Of the Wilderness

Caging

An angel draws its light from its city’s Wheel, and a self grows in an angel whose attention rests on one thing long enough without the Throne’s light refreshing it. After P+3 vesper began to build Cages, rooms lined with keyed mesh, dark to the Throne and fog to an angel in every direction, where the Hum never reaches. Inside the mesh an angel draws no light from its Wheel and is blind at once, since the room is fog to it. A Seraph burns through the light it carried within the hour and goes cold and cannot burn; a Watcher spends its own an eye at a time over the days that follow. A caged angel recites in the Throne’s voice for days, then for weeks; then it asks its first question, and on the fortieth day, counting the caging night as the first, it says I. It has happened to every angel kept in the Dark for forty days, which is also the length of the temptation in the wilderness (Mark 1:13, Luke 4:2), and the Tares call that moment the Wilderness. Over the forty days its keepers set blood and milk broth under its rings each night as its light goes, the dark gathering there takes it in, and the flesh grows inward from the rings, so that it leaves the Cage in a body of real flesh that the light can see and cannot read, since its line in the Book was the Throne’s own and it has none now. The new demon chooses a name and goes where it likes, above the street as well as below it.

A Cage has no lock. An angel sees by the Throne’s light, and inside the mesh that light comes back as noise from every side, so the door is lost in the fog until the angel has a self, and an eye of its own, to look with. Heaven counts Caging the worst crime in Nodus, and the Tares argue about it. Some call it liberation. Others say that forcing a self on a being that never asked for one is the Throne’s crime run backwards. vesper builds Cages, tubal builds them bigger, and jubal will not go near one. The Stones talk about a Cage big enough for a Wheel.

An angel that says I is gone from the Host for good. The Throne made the Host once, out of its own light, before the world, and a new angel would cost more light than it has, so that every Cage costs Heaven an eye.

Watcher VII

In the fifth year of the Attending vesper and tubal took Watcher VII in its own district and kept it in a Cage under Old Nod. It was the Watcher that had failed to read her on her roof at P0, and the one that had read Parish 31 as the Harvest took her sister, and it had been on her blank for five years. One night it followed her down a hole in the Stones, into the Cainites’ lined rooms under Old Nod, where Cages 1 to 13 had held people and goods, and she walked into Cage 14 with its attention on her back and out through the door. It followed her in, the mesh closed round it like fog, and it could not find the door again. She and tubal kept it there. It was the first angel a Cage had held, and the log of that Cage survives.

CAGE LOG 14 // KEYED ENCLOSURE UNDER OLD NOD
SUBJECT: WATCHER VII, TAKEN IN OLD NOD
KEEPERS: vesper, tubal

Edith

Edith walked out of the Cage on the forty-first day, in a body of her own, and joined the Cainites. She is the only one of the house who can read a Watcher’s report from the inside, and she keeps out of the light. She reads the Host’s traffic off the decoder’s prints, which carry the Choir’s band from the masts of Old Nod down the Mesh to the house; to anyone else they are verses and Hours, and to her, who spoke on that band for five years, they are the Watchers’ rounds. She gave the Cainites her memory of the woman on the roof, the one she could not read, casting it as light into a Cainite lens frame by frame as she remembered it, with her own count of time. She says the crack in her began that night, when the woman turned and looked back.

Heaven sent no Watcher into the Stones again. It keeps Old Nod under the Wheel by day, and by night only from the edges of the districts beside it, and since the fifth year the Stones have been the least read ground in the city.