There's not a blemish on my body. All the scars have vanished. My long, muddy hair has been cleaned and brushed to make its way down to the small of my back. There's no sand between my toes or grit in my ears. My finger nails are no longer black, but have been polished with a reflective surface. My entire body feels as smooth and silky as a newborn baby.

This is serene. This is heaven. Standing in a thin white robe I look over my skin.  Never before have I been so beautiful.  Even after a revitalization I'm normally already blemished and dirty.  I'm at the top of the world now.  Happy, relieved, and free of my mortal bonds—I'm clean in both body and mind.  A first.

There, not ten steps from the bed I rose from is a white curtain with dazzling light shining through. I reach my fingers around the edge and feel the warmth of an even brighter outside. I remember a white city.  I remember brilliant sunlight and flawless world.  I remember a majestic angel and her lush downy feathers. I peel the curtain slightly and it's like a floodlight pouring into the room. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," a soothing female voice pours over me, "Unless you want to blind yourself again."

That voice calms my fears and cures my anxieties. I'm not afraid of it.  How could I be? It's so wonderful and I know exactly what regal being it comes from. The Queen, I'm in the home of Her Majesty herself. The curtains above me spread apart as she gracefully falls from the sky. She lands peacefully on a massive pillow in front of the large couch in the otherwise empty, white room. Not even an ounce of that blinding light comes in from above as she places her four feet upright on the pillow and lets me look upon her body.

She has a long neck of white feather which leads up to a large, flat, hairless face; the face has two massive crystal eyes, white lips, and an almost human-like nose. She props herself up on a pair of long skinny fingers connected to slick arms that are quite a bit larger than a human.

The feathers from the underside of her neck grow smaller as they move towards her back. Her hind legs resemble slightly bigger and stronger versions of the arms she has in front with claws in replacement of the fingers. These glass-like talons rest gently on the pillow as if to not puncture a hole.

She stretches out one of her arms and reaches her fingers towards me. This arm with her lanky fingers outstretched goes unnaturally far and is able to easily close the eight foot gap between us. "Come, take a seat little one." Her voice is like a melody sung from a siren.

She lures me in like a fish on a hook.  I round the couch following those fingers of hers until I take a seat on the very edge. My body is tense as to why this angelic creature would grace me with its presence. Getting close I see the most magnificent part of her, her wings. They are made of pure fluff. She has a wing span so large she could touch both walls of this room and then some. She could probably spread them out close to fifty feet, a size so grand she could glide for an hour without moving the beauties once. The wings are so clean it doesn't seem realistic. How does she keep them so pure with the hellish world just outside her walls of white?

Her fingers reach around my head and run through my long hair. I lean into the hand. It comforts me. This causes me to relax against the back of the couch as she speaks, "The lights are going out, and if the lights go out we have to find more or the world descends into darkness.  The Darkness that will destroy everything that is pure. The Darkness that will allow the monsters of hell to rip apart everything we've created ten thousand years ago. You see," the hand behind me closes around my head and I look right up into her face, "I'll be the first thing that darkness consumes. There's no place for me outside of the light. It'll rip me to shreds in an instant and spread my blood across the dust."

Why? How could anything butcher something so beautiful? What would possibly be so sinister?

"Why? Because I am everything it is not. I am white, pure, untouched—it wants nothing more than to take everything from me. To take my purity, my voice, my soul—it wants to become me. But it can't become me. It already has its place in the world and will never be anything more than that. This is the order in the world. The order The Darkness hates and despises and wants nothing more but to destroy.

"And you are our Champion. You must save us. You must save us all." She looks down at me again. Everything about her appears fragile and majestic. Her calming blanket of a voice grows sharp, "You're not my first choice." I catch my breath and look with fear into her eyes. How can I not be? She has me here now. She's holding me in her hands now. She's my everything.

"You're a killer, a mass murder. You have no regard for life and are part of the problem that is tearing the world apart. You use dark magic that requires death to work, you can't even control yourself and to make it worse you're the embodiment of the walking dead. You're a monster. You have no love, no emotion, no glory, no guts, and all you want to do is survive and will do anything to make that happen. You push your suffering onto others and take down anyone who has ever gotten close to you.

"You may be Aleniese's champion.  You may be what he thinks is our salvation.  But I know you for what you really are. You're going to be the one to bring him to his knees. You'll be the one to kill my lover, suffocate our world and rule the hellish land that it becomes. You're a monster and I should end your life right now. I should slit that little throat, suck all the air out of my residence and watch you die. I should watch your life finally end. I won't even clean up the blood and leave it as a memento of the hellish fiend that almost destroyed two worlds."

Is that what she really thinks of me?  There's nothing to say.  I don't even have words. Her fingers strengthen on my head, two of them twiddle with my hair as another tightens under my neck. Her finger pushing against my throat reminds me I'm holding my breath. I'm not sure to cry because it's true or get angry because it's not.

Am I really heartless? Am I really a monster?

The fingers of her other hand wrap around my stomach. This is when I notice I'm shaking, not out of cold but out of fear. Fear... I don't feel that too often. It's not fear of her, but fear of what she said, about what the world portrays me as and what everyone thinks of me. It's all painfully true. I've killed everyone I've known. I'm a murder, so much so I stopped caring about the lives lost. I affect everyone around me. Good people have killed just because of being around me. An innocent boy was turned into a killer, because of me. I destroy everything.  Maybe that's all I am.

She lifts me up into the air. I don't resist as she pulls me in towards her face. She admires how clean my body is. She looks me over from my legs to my thighs, right past my chest and up to my face. I finally muster up the courage to speak, "You should kill me then, I'm a monster. It's true..."

"I should," she says, those smooth fingers rubbing against my throat as if at any moment she's going to crush it, "I really should..."

-excerpt from Chapter 37: Salvation - Rapture: With Love

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