, none of you shall perish from age or disease. Until the end of time, I will not strike you down. Until the end of time, only by your own hand will you ever experience death..."

For only the fourth time since the Fall, someone had succeeded in not only killing an angel's physical form, but its spiritual form as well. If the cease-fire had ended, it meant bad news for everyone. If this wasn't the start of another war, it still meant trouble. Either way, if the spear was an angel-forged weapon, Dante was going to need it. The only question was how to get it...

Then the floor finally gave way.