1

I found the angel lying in an ashen pit. The stones around him were warm and smoke rose from the ground. His body was blackened and bruised, his wings still smoldering. He was badly hurt. He was beautiful in his weakness.

I picked him up carefully and carried him on my back into the mountains. There, I laid him across a flat stone to rest. I brought water and washed the dirt from him. He slept fitfully for a short time, opening his eyes now and then to look at me. His pain was my pain and I did not know how to ease his suffering, except to caress his broken body.

A few times he awoke and at first cried out when he saw me. But he was too weak to make any movement and quickly collapsed into unconsciousness again.

Finally, after what seemed days, he awoke for more than a moment and stared into my eyes and begged me to kill him. He was breathing heavily and I wondered if I should and be done with it. But he was so beautiful, so fragile-looking.

“Why have you brought me here? My life is wasted,” he said. “There is no purpose.”

I told him softly, “sometimes life is suffering and that is the only purpose.”

“Suffering?” He began to weep and again he begged me to kill him. I answered him with tears flowing down my face that I could not. Everything I had loved had already been destroyed. I was the last. The only. After me, there would be no more dragons. I told him I would not allow him to die.

At that, he went silent, perplexed in his grief.

He opened his eyes again and I could see the distance he had fallen from Heaven. I gazed into his watery depths and I could see the memory of a fiery descent. My loneliness was as his was. We were both eternally separated from our homes and from those we loved.

“You were my purpose...” he mumbled, “to find you...” and he fell asleep again.

And indeed he had found me. But I was already dead. Part of me had died a long time ago on that black day that I remembered too well. In my memory I could still see them, the Cherubim, descending from Heaven, their flaming swords glowing brightly. Down they came into the valley where we had gathered.

Down they came, bringing death from above.