The End and the Means

She had always been a sickly child, and she didn't even realize that she was dying until she awoke, afterward.

At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary except that it didn't hurt to breathe, and there was a strange man watching over her. He didn't look like a doctor. She could hear her mother sobbing softly in the other room, but that wasn't at all unusual. The man made some sort of gesture with his hand and suddenly she couldn't hear anything at all anymore. The silence was absolute, more complete than any quiet she'd experienced in her short life.

"Greetings, little sister," the man said. His words were kind but there was something cold in his smile, like winter sunlight; bright but offering no warmth.

"Who are you?" she asked, a small, shivery feeling starting in her stomach. "I don't have a brother. I want my mommy."

"My name is Reith, and I'm an angel." His smile remained humorless. "I would ask your name, but it doesn't matter now. You'll have a new one soon." The impatient motion he made at her still somehow managed to look graceful and flowing, like water over stone. "We're going on a journey, now. You won't need to pack, but if there's anything you desperately want to hold on to I suggest you collect it."

Tears began to well up in her eyes, streaming down her cheeks. "I don't want to go anywhere with you. Are you coming to take me to heaven? I don't want to die! MOMMY!"

"She can't hear you, little sister." A low chuckle escaped the man, devoid of genuine mirth. "You might say I'm here to take you to heaven, but you don't have to worry about dying. You've already crossed over, and you'll be an angel too once you're named."

"But I'm not dead!" The words came out as a wail. "I can still feel things! I can still think!"

"Death and crossing over are not the same thing," Reith said, his grey wings unfurling slightly in what might have been impatience. "Mortals die every day. Only the special ones chosen by the Goddess cross over and become angelus." The word rolled off his tongue with perfect pronunciation, carrying overtones of meaning she couldn't quite grasp. "You should be honored."

They called her Kaldi, or Destiny. She was seven years old, and the last memory she had of her mortal life was the sound of her mother crying.

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More than anything, she loves being an angel. Reith takes her under his lovely grey wings and teaches her everything. Her own wings are midnight black, so dark they drink up all the light, and when she first manifests them, she spends hours just staring at their impossible darkness. Her hair and eyes have changed too - turquoise and magenta, respectively, colors that should clash but somehow harmonize on her small frame. These, along with being able to create and control water, are her third favorite things about being an angel.

Her second favorite thing about being an angel is that she can run and fight without collapsing. No more wheezing breaths that taste like copper, no more legs that give out after a few steps, no more pitying looks from other children who don't understand why she can't play with them. Now she can train for hours, pushing her new body to limits she never imagined possible.

Her very favorite thing about being an angel is that there are rules, and order, and those rules state that she is now one of them. It is a family, and even though it's a distant and dysfunctional one it is less so than the family she has left behind. Here, love is earned through competence, affection shown through instruction, and belonging guaranteed by divine decree.

"Always look at the bigger picture," Reith reminds her when she complains about some difficulty in her training. They stand in one of the practice chambers, its crystalline walls reflecting their movements in infinite recursion. "By yourself, you are nothing. It's only in the grand scope of things that anything you do has meaning. If you can't contribute to the greater good, you are less than nothing."

She tries to remember this when she is so tired she can hardly stand, when her muscles scream and her newly powerful body threatens to betray her just like the old one did. She remembers it when she has drained her magical resources to the point where she develops a blinding headache that makes her wonder if this is what dying felt like, before.

"Look at the bigger picture," she murmurs to herself as another novice starts a squabble with her over training schedules, and she withdraws rather than engage. The other novice, a boy who crossed over at twelve and still acts like the street fighter he was, calls her a coward. She doesn't correct him. The greater good is what pushes her to get up just once more after Reith knocks her down at weapons practice, to coax forth just one more particle of magic when her reserves are empty. Reith, watching from his position by the wall, approves silently. She can see it in the slight softening of his perpetual frown.

The angelic realm becomes her entire world. She learns its corridors and chambers, its hierarchies and hidden currents of power. She discovers which angels to approach for knowledge (Vaethir and the scribes), which to avoid (Shiki and her chaotic followers), and which occupy that dangerous middle ground of conditional alliance (Chidara, ancient and unknowable). She masters the formal greetings in Celestial, the proper forms of address for each tier, the subtle body language that distinguishes a friendly challenge from a genuine threat.

Most importantly, she learns about the war. The eternal conflict between angels and demons, played out across the mortal realm with humans as both pawns and collateral damage. She studies the great battles, memorizes the names of legendary hunters, analyzes tactical failures with the dedication of a true believer. When Reith speaks of their sacred duty to protect mortals from demonic corruption, she drinks in every word like water in a desert.

"We are the shield," he tells her one evening as they watch the sun set over the angelic realm's impossible architecture. "We are the sword. We are the only thing standing between the innocent and the void."

She believes him absolutely.

Her First Kill approaches like a storm on the horizon, inevitable, terrifying, necessary. She's been an angel for forty-three years. She's watched other novices depart for their trials, some returning bloodied but triumphant, others not returning at all. The latter are not mourned, merely noted. Weakness has no place in the angelic host.

The demon she eventually chooses is young by their standards, barely a century old. It has been terrorizing a small settlement in the mortal realm, feeding on fear and despair like a parasite. She tracks it for three days, analyzing its patterns, learning its preferences. When she finally confronts it in the ruins of what was once a school, she feels nothing but cold determination.

The fight is brutal and quick. The demon underestimates her, sees a child where it should see a weapon. She uses its overconfidence against it, feigning weakness to draw it close before striking with precision born of decades of training. Her water magic floods its lungs from within, drowning it in its own fluids as she manipulates every drop of moisture in its body. When she drives her blade through its heart, she does it as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible, as though she is being graded.

The test is pass or fail, but she doesn't care about mere passing. There is an order to these things and she wants to do well on the last task Reith will set her before she becomes a full angel, a true member of the host. The demon is just the means to an end, a stepping stone on her path to serving the greater good. Demons upset the natural order of things, corrupt and twist what should be pure. She isn't sorry to see this one dissolve into ash and shadow.

When she returns, Reith is waiting. For the first time since her crossing, he smiles with genuine warmth.

"Well done, little sister. You are angelus now, in truth as well as name."

She has never been happier.

As her power grows, she regards the newly crossed over novices with a sort of distant pity and dismay. They don't understand, yet. They arrive confused, frightened, clinging to mortal attachments that will only hold them back. If their mentor is careless, they might never understand. She doesn't comprehend why the older angels aren't like Reith.

Chidara flatly refuses to take a novice. Shiki lets hers run wild, with no discipline whatsoever. Jihannu's, despite her best efforts otherwise, is a shy, quiet little thing who probably won't survive her First Kill. The waste of potential frustrates Kaldi. Every failed novice is a resource lost, a weapon unforged in their war against the darkness.

When her own time comes to take a novice, she approaches it with the same ruthless efficiency she brings to everything. The girl who becomes Meidi crosses over at fifteen, full of fire and passion. She reminds Kaldi of the street fighter novice from her early days, all emotion and no control.

"You must look at the bigger picture," Kaldi tells her, unconsciously echoing Reith's words. They stand in the same practice chamber where she learned to fight, the crystalline walls now reflecting a new generation's struggles. "Individual desires mean nothing. Personal attachments are weakness. We exist to serve."

But Meidi, newest in the long line of Angels of Dreams, can't comprehend the bigger picture. They have long, drawn-out fights about it that leave both of them exhausted and frustrated. Meidi chafes at the rules ingrained into angelic society, questions orders that have stood for millennia. She doesn't understand discipline, or order, or the need for anything larger than herself.

Most damning of all, she cares passionately about the mortals. Not as a collective to be protected, but as individuals. She learns their names, remembers their faces, grieves when they die even of natural causes.

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"They're not pets," Kaldi snaps during one particularly heated argument. "They're not our friends. They're our responsibility, nothing more."

"They're people," Meidi shoots back, her dream-touched eyes swirling with colors that have no names. "They have hopes and fears and loves just like we do. How can you be so cold?"

"Because cold is what keeps them safe. Attachment clouds judgment. Emotion leads to mistakes. And mistakes get angels killed."

She should have seen the signs. Should have recognized that Meidi's passionate nature would be her downfall. But she was so certain that proper training would temper that fire, transform it into something useful. She was wrong.

Meidi freezes up during her First Kill, and is brutally hacked apart trying to execute it. The demon - older and craftier than Kaldi's had been - recognizes her hesitation and exploits it mercilessly.

Kaldi does not intervene. She watches from her position on a nearby rooftop as her novice is torn apart, cataloging each mistake with clinical detachment. There is an order to these things, and the novice must stand or fall on her own. Reith is not there to offer her any wisdom; he fell to a group of demons some time ago in a battle that has already become legend, and a new novice now carries his name, a stranger who will never understand what the original meant to her.

"Look at the bigger picture," she thinks to herself as she collects Meidi's lifeless remains, as hot tears gather behind her eyes and refuse to fall. If Meidi was a weak link, it is for the best that she is removed now, before her weakness can infect others or compromise a mission. The logic is perfect, irrefutable.

It does nothing to ease the cold that settles in her chest where warmth used to live.

Shortly afterward, Jihannu's novice comes home badly bloodied but successful, a fully fledged angel. The shy, quiet little thing showed steel at her core after all. It seems there was some fighting spirit in her, or perhaps desperation breeds its own kind of strength. Kaldi offers her congratulations in a perfectly controlled voice that betrays nothing of the bitter jealousy eating at her insides.

She doesn't take another novice. When pressed, she claims her duties require her full attention. In truth, she cannot bear the thought of another failure, another name added to her list of inadequacies. Better to focus on what she does well: hunt, kill, serve. The greater good demands nothing less than perfection.

Decades pass in a blur of missions and battles. She rises through the ranks with mechanical precision, each advancement earned through flawless execution of her duties. Other angels begin to look at her with something between respect and fear. She cultivates both, understanding that being loved is less important than being effective.

When the summons comes for her to attempt the third tier, she is ready. More than ready; she has been preparing for this moment for over a century, studying every account of the Revelation ritual, analyzing the patterns of those who succeeded and those who failed. She will not fail. Failure is not an option for those who serve the greater good.

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Kaldi stands outside the entrance to the shrine, heart pounding with an intensity she hasn't felt since her First Kill. She has been here many times, but today is different. Today she has come to seek her revelation from the Goddess, and behind those doors lies the unknown.

"If you can't serve the greater good you're less than nothing," she whispers to herself, the words a prayer and a promise. She's reached her peak as a second tier angel; to move up, the only way is forward. There is an order to these things, and now is the time. Steeling herself, she takes a deep breath and pushes the heavy carved doors open.

The huge room is quiet, dark, and still, lit only by the light of hundreds of candles left by angels come to pray or to show their devotion to the Goddess Weaver. The scent of smoke and wax hangs heavy in the warm air, mixing with the subtle fragrance of ethereal lotus, flowers that bloom only in the presence of divine power. A low altar holds a long-dead amethyst focus stone, smooth and round and nearly as large as her head, its surface polished by countless hands over millennia. Scattered around it are offerings; lesser crystals that hum with residual power, art depicting the Goddess in her various aspects, flowers both mortal and divine, food that will never spoil in this sacred space, poems written in Celestial that speak of devotion and duty.

She has the shrine to herself, and will, for as long as it takes. The ritual can last hours or days; there is no way to know until it is complete.

Summoning her staff to her hand, she touches the warm wood for a moment as though for reassurance. Gently, reverently, she places it on the altar among the other offerings. Kaldi settles on a soft cushion before the altar and offers up a silent prayer to Weaver, using the formal Celestial forms she memorized decades ago. Divine Mother, She Who Weaves the Patterns, Guardian of Order and Purpose, grant me the wisdom to see truly. Show me my path that I might better serve.

She isn't quite sure what is supposed to happen. As with the ritual of First Kill, the third-tier angels are all vague about the experience, although whether it is purposeful or simply from the inability to describe it she doesn't know. Chidara merely said, "You will know when it comes," with that enigmatic smile of hers. Others have been even less helpful, speaking in riddles and metaphors that obscure more than they reveal.

She simply sits, and stares into the flames of the tiered candles filling the walls around the altar. Out of habit, a meditative state slips over her and she falls into almost a trance. Kaldi's breathing evens, and slows. A distinct sense of peace fills her, the kind she has only felt in her earliest days as an angel, before the weight of duty settled on her shoulders like armor.

Time loses meaning. The candle flames seem to stretch and dance, creating patterns that almost resolve into meaning before dissolving again. She feels herself sinking deeper, consciousness unfurling like wings into spaces she didn't know existed within her own mind.

Then, between one heartbeat and the next, everything changes.

A tide of power rips through her, shocking her awake, except she isn't awake, not truly. The points of candlelight seem distant and cold, and she realizes with a start that they are now stars. The world shines below her, beautiful in triplicate, all three realms buzzing with life like jewels strung on invisible threads. She can see it all: the angelic realm in its crystalline perfection, the demon realm writhing with chaotic energy, and between them the mortal realm, fragile and precious and terrifyingly vulnerable.

Even so, her breath comes short and an ominous sense that something is wrong clenches in her stomach. The beauty of the vision can't disguise the wrongness that creeps along its edges like rot. Flailing in space, she tries to figure out where the overwhelming sense of dread is coming from.

Her answer comes in the form of a black wave blotting out the stars.

It isn't darkness as she understands it, not the mere absence of light. This is negation itself, unmaking given form. It washes over their brightness, snuffing them like the candles she had mistaken them to be. Where it passes, nothing remains. Not even the memory of light.

The wave rushes toward her, toward the glowing jewel of the world. It crosses the sun and eats into it like a cancer, darkness blooming across the fiery surface in patterns that hurt to perceive. She watches in horror as the source of all life begins to dim, its light becoming grey and then nothing at all.

Encircling the world below, the nothingness begins to dissolve everything it touches. She can see the realms trying to respond, but they are divided, too preoccupied with their eternal war to recognize the true threat. First one realm and then another starts to crumble into annihilation. The angelic realm marshals its defenses, walls of light rising to hold back the dark, but without the support of the other realms, they flicker and fail. The demon realm lashes out with chaos and fury, but chaos means nothing to the void. There is nothing there to disrupt, no patterns to break.

The mortal realm lasts longest, surprisingly. Perhaps because they are used to being caught between forces beyond their control, they adapt fastest. She sees flashes of human ingenuity, desperate alliances between species that have learned to hate each other, but it is too little, too late. When the last bastion falls, it crumbles like sand.

The last piece shatters into oblivion, and the dark cloud expands. A terrible sense of loss leaves her bereft and she realizes that there is nothing left, nothing at all in the entire universe except for herself and the darkness. The leading edge touches her and bitter cold leaves her gasping for breath - except there is no air, no space, no anything. She watches as mote-like bits of her start to flake away and become sucked into the dust-like blackness. Her consciousness begins to fray at the edges, thoughts becoming simpler, memories dissolving.

I am Kaldi.

Even that begins to fade.

I am.

Then nothing.

When awareness returns, it comes slowly, like drowning in reverse. First comes the sensation of breathing, then the feeling of solid ground beneath her, then the gradual recognition that she is still herself, still whole, still real.

Kaldi opens her eyes on the floor of the shrine, the candles shining down on her like warm stars. Her throat is dry and raw, as though she has been screaming. Testing herself to make sure everything is still there, just in case, she slowly sits up. Her body aches in ways she hasn't experienced since her mortal days, but she feels different; more powerful yes, but overall just... more. As though she has been a sketch before and is now painted in full color.

The transition to third tier is complete, and that must have been her revelation.

But the vision...

Something is coming.

Something that will require all the strength the world can muster to even have a hope of turning it away. Something that renders their eternal war not just pointless but actively harmful; every resource spent fighting each other is one less available for the true battle to come.

"Look at the bigger picture," she rasps past her parched throat.

Something that threatens even the Goddess herself, because why else would she have been alone, the only thing existing in that ravaged universe? Why else would the divine realms themselves crumble?

Kaldi musters a deep breath, and sits up fully. She has been given a warning. Why it has been given to her, she doesn't understand; perhaps because she alone has the will to act on it, the clarity of vision to see past petty concerns to the greater good. But suddenly it all comes clear. She is the only one with sufficient power who understands. In time there might be others, might already be others, but it will be up to her to show them the way.

Serving the greater good means stopping that black wave, no matter the price.

The mortal realm is the weakness. She has seen it in the vision, how the divided attention, the eternal battlefield, has prevented unity when it was needed most. If the mortal realm ceases to exist, if there is no longer a battleground for angels and demons to waste their strength upon, then perhaps they can stand together when the darkness comes.

It is a terrible equation, but the math is clear. Sacrifice millions to save everything. Trade one realm for the chance to preserve existence itself.

Sitting back on her heels, she stares at the lifeless stone on the altar. The amethyst once channeled the Goddess's power directly, before something severed that connection. The Lodestone, sleeping since the dawn of creation. It has the power to unmake, to unweave what the Goddess has woven.

There will be a way. There is an order to these things, and there is always a way.

She just has to be strong enough to take it.

Rising on unsteady legs, Kaldi retrieves her staff from the altar. It feels different in her hands now, heavier with purpose. She can sense Reith's approval in its weight, he who taught her that individual lives mean nothing compared to the greater good, that sacrifice is not just acceptable but necessary.

"By yourself, you are nothing," she whispers, his words a benediction. "It's only in the grand scope of things that anything you do has meaning."

She has her meaning now. She has her purpose.

Walking from the shrine with steady steps, Kaldi begins to plan. There will be resistance, of course. Angels too blinded by compassion to see the necessity, too attached to their mortal charges to make the hard choice. She will need allies, those who can look beyond immediate suffering to ultimate survival.

And if persuasion fails?

Well. There is an order to these things.

The greater good will be served, one way or another.