Work Text:
The angel no longer knew how long it had been.
It could’ve been years, it could’ve been centuries. Time had ceased marching forward in this place. It hung still, suspended, like dust floating in the ray of unmoving light.
The flaming sword still turned, burning without fuel or touch. The angel no longer held it, didn’t remember its weight in its palm. It spun on its own, obeying a command that hadn’t been spoken in a thousand lifetimes.
Once, the angel had obeyed with joy, honored to be given such a task.
Now, it merely obeyed.
It stood at the gate as it always had. But the gate no longer opened. The road behind it no longer sang. Eden was not dead, not yet, but it was decaying. Rotting away like something forgotten in the sun.
And the angel stood at the gate as it always had. Obedient. Unchanging. Unmoving.
Adam had been the first to call the angel by a name. Not aloud though, he could not pronounce what the angel was. But he would look upon it the way a child would look into fire - reverent, curious, afraid to touch.
He had been the first to name things. Naming had been his gift. He had named the lion and the raven, the fig and the fern, the colors of the sunrise and the breath of the wind. His eyes had burned with language.
And he had named the angel.
The angel had never answered him. It was not made to speak with man. The Voice passed through it, but never lingered. It could deliver divine orders but not mercy. It could burn, but not bless.
Still, Adam had watched it. In the early days, when it had just been him, Adam had sat beneath the trees and looked upon the angel for hours, blinking against the heat of the sword’s light. He had not yet tasted disobedience, but even back then, he had hungered.
The angel remembered the last time Adam came to the gate. He had stood before the gate, his face drawn, his eyes swollen from weeping.
“Does it hurt you?” Adam had asked, nodding towards the blade.
The angel had not answered.
Adam had studied it, as if he had expected something, anything at all.
“I thought it would be bigger,” he had said.
Then he had turned and walked away.
And he did not return.
Eve had not looked at the sword. She had looked at the angel.
There was no hatred in her gaze, nor fear, nor awe. Only a single, terrible question that the angel could not answer: Why?
Why the Garden?
Why the Tree?
Why make something so beautiful, if only to forbid it?
Her sorrow had been different than Adam’s. Sharper. Wordless. She had not screamed when they were cast out. She had not pleaded. She had turned to the angel, her face hollow with knowledge obtained too fast and too unprepared, and said only:
“You could’ve stopped us.”
And she had been right.
It had the strength to stop them. The flame, the power, the presence. It could’ve intervened. Could have struck down the serpent. Could have spoken, perhaps, or blocked their path. But it had obeyed the Voice instead. The command had not been to prevent. The command had been to guard.
And so the sword had turned. And the gate had closed. And humanity had fallen into exile.
Eve had been the first to grieve.
The angel had once believed it was above grief. It had been wrong.
Eden had once been a hymn. The soil had hummed. Its rivers had shimmered with a light not born from the sun. Its trees had borne fruits that pulsed with life. There had been no death here. No decay.
Now, the Garden wheezed.
Flowers bloomed and withered in the same heartbeat. The air carried the heavy scent of iron and mildew. The fruit split on the branches, oozing with black rot. Trees leaned inward, shedding their bark in long, curling strips. The rivers crawled in a muddy sludge.
Once, a lamb had slept beside a lion. Now they were both bones, half-sunken into the roots.
The angel could still hear the rhythm of the original song, a fading echo that was slowly being drowned out by static. The Garden remembered what it had once been, and that memory was its curse. It did not die - it simply grieved itself into silence.
The angel did not sleep.
But it dreamed.
Not of prophecies or visions, those had long since ceased. Its dreams were fragments, disjointed pieces of memories not entirely its own, half-forgotten or never lived - scenes from before the exile, distorted by grief and time.
In one dream, Eve reached for the fruit but never touched it.
In another, Adam turned and looked back before the gate closed.
In yet another, the angel stepped forward, took the fruit from their hands, and said: “Not yet. Not today.”
None of these things had happened, but the Garden whispered these falsehoods anyway. Like twisted versions of lullabies. Alternate endings. Lost possibilities.
There were no demons here. Only hypotheticals. Only regrets.
And that was worse.
The flaming sword still turned.
The angel had not held it in centuries. It floated now, spinning slowly before the gate. Not as a weapon, but as an open wound. Its fire no longer blazed with wrath. Its flame had cooled into something else - a fire that did not consume, but forgot.
Once, a lion had approached the gate, half-starved and mad with hunger. It had lunged.
The sword had not touched it.
Still, the beast had screamed.
Its body had split open like an overripe fruit. Its bones had blackened and vanished in a blink. Its blood had sunken into the soil and was forgotten.
The angel had watched, unmoving. It had not understood.
The sword protected the way to the Tree of Life. But the Tree was dying.
Its fruit had stopped growing. Its bark oozed sap the color of old blood. Its roots bulged from the earth like veins. Its branches twisted toward the angel as if asking why . But the angel had no answer.
Still, the sword turned.
Still, the angel stood.
There was no clear water left in Eden. The rivers were choked with moss. The lakes stank of copper.
The angel no longer remembered its face.
It caught glimpses of itself only in dew and decay, in the gleam of rotted fruit, in the sheen of sap pooling on the roots - reflections warped by rot. Its wings had thinned, ragged at the edges. Its feathers never stopped molting, falling and pooling on the ground like dead leaves. Its robes, once white as starlight, had dulled to a rust-streaked ash. Its feet had rooted into the soil, not by will, but by time.
When the sword turned, it sometimes cast the angel’s shadow against the gate. It did not recognize the shape. And sometimes it caught itself wondering if it had ever been beautiful.
The angel had not heard the Voice since the day of the exile.
No command had followed. No benediction. No release.
It had obeyed. It had remained. It had guarded.
But there had been no sign.
It did not know if it had been forgotten or left deliberately. Perhaps God had turned His gaze elsewhere. Perhaps the covenant had shifted. Perhaps this gate, this Garden, this angel, had been folded away like a page in a closed book.
Sometimes the angel tried to speak.
Its voice did not work.
Sometimes, in the moments when the winds moved strangely or when the sword flickered, the angel saw her again.
Eve.
Not in flesh. Not in spirit. But in memories too real to be an invention.
She never approached the gate. She stood far off, by the riverbank or beneath the old fig trees, her hair wet and face unreadable.
She did not age. She did not breathe. She spoke only once.
“Do you still believe He is good?”
The angel did not reply. And Eve vanished again into the rot and silence. But the question lingered.
Lucifer had chosen rebellion. He had risen and fallen and been cast out.
The angel had chosen obedience. And yet it, too, had been cast into silence.
Perhaps exile was not only for the defiant. Perhaps silence was its own kind of banishment.
The angel no longer believed its station was holy. It stood because it had not been told to stop. Because it did not know what else to do. Because it was the last remnant of a command once divine.
It began to wonder if the Garden itself had been abandoned. If the gate no longer led to Eden, but to absence.
Perhaps it was not guarding a paradise. Perhaps it was guarding a grave.
On the last day Adam came, he knelt in the dust before the gate.
He did not ask to be let in.
He pressed his forehead to the soil and whispered.
“I was wrong.”
He offered the angel his blood, cut from his own hand, cupped like an offering.
The angel had not spoken.
It had wanted to.
It had wanted to say: You are still beloved.
But it did not know if that was true.
So it stood and it watched him rise, and turn, and walk away.
He never returned.
The trees leaned toward the gate now, hollow and splintering.
The soil did not grow, but it hummed, pulsing with a sound too low to hear.
The sword turned.
The angel stood.
It did not know whether it remained out of faith or fear. It did not know if God watched. It did not know if it had been abandoned or preserved. It did not know if Heaven still remembered its name.
But the Garden remembered.
And until that memory died, the angel would remain.