The sky was the colour of freshly-washed linen and, between the low-lying clouds, angel wings beat a measured tempo.
I stood on a ground as white as the skies, a featureless expanse of paleness devoid of any signs of life. It was a clean place, an empty place, a sterile place, and my blood fell on the ground like the red petals of a flower and stained it like a wound.
I stood and watched angels fly on the high winds.
Angels: wings that stretched six or seven metres from tip to tip, razor-sharp white feathers cutting through the cold, clean air like heated knives. Angels: strangely human heads that swivelled this way and that, with eyes that were fathomless pools of mixed grey and milky whiteness, eyes that I could feel examine me from high up, from the cold clear winds of those enormous skies. Angels: circling on the wind like giant birds, swooping low and coming back up again, majestic and care-free and dangerous birds of prey.
I felt strangely devoid of urgency, as if I had stumbled into a dream world in which dream logic applied, where my wounds were only a detail of the dream; when I looked down, the bleeding had stopped and my injuries seemed to have suddenly disappeared.
I sat down on the ground and pulled my feet up under me, and watched the angels fly in the vast, featureless sky.
I remembered the window breaking, the pain in my hand. Someone must have been shooting at the train, shooting at the window, shooting at me.
And I must have been shot, and this was the result: that I was now hallucinating, that I was dreaming this place.
And yet I could feel the cold. That was real enough, the sort of cold that penetrates into the bone, that makes you want to claw your face to draw warm blood, anything to warm up. It felt very real, that aspect of it. It had the kind of coldness that shakes you awake.
And it had an alien essence about it, a strangeness and a wrongness that said I did not belong there, that this was not my world.
The shadows of the angels flittered on the ground like giant, shifting shapes. As I watched, the shadows congealed and came together into one massive blotting of light, and as I sat and waited, a shape slowly appeared, titanic and yet indistinct, descending from the skies to land before me.
A giant head regarded me from a height. Eyes the size of lakes set in a craggy face, a face like a weathered mountainside where little grew or lived or breathed.
A vast mouth opened, and a sound like a hurricane emanated from it.
It was one word.
Just one word.
It was a name.
Killarney, the voice said.
“What are you?” I said, but even as I spoke, my voice dissipating in the cold, clean air, I knew the answer to my question.
As above, so below.
“I don’t understand.”
You will, Killarney, the giant mouth said, and in its voice was the sound of leaves in autumn and the coming of snow. And: Too long have the Fallen escaped me.
“What shall I do?” I felt lost and small, a child amongst giants, seeking answers to questions I didn’t even know to ask.
The man you follow is both more and less than a man. The cipher and the key.
The giant moved like an avalanche, and its breath carried down to me and brought with it images: snow and ice and loneliness, and in the whiteness of the desert of ice, a building, human-made and impregnable.
“I don’t understand,” I said again.
You will, it promised again. When the time comes, you must destroy the key.
I was being given nonsensical answers in a dream, and the reality of the place seemed diminished as if it were beginning to fade.
You will shortly wake up, back in your world. Remember this dream. When the time comes, you will know what to do.
Its shape began to shimmer like ice melting. Its last words were a lost whisper catching at the edge of consciousness. Fair well, Killarney. We shall meet again, before this is over.
My eyes snapped open.
Pain, my hand throbbing, multiple cuts on my upper body adding to my previous injuries. Broken bones, a cut-up face. At this rate I’ll be dead before the next train stop, I thought, then realised the lull of the moving train was gone, that I was on solid ground, and that the face looking down at me without expression was human, not angelic.
It was Seago.
“What the hell is going on?” I tried to say, but my mouth didn’t work and I was drifting again, my eyes closing, seeing only white, icy and cold and, in the distance, the aerial dance of angels....