The Angelic Observation of Mortal Evolution

There’s a fish on the shore. Red leaks from where its body has been battered against the rocks. The fish struggles, little legs fluttering blindly for help, for aid.

Uriel watches it.

It’s disgusting, this fish Father has made. Uriel is distinctly grateful that as an angel, being and grace will never become broken sacks of skin that wither, die, stain.

The fish, perhaps sensing Uriel’s presence, panics, struggles to get away. Something escapes its mouth, a manipulation of air molecules with a keening pitch.

Uriel decides it is an unpleasant sound, just like the fish with the seeping red viscous fluid is an unpleasant sight. Uriel stretches forth grace around the fish and it is undone.

Later, when Joshua asks Uriel why unmake the fish instead of healing it or letting the fish die naturally, returning to the ground to nourish others of its kind in turn, Uriel says that Father extended revelation.

That must be the truth.

What other reason could there be to feel revulsion regarding the existence of the fish when the other angels watch them with awe, with worship, with newfound appreciation for Father?

Anael spreads across the ocean and the fish scatter save for one. It, no, she noses the edges of Anael’s presence, does not flinch away even though Anael’s energy wreaks havoc on the creature’s primitive nervous system. Anael folds closer in upon being, tries to dim the brightness of grace and light so that it no longer blinds or sears or hurts. And the fish edges closer and Anael pulls into a pinprick, trembling with the effort of limitation, and Anael is just a spot of light upon the ground as the fish pulls herself ever closer until she opens her mouth and swallows Anael whole.

Anael is grace, not meat or bone, so there is no fall into the fish’s belly, just the suffusion and diffusion of light and energy. And Anael is in her, was her, almost becomes her the fish and for a moment Anael is lost, plummeting as the fish seizes, overcome with the presence of an angel burning on the inside.

And Anael tries to save the fish, she tries so hard, but with even the slightest touch the fish convulses, heart stopping, lungs gasping, nerves overcome with grace until it flops to the ground dead and Anael crawls from the bloody carcass afraid because after so long of only watching, of never touching, she has done this thing, this thing that has made the fish not to be, to have simply been, no longer more than the sum of all her parts, just flesh and blood and organs waiting to turn back to dust, to be lapped back into the ocean from where she had struggled forward on her tiny little legs.

It moves and Castiel watches it move.

There are other things that move, that grow bigger or change shape, and Castiel likes watching them all, even the ones that are so slow he has to wait for the planet to turn before he can see what they change into. This isn’t one of those though. This is one of the ones from the deep water, so tiny and so fast. There are so many new things here. He asks his brothers for the names of these things because they are bigger than him, older, and they know about names. Sometimes they take the time to tell him.

Sometimes he asks Gabriel, who always makes him invent his own.

Gabriel is watching him now, Castiel knows. Gabriel’s not as big here as he is up there, where he goes on in all directions as far as Castiel can feel, where he’ll sometimes stop to wrap Castiel up and hold him close and take him spinning down faster and further than he could ever go by himself, but he’s still much bigger than Castiel and when he stands behind him he casts a shadow.

It moves and it is so small.

Don’t step on that fish, Castiel, Gabriel says and Castiel blinks up at him. Big plans for that fish.

Castiel nods dutifully and looks down again. It’s moving slower. Its tiny exertions are getting smaller but it still moves. The mud pulls at it. Small rocks rise up in front of it. But it still moves.

Big plans, Castiel thinks and tilts his head. You have a lot of work to do.

The little fish wriggles and the mud pulls. A rock lies in its way, only small and mostly flat but Castiel reaches down anyway. A little less work.

He freezes with the rock held tight when Gabriel touches him lightly. Maybe he has done wrong. He does not know the big plans. Maybe there are rocks. He should have asked permission. He looks to Gabriel and starts to ask pardon.

Gabriel’s laughter pulses in grace and he pulls the small angel closer. Shut up and watch, little brother.

Sometimes when Anael spreads herself across the waters she finds fish that are not fish. Their legs gone, their jaws unhinged, breathing apparatuses tinkered with so that they slowly suffocate.

Father works in mysterious ways.

It is the nature of the fish to die so Anael cups their essence within herself and remembers.

When the fish are no longer fish, when there is a glimmering of what the angels call a soul, their bodies are no longer mutilated.

Anael finds the fish walking, standing upright with their four competent limbs, but their soul is marred, twisted with shadows that should not be, and when they speak their words hang in the air, cold like ice, steaming under summer suns, crackling under winter nights.

Nature could not touch the souls. The souls are like the angels. Untouchable, shrouded in flesh and blood to keep them warm so that they will not wither and die.

The souls are not like the angels. Fragments of something other, of a possibility of greatness, a portent of opportunity whereas grace burns steady, never flickering, never wavering, always there, fires on a mountaintop, constellations in the sky scrawling across the continuum of space and time, God is here and he will never forsake you.

With the souls, the fish are both immortal and mortal, a paradox that Anael struggles to understand. They are vast and limited and Anael wonders if limitation is swallowed whole by a fish until the fish dies and she emerges whole, intact, as bright as before while the fish flops helplessly on the shore without a soul to cup inside, without a soul to become immortal.

Anael wonders how the fish can walk on land but not be one with the earth, how they can speak to each other but their breaths remain unfused, crushing and stimulating separate molecules, how they can come together but still not be two masses inhabiting the same space as the angels can.

Anael doesn’t think much about the period that comes next, the time when Lucifer is cast down, burning, a meteor crashing through atmosphere and Earth and Lilith following after, the first fish whose soul is unrecognizable, who is utterly alien, who is no longer a fish but something else, a corruption.

The other angels say that Father wants the angels to spurn these fish who are no longer fish but Anael remembers, she remembers when they were fish, when their souls were pure, when they burned brighter than a star and how she would rather gather them to herself, all those corrupted souls, and whisper, breathe away the pollution like the wind blows pollen from the apple blossoms, but the angels say Father shakes His head no. They say He hardens their being, edges their grace with a fine honed blade and sorts them into garrisons stationed on Earth among the fish but never touching as Lucifer and his progeny twist more fish into their likeness.

Lucifer steps on the fish, the only angel who has touched their fish souls, and he touches and he touches and he touches and Anael reaches after the fish, reaching and reaching and reaching but never touching, never saving, never holding.

Instead of helping them, Father wants them to fight and then he wants them to watch and do nothing as Lucifer rages below, smoke and ash polluting the sky and the earth with a stain so deep and strong that no rains could ever wash it away.

Castiel watches with her.

She says, as the fish sometimes hurt each other, sometimes kill each other, sometimes help each other as the angels watch, I don’t think the fish have ever truly left the ocean.

Castiel shifts towards her without disturbing the molecules of air and earth surrounding them.

You can see it in their eyes…always wet like they’re always weeping even when they’re not—overflowing with the salt water just lurking beneath their surface. And they are made of water, like they carry the sea within them always and it’s not until they’re dead and gone, skin crumbling and bones moldering back into the earth, that they truly leave the sea.

Castiel turns back, leaning a little forward, trying to see inside their eyes, to find the ocean inside their bodies as shores of dust.

Anael wonders what it must be like to carry the weight of the ocean inside as they walk the land on two legs, how heavy it must feel, and cannot imagine it.