Reflecting Shadowed Time

~ Chapter 1 Awakening ~future~

No light could have shown through the darkness of which the night held. On slick, wet pavement shards of glass reflected raindrops that fell upon them. Anyone who looked outside their window into the dark raining night would not see a blur of the muddled heap that lay in the middle of the street. Pieces of broken glass set around it as if it were an intricate design, each piece laid out carefully, symbolizing a part of the life that had been recently torn from it's soul. No one could have seen it.

But him.

He stood close, frozen in a state of mind, eyes misted over as if he were in an alternate universe. And then, suddenly, the fog cleared from the emerald orbs and instead settled around him and the monstrosity that lay in before his eyes. It covered the street and many after it. Mattys did not trust the darkness to hide the horror from human sight. Slowly he approached, breaking the silence only with the sound of glass being crushed beneath his feet and the shallow breaths he took with each step.

You could not call what he saw human. For perhaps, in another lifetime, it once was, but one could no longer identify it as so. Pain etched its way across of which must have been its face and metallic eyes stared lifelessly back at him. Upwards, backwards, sideways, all at once they seemed to see everything. However, Mattys knew well that they saw only the darkness of its empty soul.

The body was mangled into a twisted, ragged, lump of flesh. Once he got near enough to overlook these features blood started to pour from its metallic eyes. It poured from a gap, which must have been its mouth, and from deep gashes in its already torn flesh. Crimson liquid flowed across the glass, dimming their reflection as if they wished not to be seen by him.

A coldness that not even the dead knew, settled in the air. Everything froze solid, Mattys' breath caught frozen within his lungs, and even time seemed to stop. He could not move nor breathe, or even cry for help, and yet he was not compelled to do any of it. The only thing that remained warm was the pool of blood that had finally ceased its flow from the lump of mutated flesh. Gold liquid shot through the blood, spreading its way through it, like veins of gold.

It grew brighter and brighter, pulsing life and energy through the crimson blood and at the moment of its power shot back into the body, leaving not a trace left on the broken glass. The body started to unravel itself, starting to take on a more human form. The steel gray eyes changed to gold, then to yellow, and finally to a glowing amber. The woman that stood before him had an angelic beauty around her.

And yet.

Sin still clung to the air around her, for a saint she was not.

Her demonic eyes locked with his green ones, and at once Mattys remembered that he was frozen. " So nice to see you again, Mattys." She said with a playful grin. She reminded him of a predator going over all the ways it could kill its prey. Unfortunately, he was the prey. The ice around him broke and his heart started to pump again, his starved lungs filled with sweet oxygen.

" I wish I could say the same for you, Anais." Mattys said in a cold hiss. Although his body ached furiously from the lack of blood and oxygen it had suffered, he stood tall against the demon's hungry gaze. Thoughts swirled around, questions unanswered, shock from truthful explanations. How did she escape, how did she come back to life? Immortality was a rare gift, not common among demons or among any creature for that matter.

Anais laughed, a rather pleasant laugh laced with a hint of malice under it. " True, immortality is rare. But a gift? I think not, my fair angelic beauty." Her words came in an elegant drawl causing his blood to boil.

Mattys had fallen from heaven, sent down upon the earth to live what time he had left. He had been cast aside shortly after Anais had fallen under his sword. A fallen angel he might be entitled, but Mattys abandoned the angels long ago. Though from any other perspective other than Mattys' it would be plain that the angels had indeed abandoned him.

With demonic speed in which Anais possessed she appeared behind him, tracing his throat with a delicate finger. Before Mattys could move his body was once again paralyzed.

" And it wasn't that easy getting out of Hell, but I'm back love, and it seems to me that the only way I can fully regain my powers is to kill you." She said with fake disappointment. " What a pity." Anais ran her tongue down the side of his throat, and then a pair of sharp canine teeth slid into his skin sending a searing pain through his whole body.

~*~*~

Mattys shot out of bed, ragged breathes dragged into his lungs. He wiped the sweat that had formed at his brow and got out of bed, shaken. Staring into the darkness of his room he cast his aura over it, searching for any presence other than his. Sensing nothing he lay down, staring up at his ceiling slowing the beats of his heart and calming his intake of breath. He could feel her power growing; he had felt it for over a month as these dreams had come to him more than once, each one more vivid.

Breaking out of Hell would mean that Anais had the gift of immortality, a gift not even angels, fallen or in height of height of their power, had. Mattys had lived a fair many centuries and was coming upon his last. However this did not worry him.

His power had not waned since their last meeting, and when she came for her vengeance, Mattys would be ready.