Chapter Fourteen: Meresin

It was completely out of my normal programming to encourage something like this. I am the Devil, not Cupid. I only brought them together because I felt I might have been directed by the Creator to do so. However, the communication from the Creator was so vague, so ambiguous, that it might not have been the Creator's directive, either. It was just my interpretation of it. Though, I had done no harm in bringing them together, either. There they were, sitting in the front seat of Wendy's old van and kissing, touching, and groping one another in lust.

I kept my attention on their auras, the spinning energies around them. As the humans kissed, both of their auras intermingled. They changed colors and danced. It was like colliding galaxies, mixing, changing, and splashing. For a moment, I imagined myself in Noah's place. I was so transfixed by the colors, patterns, and shapes in Wendy's aura, that I felt an open longing. I knew that my own patterns would never mix and create new waves of energies. With my connection to Noah, I felt vicariously closest to a human. It was like feeling the earth through dampened layers of thick cotton.

There was one step closer, and that was to possess Noah. It was a struggle to retain control of a human body over the body's assigned consciousness. I knew I could not defeat Noah for control of the body. But I entertained, just for a moment, the idea of seeing through flesh eyes. I longed for the idea of a tongue to speak and a mouth to eat. I thought about the idea of what it would be like to hear music, not just experience the vibrations and intentions behind it. I wondered what it would be like to kiss and embrace another being.

Yet I was always left to wonder. I could not have a body. Bodies belong to mortals, a separate species on a different plane. I observed as Wendy and Noah sat and talked. Then, Noah pulled himself away. I could see his energy darken and become muddy. His patterns and colors looked as if a great shadow pulled over them. His thoughts were pulling closer. Self doubt crept in. Thoughts of pain and uncertainty. He second guessed his every feeling. The bright white patterns of love were receding like the tides, dwarfed by his emotions of doubt and distrust.

Wendy did not look the same way. She had little to no doubt of love in her aura. I found this curious since in my eternity in observation, most humans mirror or mimic one another. At least in this moment, her emotions were still wide and bright. I could see buzzing and spinning intricate patterns of curiosity for Noah in her aura.

"I just, I don't know," said Noah out loud.

"We can wait," Wendy offered kindly. "it's not like I mind, I really like you, Noah. You're a good boyfriend."

"I'm glad you think of me as your boyfriend," he said. I could feel the blood rise to his face. Both in his energy and his body seemed to visibly flush, then shrink. I observed his lack of confidence gnawing at his insides. He felt both drowned and overwhelmed in conflicting feelings. Still, Wendy's attraction persisted. It almost seemed like it began to shine more acutely with his muddled reception.

"Well, what else should I think of you?" Wendy balked. "my pet aardvark?"

"Some would say your girlfriend," said Noah sadly. I saw a huge spike of dark, sticky depression growing in his field.

"Some people say the Earth's flat," said Wendy coolly, looking away from him. "and some people are complete idiots and can kiss my ass. And if I had a girlfriend, so what? I have before. You're just not though," she insisted.

"Oh," replied Noah. For some reason, perhaps through my influence but perhaps not, the depression swallowed him deeper. It wasn't that Wendy had said anything wrong, it was that his personality was shattered and incomplete, as many humans were. Many humans were in this life cycle to form themselves more fully. It was no ones fault he was incomplete and more susceptible to the universe's darker influences.

Suddenly and without provocation, Wendy pulled Noah's face closer and kissed him. She kissed him hard and wantonly. I saw her passion overtake Noah's aura. The white and bright red ribbons in her energy buzzed and crackled. It rose like the dawn. I had never really seen anything like it, and I sat back and watched with great scientific interest. Her energy was like a fountain, pouring out and and splashing all over the car and the area around it. It seemed to spill out from her without any end to its magnitude.

Once again, I was finding myself almost more fascinated with Wendy than I was with my long-term project, Noah. Her energy kept growing, forming spirals and patterns that I had never before seen. Her energy came in waves, ringing loudly like a concentrated orchestra. It overtook everything. Every tree, rock, and bird was affected by her unseen energy. It was large, unending, and burning like a nuclear reaction. Noah seemed more and more pulled in. Until the kiss ended.

As they pulled themselves apart, I could see the smoking wreckage of Noah's aura. It was like a bomb had dropped on it, flattened by Wendy's energy. He was now more unsure than ever before, sunk by his feelings of desire and inadequacy. I had seen this happen many times before throughout watching eternity. Love was always the most powerful energy, but it had unpredictable effects on its host.

I could see Noah shrink right before my eyes. He pulled further and further inward, insecure in his skin. I watched as he curled like a slug burning in sodium chloride. It was both pathetic and sad. As I watch uncomfortable interactions between mortals I often am forced to wonder what I would do, were I given the opportunity to have a close interaction with another being. It is easy to say that one would act differently. However, over and over again, that is proven not to be true. We will often do the same thing in the exactly same way as if we were caught in a loop.

Knowing Noah, he would kick himself giving up the opportunity to experience the energy of love. I watched as he actively shut himself out of it. The white-red cleansing energy of Wendy's love exploded from her in fireworks. It was real. Love was unreachable to me, but I watched as it smothered Noah. His energy wasn't absorbing it, but instead beaded and rolled off his shields like water on a duck's feather. He was defensive. He was scared.

I wasn't sure Noah would ever get the opportunity again. Looking at what I could see of his life's timeline, there wasn't many chances for Noah to find love. He was introverted. He was in a social minority group. He was often actively suicidal. From what I can infer of the Creator's intentions-- the source of the love wasn't as important as its purity. Like metal or minerals, purity of the emotion was what made it strong. There was no ulterior motivation behind Wendy's love. It was just love, pure and simple, from what I could read in her energy signatures.

I felt I had been given a clue to a task directly from the Creator, though I had yet to discover the task itself. I still had the scrap of paper, the fortune cookie message written in gold ink. The Creator's message was short, simple, and enigmatic. "Choose love." It could mean one thing, it could mean many things. However, here I was, in the back seat of a car with two mortal humans. One was my pet project, a human whose ancestry I had been following and manipulating for centuries. And another, just a woman who seems to be in love. I saw that she truly loved him. I saw the chemical component of love singing brightly in front of me. Its colors were white, scarlet, and flashed in lacy iridescence. It was a powerful chemical, I simply did not know how to use it. I felt like an alchemist sitting in front of his chemistry set-- with beakers, bases, and acids, unsure how to perform even the simplest experiment. What did God want me to do?

Wendy and Noah were near the conclusion of their date. The strong, deep feelings subsided in exchange for fun conversation. From reading their energies, both were having a good time. However, beneath the surface I saw rumblings of self-loathing and doubt in Noah's aura. I knew that it would ruin whatever love Wendy had for the long term. I had seen such things time and time again from watching mortals interact. Self-loathing was one of the most destructive forces. It was just a quieter, slower poison.

I strongly considered, just for a moment, of possessing Noah. Something in my mind concluded it could be done lightly as an experiment. I intended to possess him with a delicate touch in his subconsciousness, only to push him onward with his relationship with Wendy and not sabotage it. I didn't want to make the Veil any thinner nor subvert his free will. I only wanted to follow the clue given to me.

I witnessed myself nearing towards his mind. At the end of the date, Noah reached over to kiss Wendy. I knew it was taboo. I knew it was overstepping my connection with Noah. I knew it was not within our agreement with one another. My shadowy tendrils reached out like gnarled tree branches. I touched his head without fingers. I couldn't feel his brown hair against the smokeless, black fire of my consciousness. I felt the slight resistance of his skull as I pushed through. It felt like gelatin as I sunk deeper inside his mind. I took a breath as if I were to be submerged underwater.

It is never how you expect. Every human is different. Every time I see through another human's eyes, I always see something different. Even though each human eye is largely constructed the same, with blood, ligaments, vitreous fluids, and optic nerves, the world always looks new. For a moment, I felt human. I was human. I sat in Noah's seat. I could actually see Wendy for the first time.

I felt like I had been splashed with fresh air. She looked the way most humans did--she had hair and eyes. I could smell the softness of her individual scent, mixture of her perfume with lilies, sweat, and laundry soap. I could feel the sensation of her hand on me. It wasn't her individual components that were compelling. It was the orchestra of her entirety. It was the missing link between her energy and her. It was the concentration of her being in a singularity body. I had never tasted a kiss so sweet.

"Hey Meresin," said another being outside Noah's head. Since I was inside of him, it sounded as warped and far away. I knew the voice to belong to one of my brothers, since I could not be perceived by anything else. It also wasn't truly a voice, it was more of a feeling of another creature saying my name, getting my attention. It was as if I had been tapped on the shoulder.

I immediately pulled myself from inside his head. I ripped myself from him as if caught cheating on a school test. I knew I was caught. I could feel an electricity strike through me. I could feel myself be seen. I was visible to him, as if naked. It happened so suddenly and so unexpected that I felt foolish. I should have used more protection. I should have scanned the area for any signatures of Devils. I should have taken precaution before doing something so taboo. In my curiosity I had become careless. It wasn't Azazel who had found me, it was worse.

Raziel, the angel of Secrets, likely found me in my enthusiasm to do something as restricted as the possession of Noah. His vibration was attracted all things confidential. He was exactly the type of entity that had I been more careful could have avoided. He didn't use a voice to speak, but instead used a feeling. He usually took fairly simple forms, such as an owl or a hooded figure in a gray robe. Since he was an angel of secrets, no one was quite sure if he was a fallen angel or an angel of the Creator. I always held a suspicion that he was somewhere in between.

"What's this you're doing here, possessing someone?"

I attempted to not perceive him. I dismissed him. I wished him to go away and mind himself. But, since it was already too late and I already had noticed him since he came upon me suddenly, I could not dismiss him. With all my efforts, he would not leave. I had been tricked into noticing him. I reluctantly turned to receive my brother. I perceived his form as an common barred owl.

Wendy dropped off Noah at his home. I felt too embarrassed to continue to have this conversation in active reality. I did not want to talk to Raziel, the angel of secrets, inside the back of Wendy's vehicle. Since all efforts to shake my brother away were proving to be fruitless, I thought I could enact a cordial meeting. He didn't announce himself. He didn't declare what he wanted or why he was here. He just was.

"You're here for a reason, I assume," I said simply to my brother. I pulled away from the car and offered a neutral place for our meeting. I felt my brother accept, his energy was gentle and unobtrusive. He offered no resistance as I put us in a plain space just outside the Void. I made the room look like a plain office, with just a chair and a lamp. Raziel kept his appearance of a stripped owl, perched on the window sill. Outside, there was nothing but blackness.

"You're on the wrong path," said Raziel, using just his eyes and not a real voice. He made his eyes look nearly identical to that of a barred owl's, only larger and darker than even the owl's natural brown eyes. His eyes were two black, circular pits. Then, he turned to clean his feathers with his little yellow beak.

"You don't know what I am doing," I retorted, defensively. "So how do you know I'm on the wrong path?"

Raziel's feathers rose as if he were a real owl, puffing himself into a ball. Then, the feathers naturally lowered as he answered.

"You're just on the wrong path," he said again. He had no intonation, no emotion behind his words. I wasn't sure if he was sent to give me this message or to steer me somewhere else. I did not trust it was from the Creator. This wasn't the first time Raziel had come to muddle things.

"Didn't you make an alliance with Samael?" I wondered, hoping to fluster him and send him away. "Is he here, too?"

"Who?" Raziel asked. This time, I could feel a sense of maliciousness. He was making a pun for an answer. He purposefully made his voice more owl-like.

"I wish to send you away, brother, unless you state your purpose," I said coolly.

I watched as Raziel's owl eyes grew blacker and larger. He hooted again, except this time it was truly to mimic an owl. Then, the two black orbs in his head merged into a single eye. For a moment, he looked like a Cyclopean bird. My attention was fixated on the eye, as if he had hypnotized me in a flash. I thought I saw stars in the eye, constellations. His eye was a crystal ball into infinity. I could see all of the cosmos, all of the world and beyond.

Then, just when I felt sucked into a trance and he had paralyzed me with his power, I realized his eye was no longer a pool of stars. His eye was just red. It was as scarlet and artificial as a tail light. My brother did not have good intentions for me. He had mesmerized me to obtain my secrets. I had just enough sense to escape his control before I felt anything important slip from me. I felt his desires needle my insides like tiny fish feeding on a carcass. He wanted to know about Noah and all my other pet projects. He wanted information on Wendy, who she was and what I was doing with her. He wanted to know all of my experiments past and present. I felt him rooting around inside me like a thug; he wanted to break in and steal anything he could grab, careless if the information was valuable.

"I know what you're hiding, Meresin," I heard him say in my head, as if it was a warning.

Raziel was known for this and I steeled myself from his efforts. I deflected him and dashed away, not unlike a cephalopod releasing ink to escape danger. I flung myself into the Void, knowing he could not follow me there.

Raziel, the keeper of secrets, was a known liar. It was also true that he kept things in his Book of Secrets that not even the Creator knew. The truth was, I did not know what he knew. I did not know if he already knew about Wendy. It seemed dangerous that he even knew her name at all. I did not know how much he knew about Noah, or how much I had meddled and experimented in his ancestry. I did not know if Raziel knew about any or all of my personal pet projects.

I knew he could be dangerous. The best course of action seemed to stay away. Raziel possessed the power to charm and hypnotize his brothers, including me. I did not want to be hypnotized into agreeing to be consumed, or anything else that he perhaps had in mind. Since Raziel was not truly counted among the fallen, he had access to troves of information and influences that I did not have.

It did not bode well to have his attention since he was a mild threat. I also did not want to ask Azazel for help. I still had a mission to follow through, and it would be just like Raziel to worm his way in to either sabotage my mission or simply take it for himself.

I decided to remain in the Void and contemplate my standing.