EVANGELINE
It was said that we Nephilim were born out of forbidden loveâbut that was only half of the truth. We were not simply born from the union of angel and human, but only if their souls were truly united, and the divine grace of the angel was involved in the conception.
Without this conscious surrender, the child remained mortal. But where grace flowed, a being was created that stood between the worlds, a half-angel that carried a spark of its creatorâs power within itself.
I, the daughter of Chamuel, the Archangel of Love, carried this truth within me for years without understanding it. Grace granted me the eternal life of the angels.
I did not age while the world around me passed away, and illnesses could not touch me. However, unlike my father, I did not possess the immeasurable power of a perfect angel.
Instead, a single gift lay dormant within me, an inheritance from my ancestry that I only discovered late in life. It took years, after my wings broke through, for me to realize that I wasnât just standing between worlds, but could actually pass through them.
The ability to walk between spheres awoke in me like a long-forgotten heritage, awkward at first, a power that both frightened and enticed me. Not with the effortless grace of an angel, but with the uncertain determination of one who had yet to learn what it meant to be half divine.
Every Nephilim carried such a fragment of its creator. Some had superhuman strength, others heard the unspoken thoughts of mortals or healed wounds with a touch.
Our wings betrayed our lineage, but our true power often remained hidden for years until it was revealed to us. Or until we snatched it away from ourselves.
My father, the angel who preached love, abandoned me at birth. Sometimes I wondered if he knew what gift he left in me.
Whether he feared what I would become when I discovered my heritage one day. Grace made me immortal, but only this one power, this piece of him in me, made me understand what it really meant to be trapped between heaven and earth.
We Nephilim were not angels, but we were not humans either. We were the forgotten ones, who had one foot in each world and yet didnât quite belong anywhere.
And that was our curse⦠And our greatest strength.
I was born in 1823, in a remote cabin in the Appalachian Mountains, where the snow was so high in winter that it blocked the door. At twenty-five, I simply stopped aging, forever trapped in the prime of my youth, while the world went on around me.
My mother died in 1854 of a fever that choked her throat until she couldnât get a word out. There was nothing I could do but hold her hand and watch the life drain from her eyes.
Years later, as medicine advanced, I learned that a simple penicillin could have saved her. The irony of fate.
A mold could have saved her, and granted her a few more years with me. After her death, I wandered through a growing America, a shadow among the living.
The Civil War engulfed me like so many others, and I learned to fight the only way that matteredâ¦by surviving. I smelled the black powder and iron in the blood at Gettysburg, and felt bullets shattering my immortality as they tore others apart.
Later, in the First World War, I fought under a false name in the trenches of France, where the mud and corpse gas reminded me that even eternal life was no protection against horror. I experienced the Golden Twenties in Chicago, where jazz sounded as sweet as honey before the Great Depression turned everything to ashes.
In the beginning, I thought I was alone. But over the decades, I met others like me.
Half-angels who hid their wings under heavy coats or used their powers to remain unrecognized. They taught me who I was: a Nephilim, rejected by the angels who feared us as our numbers grew.
My father, Chamuel, had left for the same reason. The Celestials wanted no more demigods among mortals.
I learned every language humans ever inventedâ¦from the harsh German of emigrants to the fluent Yoruba whispered secretly by slaves in the cotton fields. I saw wars come and go, fought in some, fled others, and learned that even immortality was no guarantee of safety.
Yet none of this could break me. Only loneliness gnawed at me, this eternal knowledge that I would never belong.
The world was changing. I remained.
And sometimes, when the moon was high, I spread my wings, invisible to mortal eyes, and wondered if my father ever looked back. If he regretted it.
But the angels kept silent. And us Nephilim? We learned how to survive.
We learned how to fight. We learned to bear eternity.
But we werenât the only beings with a long lifespan. And I realized this in the nineteenth century, when I met my first demon.
Its breath smelled of rotting flesh and sulfur as it burst out of the alley. The fight didnât last a minute.
That night, I learned that we were invincible against demons. A single Nephilim could destroy whole legions, so powerful that it took several angels to defeat one of us.
But that was exactly our downfall. We were hunted, just like demons; our existence was deemed an angelic danger, and with this decision came the weapon for our destruction.
The angelsâ swords were once forged to protect the light. But when they discovered that their holy blades were also effective against us Nephilim, they became our curse and the hunt began.
I fled to the ends of the earth, to the Siberian tundra where the wind howled like lost souls. To the Amazon jungles where no mortal had ever seen my face.
One after the other, my fellow species fell. Until only I was left.
For decades, I hid my true nature, not only from humans, but from the whole invisible world. I learned to contain my powers, to hide them like a disgrace.
There was only one way out of this damnation: to voluntarily give up our immortality for the love of a being. We would then age, liveâ¦and die with our soulmate.
I had heard the stories. Of the Nephilim who sacrificed their eternity for human love.
They swore that this bond was unbreakable, that no sinister act could kill a soulmate. The instinct to protect would be stronger than anything else.
For a long time, I thought this was a naive fairy tale, but now, after meeting Devas, I felt it. I tried to kill him, and I could have succeeded, but something inside me pushed me away.
It threw me through the air, forbidding me to harm him. And only when I realized it did I feel his heartbeat.
A demon was my soulmate. One that was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen.
The sight of him took my breath away, every time. Devas wasnât just beautiful; he was the living image of divine perfection, a being that broke down the boundaries between angel and demon.
His hair, thick and dark, fell down his forehead in loose strands, as if it didnât care about the laws of gravity. He had the kind of masculine beauty that left you speechless.
His face was indescribable perfection. The chin, angular as chiseled granite, spoke of unbending determination, while the high cheekbones gave him an almost royal bearing.
His lips, full yet precisely cut, maintained a pensive smile even at the most severe moment, as if they harbored a secret that only a kiss could reveal.
But his eyes... Black as polished onyx, deep as a nighttime abyss, they caught me as soon as his gaze rested on me.
Not an ordinary black, no. In their darkness, tiny slivers of light twinkled like distant stars, which inevitably cast a spell over me.
When anger gripped him, these stars seemed to glow as if a hidden fire burned behind the blackness. And when he laughed, they condensed into a sparkling glimmer, as if the light itself was held captive in their depths.
They were the eyes of a creature that had seen too much. Experienced too much.
Lost too much... just as old as I was.
His body was that of a warrior, broad shoulders that hinted at the power of a demon beneath the fine linen of his robe. And a stance that exuded both grace and unrelenting strength.
When he moved, it was with an almost deceptive lightness, as if he were floating above the ground. But I knew the deadly precision that lay in those muscles.
Devas was my soulmate; my heart beat for him as if it had been created just to call out his name. Every breath without him felt like I was slowly suffocating.
I would have given him my immortality without flinching. I would have traded my eternal life for a single, shared, mortal existence.
But... I was not allowed to.
The night my father appeared to me in a dream was burned into my memory forever. Chamuelâs voice had been a broken whisper when he revealed the prophecy.
I was the last one. The only one who could stop the end of all beings.
The angels had long since withdrawn from the earthâtheir own actions had driven them into exile. So I was left alone.
The last Guardian. The last hope.
When I awoke, it lay heavy in my hand, cold and yet pulsing with a strange warmth. Chamuelâs sword. The last remaining angelic sword on this earth.
Its blade gleamed dully in the dawn, as if it did not reflect the light but swallowed it up. Only the fine, bluish gleam along the edge betrayed its heavenly origin.
I tightened my grip on the handle, feeling the engraved runes under my fingertips. They burned slightly, as if testing me, to see if I was worthy.
Without this sword, I would have thought the dream was a feverish fantasy. A desperate product of a lonely soul.
But the weight of the blade in my hand, the strange echo vibrating through my bones⦠it was real. My father had left me more than a weapon. He had left me a burden.
A responsibility.
For years, I roamed the world, searching for the Saviour, the one who carried the Red Power. When I felt this energy for the first time, I set out immediately, my heart pounding wildly with hope.
But when I arrived, in that warehouse⦠there was nothing. Just the fading trace of a portal and this irrepressible, red power that was still trembling in the air.
I traveled between the worlds, following every trace, every whisper of this power. And yet⦠I found it here. In this cursed place, where the exiles lived out their existence.
And now I faced the impossible choice⦠Devasâ love or the salvation of all existence.
If I gave up my immortality, I couldnât protect her. Iris⦠our Saviour.
Without it, I was vulnerable, mortal. And if I fell, the prophecy would never come true.
Yet every time Devas looked at me, I asked myself:
âWhat good was an eternal existence⦠if it was empty without love?â