Pleading with Angels to Spare Humanity

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

She saw its bones and the sight of them — that they were real and not a dream — caught in her throat. She raised her hand to cough, and suddenly her lungs heaved and blood began to pour from the spaces between her fingers. Her eyes grew wide and she cupped her hand, and she retched again and her blood sprayed out like a hose. It soaked her, but she stayed steady.

The bones of an angel, either bioengineered in the kilns of an ancient civilisation before ours or fallen from the spirit world, are sacred and insanely jealous of human life. Here, the forgotten bones of an angel try to scare Tzipora by filling her lungs with blood. She knows better — she’s friends with the spirits of this place — but the trick still scares her. Many such bones litter the earth, but few are found on the surface.

Ancient creatures that lie dormant below the surface of the world have been disturbed by the nuclear war between China and the U.S. If awakened, the creatures — called Lehmenan by forgotten peoples — will use lances of fire to cleanse the Earth. In this moment, in a field of flowers in rural Vekllei, eleven-year-old Tzipora acts as an ambassador of the human race, and pleads with the spirit world to forgive the destruction of the North American and East Asian continents.

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