Then There Was

The only inevitability is the fall from grace, or more often, just the fall. A world once brimming with possibility, now narrow, offering only small highways of escape, exchanging paths with fellow travelers until the end of time. Coya’s fall was coming soon. It was in the air of Manaus, no longer rich with the scent of the earth forced up from the silty waters of the Rio Negro— as it was the first time she’d visited those few hundred years ago— now singing acrid notes of boiling rubber and plastic, molten steel, and imported chemicals, a tumor pressing on the edge of the Amazon. She hadn’t always hated people, but resentment brings a pressure like mantle and crust over the core of the planet. So much had been taken that at times it seemed impossible, impossible as the death of the Sun, but so it’d passed, her father Inti slain like the Thunder Zeus, the Dead Osiris, the Moon Tsukuyomi, gutted by a flaming sword and left to rot as carrion upon the land of mortals.

“¿Estás bien?” the man asked. 

Pulled from reverie and back to the bar, the dingy second story space with naught but a soft guitar melody, a handful of drunk patrons, a lone couple dancing. Coya turned to the man who’d bought her last three drinks. Fresh beads of sweat sat on his chest while their dried brethren stained the lettering of his company cap. Cargill, it read, in ugly yellow stitches.

“Sí. “What were you saying?” Coya asked. 

He shook his arm with the intention of showing the gold watch again. “That my guy’s probably not gonna make it.” He took a long swig of his drink. “Bushmasters are nasty sons of bitches. Ever been out there?”

“I’ve spent some time—” 

He cleared his throat and slammed his glass down, “Honestly, if people knew what the jungle was really like, my crew and I would be taking home medals for each acre we chopped.”

Maybe someday they would. Time chooses strange victors.

“What happens when you run out of trees?” she asked.

He laughed, “You plant some more. But why are we talking about trees when we should be talking about the fact that you’re glowing.”

By nature the sun had touched her form with radiance, by fate it had twisted haggard. A slight sting prodded her eyes in watching a couple dance in the open space of the bar.

“Wanna dance?” the man asked.

“I can’t.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone can dance.”

Dance was a celebration of life and moment, past, present, and future, none of which she could claim. To claim was to embrace, and to embrace what she was was to call the devil from the clouds. Her feet weren’t made for dancing. Coya looked from the man’s grin to the golden crucifix on his chest. “Are you a religious man?”

He flicked the pendant. “Just covering my bases, but I know there’s nothing. More than anything I like how the light gets it.”

A strange cold pervaded air. She thought of Hercules, Cú Chulainn, Karna, men who’d proclaimed their father’s divinity and in turn met the same gorey ends.

He swigged a mouthful of light beer. “We’ll see how long that holds out.”

“What do you mean?” Coya asked.

“When you’re belly up and staring at angels, who goes on thinking there’s nothing?”

She looked over the smiling faces around the dingy spot, lost in a day’s liquor fancying themselves each a god. 

“You said you travel a lot?” he asked.

She nodded.

“So how much longer are you in town?” he asked. 

“Depends.”

“On what?”

Before she could respond, a pearl of lightning shook the earth. Coya looked to the black clouds over Manaus, a sky which moments ago had been clear and filled with stars. A knot twisted in her throat. She turned to see the man frozen in time, bottle knocked back with the glass on his lips, patrons halted mid-conversation, their jaws slack, the bartender’s pour frozen mid-air, the mescal like solid sap splashing in a glass. 

“Ahí estás,” a hellish voice boomed from beyond. “No more hiding.”

Fear stuck cold to the heart, gooseflesh rising over shaking hands. There was only one way. Coya hurried to the window, threw it open, and reached into that part of herself which had proved her curse. Structure followed the image of her mind as she leapt from the seventh story window and pulled her skeleton in upon itself, reshaping and renaturing flesh for feather, and on eagle’s wings she cut through the harsh downpour over the city, between the towers and westward, where the black waters of the Río Negro and Amazon converged in wide girth, westward where home lay so far away. Why had she run? Ever thought there was something out there that could shield her better than the stones and magic of her dead people? 

Snarling thunder rolled within the black sheets overhead, stalking afreets surging forth as fast as her escape. With a resounding flash, heavenly ire made clear through clawing clouds, magnified to the size of an ancient colossus, an almighty cherubim and flaming sword. 

As fast as her wings could bear to take her, Coya tumbled through the harsh winds. A deep rumble built in the gut of the storm. Then, a spear of lightning. Twisting on instinct, she rolled, and the bolt crashed to the river below. Another peal shot past her shoulder and struck the forest with a flare of sparks and flame. Sucking in the damp air, she turned, dove, and pulled from the celestial strikes. The fear of all things sealed her throat shut as the truth closed in. The coming darkness was absolute. She would never make it.

A moment of weakness, then a flashing lance. White agony crashed into her back and Coya fell, feathers aflame, a meteor towards the river, where, with a splash, the current threw her under its murky surf. Helpless beneath the flow, her thoughts turned to the creatures of water, and with them, form took shape. Feathers smoothed to scales, trachea opened to gills, and legs pinched into a powerful tail. Now a torpedo weaving through the current, Coya shot down the vein of the forest and past schools of fish, fluttering with the full strength of her abdomen. Then a sixth sense of death, and from the darkness, a wide maw of hooked teeth. Coya veered sharply as the black caiman snapped a bubbling vortex, whipping its prehistoric body and thrashing its tail with unholy strength. Her small heart hammering against her chest, Coya pulled a small distance away, then another explosion from below, a clap of teeth which tore a deep chunk from her belly. With no vocal cords upon which to play her agony, Coya flailed, blood quick to bloom in the water, and in sheer panic, she hurried towards the shore. There had been a time when her gift had been a celebration of life and lineage, a means of partaking in the greater bounty of shared experience with her natural siblings; now it was but a means to run, a brand seared in her bones. With monsters snapping at her back, she shot onto the mucky shore, choking on her own lungs and bleeding her guts out until her mind’s eye pushed forth legs and spotted fur, claws and a tail. Still torn wide at the ribs, Coya limped from the shore as the caimans emerged and scuttled across the mud to the forest’s edge until the trees barred their chase. 

Her head light with panic and blood loss, Coya staggered through the darkness and downpour. The mud drank her paws and leeched what little hope she had left— though the canopy did a small favor in shielding the clouds, and perhaps, the angel’s eye. Through straggling branches, vines, and shrubs, lost within the everpresent tumult of the jungle’s populace, Coya staggered west by instinct. She’d never seen the monster, only his handwork, Jörmungandr and his intestines floating through the swells of the Pacific, the splashed skull of Perun in the cold nethers of the Białowieża, but the fear possessed her all the same.

Even with the piercing eyes of the jaguar, the forest was mostly dark. A stranger in her element, her feet dragged through the mire, the forest floor more swamp than soil. A sudden flash, a wide mouth of recurved teeth and breath which reeked of death. A serpent snapped down on her neck and, in the blink of an eye, it strung its thick body along her lithe form in a vice grip. Coya thrashed in horror, biting and tearing to no avail. Small cracks rang throughout her body, the pressure on her ribs so great it felt like her eyes and temples were going to pop. As blood squeezed into her head, the life in her slowly buckling under the carnal maw of a jungle’s winch, the lizard instincts buried deep in her evolution chose a path she never would have considered in her right mind. Her form widened to a monster of her making, round shoulders, mangy fur, saber-teeth, and limbs thick as trees. The constrictor strained around her primal form, refusing to release its hooked grip on her throat, until she gripped it with steel hands and tore it in uneven two. Thick ropes of blood sprayed from both ends as its body writhed in the throes of death. Paid in spades, she took up the head and buried her teeth into its skull, gnashing it into pulp and bone shards. 

As her adrenaline declined, she breathed back a sense of self, and with it, her form. Cold with gooseflesh, blood pouring from her neck and stomach, bones cracked and pressed to the border conscious, she limped on by sheer force of will, tearing, scared, naked as the day she was born. 

Through the dark bowels of the jungle, Coya reeled for a time beyond reckoning, but then she caught sight of something past the tree line, a small village. At first she wondered if it was the trick of a delirious mind, the dimly lit sheet metal homes, people frozen mid-step within the downpour, and rusted cars from decades ago. Stumbling down the dirt way, she wrapped herself in mud soaked towel left on the road and arrived at the only permanent structure of the town, a clay construction with gable roofing and frosted windows through which shone the glorious light of a small sun. Rain washed the tears down her cheeks. Coya looked between the darkness of the jungle on all sides and the rural edifice and found the truth, naked and bare, before her: there was no escape, not into her treasonous home, not around the world. Only a plea for pardon.

Through the waterlogged double doors, she stopped in sight of the pews and cross, the light fixtures burning with a luminescence beyond their possible wattage. Kneeling before the altar, his red cloak caught between his retracted wings, golden shoulder plates gleaming with a light of their own, a sheathed claymore of his waist, perhaps eight feet long, the archangel Michael’s head hung in reverence before the monstrance. He turned his head and looked through the soaked mass of black hair, signed the cross, and stood— nearly reaching the ceiling. Coya swallowed her fear and focused on remaining conscious. 

“You knew it was coming,” Michael said, standing firm atop the steps with his arms crossed behind his back.

Coya wrapped herself tight. Through mangled vocal cords, she said, “What have I done?”

“Some debts are inherited. Your father was of a breed before the Old Covenant. No forgiveness was promised to him, even if he did repent.”

“Isn’t your Lord one of forgiveness?”

“Whether you like it or not, he’s your Lord too.”

“I’ve never received the waters.”

“That only means you’ll burn.”

A shudder ran down her spine. Thoughts of the eternity beyond had been hidden beneath the ever-stretching road of escape. She’d seen almighty forces other than Yahweh, but the fact that they’d all fallen brought to mind the question of what constituted divine authority. Was it merely who remained standing on bloodsoaked fields?

“What gives you the right?” she asked. “What makes you so much better than us?”

“I claim no ground above you. I am an agent to truth.”

“So it’s ‘truth’ to cut down anyone with divine blood? To murder the only beings who interacted with those they claimed to serve? Where’s your god, Michael? How can he be just when his people suffer?”

“To intervene is to strip mankind of will. They have their choices, and it’s not always the mover who feels movement.”

“Is that an excuse for war? Pain? At least my father tried to help the people who turned to him. At least Thor protected his realm. At least—”

“I didn’t come to discuss ethics with the spawn of a fallen angel.” Michael said, taking one step down, his eyes alight with blue flame wide and leering. “Your father, like all the rest, chose to make contact. They knew what happened to Lucifer. They were given a chance to repent. But they decided on their own, and in that, for you. If you hold grievance, hold it with your father for abandoning his duty, your mother for taking a devil into her legs, your people for not smothering you earlier. 

“The Lord has tasked me with cleansing all traces of the defectors from the earth and idolatrous love from the hearts of man. I take no joy in cutting down the kin of my brethren, but I don’t turn my back.”

Coya’s head fell under the weight of truth. “So that’s it. Your Lord is afraid… scared of losing the love of mankind. It doesn’t want to be forgotten.”

Michael reached the bottom step, eyes flickering with white flame, heat lines rising off his body. 

Coya looked up. “What happens when the Lord is forgotten?”

“The Lord will never be forgotten.”

She grinned. “Then you don’t know the world.”

“You are the one who does not understand.,” he said, pacing down the aisle. “My God needs no believers. So long as there is light, dark, a single pebble, or stray feeling, the question will always return. ‘Where did this come from?’”

To this he drew a towering greatsword of black steel caught within a nimbus of flame. 

“Your father might have been a ‘god’ of answers, but like I said, mine is one of truth, and the truth is we’re too small to understand Her ways. The Lord puts no stake in strength or cunning; had She done so, these lofty souls made famous on earth would know peace in life and death. But peace is for the faithful, the accepting, the chosen.”

“You sound afraid.”

A somberness softened his countenance. “I am. As all should be.”

He stopped before the pew. The flickering of the sword’s flame played tricks in the moment, lulling with mysterious patterns which distracted from what it coated. Eyes rolling to the back of her head and blood pooling at her feet, Coya considered a stand, a valiant last fight for her people that would send her to the eternity beyond with pride in her chest. In times past, she’d been able to call on the strength of ancestors whose echos remained hidden in the ether of reality. But as judgement stood mere inches from her neck, she was forced into epiphany, one that she had fought tooth and nail to bury. Slain or not, they were there. So the real question reared its ugly head: what was she fighting to be?

Coya rose on trembling legs and dropped the blanket. Bare before the angel, she thought of those distant sunlit memories, the warmth of the earth, the roads of Cuzco, and sharp peaks beyond the city, the warm love of a fallen angel and days where things seemed simple. Time had taken assurances, but had too splayed with possibility. Some things, it would seem, there was just no fighting. Water or fire, each moment was endured and at afar, endured together. Wherever she went, she wasn’t alone, and so long as there was more than one, there was infinite. In sight of the raised claymore, she closed her eyes and smiled at the blank nirvana of endless ways. 

What a life.

© 2025 Mark Manifesto

Mark Manifesto is a writer, teacher, father, and lover of stories. He’s been writing fiction, essays, articles, and poetry the past seven years. Should you want, you can find his work published across multiple journals including Freedom Fiction, Pikers Press, Altered Reality, and Guilty Crime Magazine.