The White Angel
THE WHITE ANGEL
Out in the further fields of space where the forces fade and the building blocks drift in useless isolation, the White Angel weaves her webs.
She wasn’t always a creature of sentient light. Her name had been Norma and she was once like you or I, blood and bone wrapped in sensations. And also like you and I, she had a busy mind filled with ideas. She was too smart for her own good. Norma was so bright that night never wrapped her in its blankets to rest.
Her thoughts had unique power and spilled from her eyes, painting the world in dream color. Neither pain nor pleasure could clear her head until the day that she tasted the fruits grown by the mountain’s roots. No bigger than a black bean, just one fruit offered Norma hours of serenity. Her thoughts never left, but they folded themselves together into softer textures, oscillated in humming waves instead of the peaks and valleys of discordant cacophony. But it was a dangerous thing for her because the power always returned and with greater urgency that fled from her as projectiles of energy. Like rubber bands pulled to their greatest tension, her thoughts snapped violently back to her.
The answer seemed clear to Norma. On a gray day, when shadows have abandoned the world, she crept to the mountain with a large bag and a pickaxe. Understanding the threat behind her intent, Norma’s thoughts intensified into a light that grew with every refraction of mica and crystal jewel of the cavern until it burned into her eyes with glowing geometry. She fought back, focusing her will into the shuddering tong of pick on stone, chipping her way to the roots of the mountain.
For six days, Norma toiled before finally crawling her way into the black void of a large mountain root, glittering with fruit. Her determination had proven stronger in the contest against her thoughts. She took out her large bag and greedily harvested.
With her bag full, she sat down in the cold, dark hollow. Her thoughts cast phantasmagoria across the stone like a cosmic drama performed by shadows. She picked one last piece of fruit where it had grown for eons in the heart of the mountain, put it in her mouth and swallowed. Then everything went black.
Norma drifted in and out of the blackness. Every time that her thoughts returned with the focus of starlight and color, shape and meaning, she reached into her bag and swallowed the fruit, drifting again and again into the depths of black nothing. She became as stiff as the stone and her eyes lost their shine, but she could not escape from herself forever.
When the fruit ran out, she was powerless to do anything about it. She did not have the strength to wield her pickaxe anymore. But her thoughts had grown more powerful in their dormancy and when they emerged from their cocoon, they illuminated the cavern. Their brightness could no longer be contained by her eyes alone and Norma’s shell cracked into fissures of light that widened and stretched until she glowed from every atom. She could not escape the brilliance of her true nature. And although she was still Norma, her experiences had changed her beyond recognition.
The White Angel lives in the furthest fields of space in deep contemplation. In the coldest darkness where the building blocks drift in isolation, she spins her golden threads of warm light into a web of endless connection.