Planet Earth is blue 14

As we trudged through the forest, enveloped in the silence that gathers before daybreak, I thought about Uriel and what he had said before Lily gunned him down. We reached the brow of a hill where the brightening sky opened up with its last stars fading, and it was then that I realised where I had seen his kind before.

I couldn’t have been more than four years old and was with my mother – on Europa I think; I remember ice fields with wide horizons and Jupiter’s red-brown globe high above us. She was there to meet someone and I was left to play with the frost lizards while they spoke in low voices. On leaving, he smiled sadly at me and even at that young age I recognised the eternity behind his eyes.

It was only then in the forest, as everything was drawing to a close, that I realised he was Gabriel and that he had been telling my mother what would become of us. Afterwards when I asked her about him, she would hold me close and cry into my hair. Annunciations are painful and I soon stopped questioning.

A blood-red moon hung low over the treetops.