What's Spilt for Fiends and Angels

**As well as self-harm, this story deals with some sensitive details of blood and slight gore**

The dull burn along my non-existent veins is a familiar feeling. A trailing blaze that comes and goes with each repeating cycle. A call that pulls me from the depths of this pit despite the ache it brings me. What hovers around me is a pitch blackness I have grown used to, lit only by the faded white glow emanating from my skin, if one can even call it such. This “body” of mine - these empty sights and the sensations that accompany them. They are all but illusions. Illusions to give my fragile soul even a grasp of sanity in the heart of my prison.

Slowly, parts of the surrounding darkness begin to unthread themselves, splitting and revealing a dull light in front of me. The first thing I see is dying, white grass, and the shape of finely laced slippers standing upon it. The figure is petite, still in the silence of night.

My torment begins again.

A shy, feminine voice introduces itself. “Maiden Aano. She is who calls you, Good Angel Sovia,” The well-known title rings through my translucent mind as she continues. "for peace and prosperity. For your freedom to bring tranquility. For our troubles to extinguish as you rise from the ashes the old gods had left you buried in.” I have heard this before, a song sung far too many times for its melody to bring meaning. They are empty, pointless words, despite the sincerity behind them.

“Arise, Sovia,” she lifts the closed fist of a pale hand, wrist uncovered by a thin, pulled back dress sleeve. “May you awaken from your tombstone, be freed from your shackles, and may you lift the village from its demise.” I regard her words with mere numbness; they fill my void with little more than the rising heat of shame.  Good Angel Sovia. The name is for me, but fails to be me. Tell the truth of what I am. An honourable title, but merely that and nothing more.

I cannot do what the maid asks of me, and I cannot tell her so from my purgatory of a world between worlds. That is the truth. I am only allowed a sliver of sight into the realm before me - her meek figure on the grass and shaking hand. When her other lifts, moonlight glints off a steel blade.

“Isn’t it precious? How they worship your name.” A voice like gravel drags through my head, more so voices. They intertwine with each other, create an ungodly symphony for me to take in. “A shame they don’t know.”

“Do not harm her.” It is all I can muster, and I do not recognize the voice I speak with. “Spare her blood.”

“Oh?” The voices mock me, their responses short. My begging is not new. Over time, it has only grown more and more desperate to no avail.

“It spills with good intent.”

“Does it? I don’t see broken skin.”

The maiden before me - many worlds away – hesitates. She’d pressed the knife against her upward wrist, trembled it in her palm, but yet remains that way for several disturbing seconds. A tremor fills my void, and my demand comes out once more in a pitiful plea. “Please.”

“Are you in such a position to beg, Angel?” The name makes me bitter, that negative feeling only growing when a booming laugh follows. “It amazes me how you still allow yourself such pity for these sickly creatures.”

“Do not call them that.”

Upon my words, the laugh dies down until I’m left with the silence I’ve grown used to. Then: “Don’t sell yourself as pious, girl. It is far too late for that.”

Once the fearful maiden’s moment of hesitance passes, I can do nothing but watch the blade slice, severing a deep line across white skin until a dark red seeps out. Whether it’s my imagination or not, I catch a whimper from the woman’s lips. The liquid trails slowly down her wrist, hangs from her flesh and allows itself to drip off. But before the droplets hit the dry grass beneath her feet, they pause in the air - dangling like ornaments on a tree. Then hurl towards me. I will myself not to flinch, watching the bits of blood begin to merge with the darkness I’m surrounded by. It ravenously sucks them in, turning my environment a dark maroon. A satisfied sigh runs along my back like a chill.

“There it is. Isn’t it wonderful?” The voices grate against my non-body, a grin in their mocking tone. “I can feel your pain, Angel. It must sting not to savour this.”

“I do not relish blood.”

“Oh, but you must love the taste. You’ve basked in its spillage before.”

“Be silent, fiends.”

“Manners, manners,” They taunt, a shift in the air as their attention leaves me. “The performance has hardly begun, Good Angel.”

“Take my blood,” the maiden speaks as the red liquid drains from her arm, lips quivering. “Take it and use it to give yourself strength.” Her words would be a stab in my chest if it held a beating heart. “I have heard of your feats, listened to the tales - of your unmatched generosity towards those below you. You were a saint among the people. You broke villages of plagues, gave them light when they had none, helped them prosper in a world where the old gods wouldn’t.” 

The void shivers, a low rumbling like a laugh by the devils themselves. 

“In all the darkness that has consumed our earth, you had been there. And the gods locked you away for it. I say arise once more, Good Angel Sovia, with my humble offering. Take my life so you may have yours,” her words tremble, an avid begging in her tone and her eyes as they raise to look at me. Our gazes meet, but she wouldn’t know.  “Others have failed, I know, but I’ve studied. I’ve taught myself how to do it right. Come back to us.”

“Adorable.” The voices speak as that previous burn in my veins becomes scalding. “I wonder just why she’s so desperate for your return? A dying relative, perhaps?”

As if all of this were some twisted game, the maiden – Aano – confirms their suspicions. “Protect our village, Good Angel, and protect my dear sister with it. Poor Maire needs you. Her sickly heart calls for your mercy.” 

“Ah,” the voices muse, satisfied and cruel. “See? They know they’re sickly.”

Through the growing heat, my anger breaks through in a backlash.

“You are all fiends.” I repeat my insult from before, a lack of weight in it that leaves my captors unfettered.

“Hm,” they respond, boredom lacing their flat, graveled tones. “Remind me again who flooded the villages? Pillaged the townsfolks? Took the lives of others when Life itself didn't go your way?”

Their quick, steady words leave me speechless. I think back to a past that is no longer my own, a body that once was but crumbled away. Its owner was cruel, power-hungry, consumed by a relentless greed that dove deep into the pits of her black heart and clawed at her very core. Good Angel Sovia, the legends say now - the legends villagers such as this maiden are left with. They’ve written verses, created abstract paintings of her soon-arriving glory.  But they do not know of the callous woman behind those paintings, verses, and that title.

The woman who, unlike others, was granted a prosperous life she used to hurt.

“Life was kind to me,” I say softly, near a whisper.

“And you squandered it. All in the quest for power. To have what the old gods held, and what you didn’t. How does our greed not pale in comparison to yours?”

Death has haunted my past, followed my footsteps till the point I flew. I treaded too close to the sun, scoured for the old gods and their throne to sit upon. When they caught me, my wings were clipped and melted away; They crushed my body into dust that eventually dissolved. Encased in this lonely tombstone, the taunting voices are all I have. I am left to be punished with these villagers' naive legends and beliefs, and the treacherous actions they will take for peace and prosperity.

 What they cannot have under the reign of gods. Under the reign of people such as myself.

A whimper before me, and my attention returns to the maiden. She stumbles as the darkness resumes drinking her blood, which no longer falls on its own accord and is instead culled from her wound. It evaporates in my prison of emptiness, consumed by the shadows and strengthening the gods having created it. The void around me has changed, turned a pure-blood red, coating my “skin” and shielding itself from my faint glow. 

The maiden weakens, trembling knees falling onto the dry grass below her. The gods allow me the sight of her crumbling skin, deforming itself to show the veins beneath it. Further blood is peeled from her as the darkness punctures her very body. “For Maire.” She rasps. Her sister’s name is all she utters before she can speak no longer. But I see the desire in her eyes. For Maire. They scream. Maire.

“Please,” I beg. “You’re destroying her.”

“She is destroying herself. Or rather, you, are the fault of her destruction, my dear.”

“I have apologized.”

“‘Sorry’ does not atone for the greed of a woman that doesn’t know her place.”

“You are monsters, all of you.” I speak more defiantly, another tremor in the air. “I have not been a good person, that is true. I have sinned in my former life. My soul is tainted, and I am not what these villagers believe me to be.” Though I don’t shout, there is anger in my tone, the spaces between my words filled by the heart-wrenching whimpers of the woman before me. “But you do no better by keeping me here and sucking the life out of those who wish for something better. Release me, fiends. Or let me die and whither away. I am through being your puppet.”

I am met with silence, but I can feel the darkness shift around me, curving a disappointed frown. “You thought it wise to steal from gods, girl. And you demand freedom for your heinous deeds?”

“I have done well to atone, being trapped here for centuries.”

“Mm?”

“Yes. With all the blood that has spilled for me.”

“But was it enough?” The voices ask, but there lacks true inquiry behind their words. I’m sure that if I answer, whatever I offer them, they will not care. They will brush it aside and continue their consumption.

But I answer anyway, quiet and modest, humility lacing my voice. “It was enough.”

I receive silence, and it lingers too long to bear. A period of debate, which softly surprises me.

 In the midst of it, I can feel a widening, disturbed grin, lips curling against me. “Very well.” Their words are unexpected, but I have no time to register it before the maiden before me screams out. Her body seems to pulse upwards, arms and legs outstretched and jerking about above the dead grass. Her blood and body hover in the air before falling to the ground below, one with a heavy thud. The darkness begins to weave itself together again, and I slowly lose sight of the collapsing corpse of yet another victim.

“No!” I protest to no avail, trapped in blood-coloured darkness. My barely glowing hands reached out to nothing before me. I grow panicked when my fingers start to crumble, turning to dust and evaporating in the maroon of my void. My hands, arms, and shoulders begin to wither away, the skin and veins that were merely an illusion. I scream out through unreal lungs and silence fills the void. Then a heavy rumble enough to shatter the ears. My “body” drifts, decomposing itself until I am only a head, and soon, that disappears as well.

I lose myself. I know nothing.

Then my eyes shoot open.

The sky is peppered by flickering stars, a weary groan pushing itself past my lips. There’s a pounding in my head, and the sensation alerts me to the fact that I can feel something. Throbbing, aching pain, but I feel it.

I push myself up, welcomed by a world of darkened colours. Swaying trees, dead grass, the soft rush of wind through the air. When my head turns, I see a statue. A woman standing, tall and proud, face carved articulately to convey only beauty and grace. Good Angel Sovia, engraved words read on its tombstone.

My tombstone. My prison. But…

I lift pale human hands in front of me, and instantly spot cracks along an arm as if having been mended up. My eyes fall to the white grass stained with dried blood. When I stand, my physical legs squirm to keep me upright. The prickly ground brushes against my ankles, a cool tinge against my skin. I look down and I see a maiden’s dress embracing my petite figure. A mind of my own thinks. I am with a body. 

But it is not my own.

My head lifts to trees looming over me, the night sky a dark blanket across the forest. The environment is unfamiliar, but I can only guess where I am. With such sudden, physical visions to overwhelm my eyes used to pitch blackness, I close them, let out a cold, shaky breath. My mind races, my heart beats, and a heavy realization floods through me in the silence of night.

Blood is all I register in my closed eyelids, and the darkness sucking it in. Years, decades, centuries of my memory pass. Villager after villager loses balance, collapses to their knees as their body shrivels up into a lifeless, grey husk. They wither into dust and die, the ashes blowing in the cruel wind or sinking into the dirt. The old gods laugh as they always do, the gristly, foul sound an echo throughout my mortal mind.

Blood spills, again, and again, and again - a never ending cycle of death and lies. Of sacrifice that ultimately leads to nothing. Of the want for safety, and the realization that it will never come. Anguish, fear, distress. Then silence. And then my captive spirit waited for it to repeat itself.

Blood was thick. I reveled in, so long ago. And then it became my punishment.

A burn grows in my chest. Shame and regret consumes my insides, hugs my heart in a mocking embrace until its beating is muffled in my ears. My soul lies in this body that survives, its blood and previous owner sacrificed to release me from my tomb. And it had succeeded, unlike all the rest who had attempted and failed. But the blood still sits on my new hands, taints my physical skin and doesn’t let go.

I am free. Good Angel Sovia. But my heart – this heart – is impure with greed and spilt blood. The voices from before whisper into my ear, a childlike glee in their insufferable tone. 

“For peace and prosperity, Angel.” 

Peace seems so far away now.

The punishment continues.