O.D. 10.26.1999 [1:10 p.m.]

(going WAY back again, this is Azra'il's intro post...)

"Time..." the drifting voice, soft as taint, sliding velveteen through the chill night. "What is time, but a concept created by those bound by time?"

Heads turn. And there he was: the intruder, standing tall betwixt two trees, backlit by the rising just-past-full moon, shrouded in blinding white, his face lost in shadow, unseen, unknown. But oh, the voice...the voice was so very familiar...

His hands slide deftly to the front of his softly billowing overcoat to unfasten the buttons, one at a time, to slide the coat from his bare shoulders.

Marble. He is as marble, pale as fire and gleaming in the light of the moon--his hair, his skin, his eyes. He is as marble, frozen in the time that he mocked, frozen for an endless moment: the final masterpiece of a sculptor greater than the angels. He is as marble...

...until he moves.

Yet his limbs do not stir. Nor his torso, nor his head. Something -else- stirs.

Something rises, from beyond his shoulders. So gradually. Something large, something gleamingly black, something magnificent. Something rises, something stretches--

Wings.

A pair of them, raven-black on this pale, pale flame of a man.

Oh, they remembered him now. They remembered him: the hush of his voice, the glint of his smile, the cant of his features as he approaches, but most of all they remembered the terrible, beautiful wings sprouted from his back, even now fading back into his shoulderblades without a trace. He slides his coat back on, rebuttons it over exposed skin. And they remembered him: remembered him despite his endless parade of names. Him. The mystery. The one who performed the acts of an angel for the reasons of a devil, and the acts of a devil for the reasons of an angel. He had led them from danger countless times, only to turn around and demand payments beyond belief. Secrets. Treasures. Souls, almost. And he had betrayed, he had murdered, he had destroyed, only to offer a reason so solemn, so stricken, so unlike his usual sharp-grinned self that they could not help but let him go his way, sometimes disappearing for decades, centuries at a time, only to reappear when they least expected him--with one exception.

He was always, -always- there, when one of their kind fell. Sometimes at the funeral, as with tonight. Sometimes immediately after the death. Sometimes...at the moment of death.

They remembered him, standing at the mouth of Semil's open grave so long before on a night so like this one, his black wings folded over his shoulders in an obsidian cloak. Grinning.

They remembered him, appearing out of the darkness and the fog the night Jyral had slain Maroch--her own brother. Grinning.

And they remembered him, crouched over Ustriel as she gasped her last breath--him with his knife drawn but unstained, cradling her bloodied body, her blood so very starkly bright against his pale, pale skin, so very grotesquely bright from within the--protective? Menacing?--circle of his vast, night-black wings. Grinning. Grinning his knife-blade grin.

Oh, they remembered him.

But they did not know him.

"My name tonight," he tells them in his gently venomous voice, as he grins like the Devil himself, "is Kyriel. It has been, my friends, too long since we have met. A pity that we should meet over such a..." one ghost-pale hand extracts itself from the ghost-pale coat, gestures to the grave, "...sobering sight. Josiah, is it? My deepest...condolences."