Part 1 

I don’t remember my mother ever being sane. From the day I was born, the house made a sound like something fraying—fabric tugged thread by thread until only strings were left. The curtains were tattered and never washed. The TV was always on, a carousel of tinny hymns and stern men pointing at the camera with their Bibles like knives. The nights were full of her muffled sobbing that would stop all at once, as if a hand had closed over her mouth. The cracked icon of the Virgin on our wall gleamed in places where the varnish hadn’t flaked away yet, and in the moonlight I was sure I saw the eyes follow me.

She smelled of alcohol at breakfast and at midnight, a fermented sweetness that stuck in the back of my throat. When I asked about my father, she didn’t sigh, didn’t avert her eyes, didn’t change the subject. She looked straight at me with pupils blown wide and dead-light empty and said the same thing every time, a cigarette stuck to her cracked lips.

“Your father is an angel, Michael. A real angel.”

I believed her once, when I was five and still believed the TV when it said miracles were on sale. I ran out to my friends and told them like I was bringing them treasure. They laughed until my ears burned. The story followed me for years—wings pantomimed behind my back, fake haloes, jokes about immaculate conceptions. My mother kept telling the story anyway, and when I stopped believing, she didn’t. In my teens, I got angry. I called her crazy, said the word through my teeth. She clutched a cracked rosary so hard it dug into her palm and bled, and she shouted that my father burned with light when he came to her, that I carried his sacred blood. She grabbed my face in both hands and her nails left tracks.

At eighteen I left. The house with its yellow light and peeling walls and permanent damp belonged to a past I wanted to fold up and put in a drawer I never opened. People had called me crazy because of her. They had mocked my imaginary father until I broke knuckles and lost teeth for the right to shut them up. Leaving was a renunciation. I moved to a different city, said I was an orphan when people asked. I worked two jobs, made friends who didn’t look at me like I was a warning. Sometimes I drank, not to blur anything, but to understand the shape of her need from the inside without being swallowed by it. I didn’t go to church. I didn’t pray. Atheism was a clean room with no fingerprints.

But I’m not writing this to talk about leaving. I’m writing about the thing that made me go back.

Even after I moved out, the air sometimes pressed on the back of my neck like a palm. Like someone was standing just behind me, deciding. A car fishtailed on wet asphalt and shuddered to a stop so close that the heat of the engine kissed my leg; I had jumped away without thinking and wasn’t sure who had told my muscles to move. Another time, walking under trees heavy with late rain, I stopped and didn’t know why until the branch came down hard enough to crater the sidewalk where I would have been. I told a therapist about the feeling and she wrote it down as hypervigilance. She said a disorder like that is what happens to kids raised on the edge of someone else’s storm.

One night, my phone lit up on my nightstand. Eleven voice messages, my mother’s name on the screen like a match head. Most were sobbing that snapped into scream, then silence. Two were slurry, the words melting into each other. The last was different, half an hour after the rest—her voice low, as if she were talking from under a bed, or with a hand wrapped around her throat.

“He’s coming for you,” she whispered. “Your father… he came… specifically for you.”

I stared at the phone like there was a window in it. I hadn’t spoken to her in a year. Two. Time was a rope I’d cut behind me. I didn’t call back.

The next morning the hospital called. They said psychiatric ward, observation, intake. I should come collect her things. The nurse’s voice made no room for questions and folded them away for me.

“Sir,” she added, soft as a bruise, “at the house we found something… strange.”

I didn’t want to go back, but wanting hadn’t mattered much when I lived there. So I went, and the first inhale in that doorway was old wood that had learned to rot without collapsing. Her things were in a clear plastic tub. On top lay a photo where she was young and unruined, smile so open it hurt me to look at it. Under that, a journal thick with years and fingerprints, the leather worn thin at the corners. Beside it lay a feather the length of my forearm—black, heavy, a slick sheen along its barbs like oil on water. I touched it and felt something not temperature travel into my finger.

The walls of her room were scribbled with chalk and ash. Circles and letters with angles where there shouldn’t be angles. The largest drawing had wings and outstretched arms and the askew proportions that make saints frightening. The nurse said they’d been hidden behind furniture and posters when I was a kid. I believed her. Some knowledge congeals only when you’re old enough to do something about it.

That first night, I slept on the couch because the bed felt like a place things had happened in that weren’t my business. Sometime after two, I woke because the air in my mouth was cold. The window I had locked was open. On the sill, four parallel gouges. The marks were spaced like fingers. The skin between my shoulder blades tightened into a fist. From the guest room came a steady scratch-scratch, a metronome someone set with a knife. Not rats—the rhythm made human sense, had human patience. I lay awake until the light changed.

In the morning the journal was where I’d left it. When I picked it up, it felt warmer than a book should. It felt like something alive pretending to be paper, like a heartbeat where there shouldn’t be one. I opened to the first page because I was afraid of the last.

It began with me. A labor that lasted through three TV sermons and two bottles. The way she cried when she saw my eyes, the exact blue of a sky she felt watched by. She never wrote his name. She wrote Him, capitalized, as if the letter itself were a kneeling person. It slid from there, like a slope grew under the ink and the sentences found speed. Love letters to someone whose interactions were visitations, descriptions of light that hurt and beauty that terrified. Drawn diagrams for rituals I didn’t want to recognize—salt circles, mirror angles, words you were supposed to say out loud for doors to open.

He came to me again. Said he would take our son despite saying before he wouldn’t. He loves only me, and I should ascend with him.

The neighbors heard Him in the attic. They know who fathered my child. The grocer doesn’t look me in the eye.

He says he will come for our son soon. He promised I could go instead. Now he speaks in dreams of lineage, of duty. How could He do this? How could he choose him over me?

The last entry read: I won’t let Him take our son. I’ll do everything to stop Him.

I shut the book so hard my fingers stung. I tasted metal. The room tilted and took its time sliding back exactly where it had been, as if the house had to think about whether it wanted to cooperate.

That night I dreamed of wings. Not the clean cartoon of Sunday school. These were huge, and at the tips the feathers were black as if dipped in coal. Near the shoulders, the shafts shone gold the way certain beetles do when you turn them to the light. A voice like a damaged recording spoke my name.

“Michael.”

When I woke, I heard a thin whispering shiver across the floor. Feathers, I thought, with a certainty that didn’t feel like mine. There were no feathers. There was dust rising in small plumes where something invisible had moved. The smell in the house had changed—fresh cut grass and hot metal, and under it a sweetness that belonged in a kitchen and didn’t: cinnamon and char.

The dreams didn’t stop. They elaborated. The wings learned a body. The figure with outstretched arms learned to stand very still. Eyes learned to glow. The voice learned to say my name like it owned the syllables, like I was a word it had invented.

Then the things that happen in haunted houses began. Lights flicked and stayed on after I flipped them down. The TV clicked to life at three in the morning and filled the room with snow. Objects moved six inches left from where I’d set them. Deep grooves appeared in drywall. I wiped at my upper lip and my fingers came away red while my nose felt fine.

I went to a church because disbelief is a luxury you can afford only if the floor isn’t moving. The priest was old and kept a hand on the edge of the pew when he stood. He looked up as if he had felt me arrive. He didn’t smile.

“What brings you here, my son?”

“I need to know what to do if my father is an angel,” I said, and the sentence sounded idiotic and inevitable in equal parts.

He recoiled like I’d peeled a bandage off a wound he’d been pretending wasn’t there. He shut his prayer book, bones cracking like twigs in his knees. He studied my face too long. I felt seen in a way that bruised.

“Who told you that?”

“My mother. He’s coming into my dreams. I feel him through the mirror. I feel… different.” I tried not to say wrong. “I’m scared, Father.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and his palms were the temperature of stone under winter shade. “The angel you describe is not a messenger. Messenger is how we make them smaller so we can fit them in our heads. Some are older than language. Some were rejected by God not for failing, but for refusing to be less than they were made to be.” He exhaled. “If one of them is your father…”

He didn’t finish. His pupils shrank. He took his hands away and crossed himself like he was locking a door.

“You must reject him. Renounce. Do not call. Do not look at his face if he appears. Those beings want lineage the way fire wants oxygen. You will never be human again if you say yes.”

Something low under my ribs thrummed at the word again. It felt like an answer to a question I hadn’t known I’d asked.

After the church, the world slipped a gear. I blinked and feathers floated, and when I blinked again there was only dust. The mirror in the hall showed my reflection and, behind the curtain, another face with my cheekbones and no expression.

The hospital called to say cardiac arrest. They said it in a voice that had said it before. When I hung up, the house filled with those smells all at once—burned feathers, meat on a grill, cut grass, sour-sweet spice. I could have walked the rooms by scent alone. I did not have to. I stood very still and listened to my mother laugh and weep in the same breath.

“Michael, my beloved son,” she said in my ear, and the warmth of her breath on my cheek made the hair along my neck stand. “He’s proud of you. Your father finally took me with him. Don’t be afraid. He’ll take you too. We’ll be a family. You’ll have a role. Don’t fear—accept.”

Stomach acid burned my throat. I bent over and took the floor into my mouth. The smell thickened and clung to the inside of my nose. The rational part of me—the part that pays bills and checks stoves—thought hallucination. The animal part thought predator.

I ran for the door. The TV turned itself on.

Static filled the screen, but not random. It pulsed like a lung. The speaker hiss went loud-quiet, loud-quiet until my own breathing synced to it. The dots moved. They became a silhouette shaped by absence, then wings articulated like paper folded along perfect lines, then a head tilted at a human angle but wrong.

The image pushed. The glass warped the way ice does when weight settles on it. The screen bowed outward. The static folded up like a veil. A hand—if hand is the word for something long and jointed and tipped in black—pressed through the membrane of the screen and curled as if testing the air. It shone and it absorbed light at the same time. Nothing in the room had that property. Nothing should.

I stepped back into the coffee table. My shins hit wood and pain arrived in a way that felt antique and comforting: the old arithmetic of cause and effect. It didn’t help. The screen distended. The figure stepped out of the TV the way a birth happens in nightmare logic. We had a man-shape word for it because we don’t have a word that fits. He was tall and underfed-looking and wrapped in metal-bright wings that kindled, then dimmed. His face held mine like a mirror holds the idea of a face—recognizable but too precise, as if a surgeon had carved my features into something that would frighten me on purpose. When he spoke, it sounded like wind moving over a field of headstones.

“We are one family again, Michael.”

My body found an off switch. The floor came up in a soft black wave. When I returned, time had forgotten how to count. The bathroom tiles were cold through my shirt. There was blood on the grout where my mouth had pressed. I coughed and what came up looked darker than it should have. Something pulsed under my skin like a small animal in a sack. The mirror over the sink showed my eyes and they were mine, and then they were not. The pupils were wrong shapes, elongated like they were learning an earlier grammar. I turned my head and the mirror’s version of me did not turn at quite the same speed.

After that, the pain arrived like a visitor who no longer rang the bell. It did not announce itself with throbbing. It woke me with tearing. Something was working at the muscles in my back from the inside. The skin along my shoulders grew tender and refused to heal. I didn’t sleep because sleep is for warm animals. When I ate, the food tasted like ashes. My tongue blistered when I tried to speak prayers I didn’t believe in, and the skin sloughed off and rebuilt itself in seconds. It felt like being set on fire and made new over and over until the cycle taught me not to flinch.

Whispers collected in the house. Not words I knew—fragments of old prayers in languages my mouth wasn’t built for. They came from pipes, from the seam where the ceiling met the wall, from behind the mirror where the silver backed onto particleboard. Under the weave of them, a bass note: his voice, speaking my name the way a bell speaks a river valley.

“Michael. You were born for ascension. I existed before the flood scoured the names from the map. My ancient blood moves in you. You will have tasks. You will succeed. I am with you.”

The stubs broke skin two nights later. If you’re thinking of bird bones and delicate feathers unfurling, think again. Think of roots punching through sidewalk. Think of something old remembering a route through flesh it had used before. The first black quill pushed up and my body spasmed around it, not grief and not ecstasy. There isn’t a human word that is clean of metaphor for what it was.

He came again after that, and the room widened to make space for him. He showed me skies like copper set on fire and oceans that were not water but layers on layers of wings, beating. He showed me a throne made of eyes that didn’t blink. When he spoke, it was not voice but a choir stacked higher than architecture.

He said I would learn to walk between dimensions when the wings were grown.

He said two days.

My skin flaked like ash and new skin shone under it. My teeth loosened like children’s teeth and fell and grew back sharper, made for a food that didn’t exist in kitchens. The fear retreated into the cave of my body and went to sleep. Something else stood where it had been, something that felt like standing on the threshold of a building with no walls and watching the wind carry my name away and back. The air learned to bend around my shoulders as if to applaud what was coming.

I didn’t stop it. I don’t know if I could have. Maybe the priest was right and the only choice you get is refusal at the door. Maybe I was already inside.

On the second night, just before dawn began to soften the edges of the room, the mirror showed not only my face but faces behind mine. They hovered like reflections in layered glass—men and not-men with eyes like coins from empires that no longer exist, women with wings that had learned the shapes of weapons, beings for whom the pronouns I know are too blunt. They nodded. They did not smile. My mother stood among them, her cheeks wet and her mouth open in a joy I had never seen on it while she lived. I tried to say her name and the sound came out a cinder.

In that reflection I also saw him, my father, more clearly than any dream. The black at the tips of his wings drank the light like thirst. The bases glowed like hot metal hammered into shape by something that doesn’t use hammers. His face was still unkind to me, the way all true things are unkind, because they refuse to be smaller than themselves. He regarded me with a pride so fierce it felt like a blade sharpened on my bones.

The house held its breath. The seams in my skin along my shoulder blades bulged and split, and the world tilted as if to watch. The first wing tore free of me in a spill of heat and wet sound. I made a noise I could not have made two weeks before. The second wing followed, and the room filled with the smell of rain on dust and something like electricity made of thought.

I stood, bleeding and newly balanced, and the pain receded the way a tide recedes when it remembers the moon.

He reached out—not a hand, exactly, and also exactly—and the air between us tightened like a rope.

“Now,” he said. “Now you are ready.”

The glass of the TV shivered. The icons on the wall—Mary with her cracked face, the saints whose names I had never learned—seemed to tilt their heads to see what I would do. The priest’s warning sat on my tongue like an unspoken word. Under it, something older said amen and meant something else.

The house breathed in.

I breathed out.

And I stepped toward him.

—End of Part 1. 

 

Part 2 

When I stepped toward him, the room warped.
It wasn’t like a door closing or a curtain lifting—it was as if the geometry itself surrendered, folding and stretching in ways that made my stomach twist. Corners stretched into corridors. The ceiling arched upward into darkness. Every surface rippled faintly, as though reality had been submerged under water.

He didn’t move. His wings flexed in silence, the metal sheen rippling from root to tip. Each feather caught light from a source that wasn’t in the room. The air around him hummed at the edge of hearing, a chorus of voices layered so thick it was impossible to separate one from the other.

“Michael,” he said—my name in his voice was both command and benediction.
“Your blood remembers.”

The moment his eyes locked onto mine, my body stopped feeling like it was mine. I felt through him—saw flashes of impossible landscapes, skies burning in colors the human eye isn’t built for, towers of bone and glass rising from oceans of shadow, rivers of molten gold carrying screaming faces downstream.

And then I saw them.

They stepped from the folds of that strange geometry: other angels like him—like me, my blood whispered. Their shapes were too large for the room but the room obeyed them, stretching to accommodate each arrival. Their wings varied—some white and rotted, some shimmering like polished stone, some a forest of metallic quills. Their faces… some were human-beautiful, some were nothing but blinding light in the shape of a head, some were masks stretched over darkness.

They surrounded me in a perfect circle. I could feel the hum of their combined presence in my teeth.

“You are ours,” one voice said, though the mouth that spoke it didn’t move.
“You will ascend,” said another, from behind me.

I felt something coil tighter around my spine. My new wings flared open without my permission, the fresh wounds in my back weeping heat and strange fluid. My father stepped closer, his height eclipsing the light entirely.

“You are the first of a new choir,” he said.
“Your mother was only the vessel—your purpose is greater. I chose her because she would protect you until the blood in you woke.”

The mention of my mother sent a pang through me—of grief, of recognition. I glanced past him, and there she was, just outside the ring of angels. She looked as she had in her youngest photographs—bright-eyed, healthy, her hair shining. But her expression… it was devotion twisted into something that went deeper than love, something worshipful and unhinged.

She stepped forward, reaching for me.
“Michael,” she said, her voice trembling with joy. “He’s giving you everything. You’re going to walk where no mortal can. We’ll be together now, forever.”

The angels around us began to chant—not in unison, but in a braided pattern, their voices weaving into each other like strands of DNA. The sound went past my ears and into the meat of me. My thoughts slowed, syncing to their rhythm. Every syllable rewrote me.

Images filled my head—me walking between cities of light that hung in the void, kneeling before a throne made of eyes, speaking in languages that tasted like blood and salt. I saw my hands stretched over oceans, pulling storms together like threads. I saw faces bowing to me.

“Accept,” my father said. His eyes burned into mine.
“And you will never be prey again. You will be the hunter. You will be the judge. You will live beyond the death of the stars.”

My heart pounded so hard I thought it would tear itself free. The part of me that was still human fought to remember the priest’s warning: never look into his face, never accept. But my eyes were locked on his, and the longer I stared, the less that warning meant.

Something deep in my chest gave way.

I dropped to my knees.

The circle of angels closed in, their shadows swallowing me. My father’s hands—clawed, shimmering with both light and blackness—rested on my head. Heat poured into me, filling every vein, every hollow in my bones. My body arched involuntarily, my jaw opening in a sound that wasn’t a scream or a cry but a resonance that matched the choir’s pitch exactly.

When it ended, I collapsed forward onto my hands. My breathing was wrong—it was too steady, too deep. I realized I didn’t need to breathe at all. My wings twitched behind me, fully formed now, stretching far enough to brush both walls. The pain was gone, replaced with a sense of completeness so absolute it felt holy.

I looked up at my father. He was smiling.

“Rise, Michael,” he said. “Your ascension is complete.”

When I stood, the room was gone. We were on a plain of black glass that stretched forever. Above us, the sky churned with fire and shadow, vast shapes moving behind clouds that weren’t clouds at all. All around us, more angels descended—some I recognized from the circle, others so alien their forms hurt to comprehend.

They knelt. To me.

“You will lead them,” my father said.
“Your reign begins now.”

And in that moment, I understood what I had become—not a messenger, not a savior, but a thing the world would kneel to out of awe or terror. Maybe both.

My mother’s hand slid into mine. She was crying. “I told you,” she whispered. “I told you your father was an angel.”

I didn’t correct her.

Because now… I was, too.

And the bloodline will not end.

Amen.

END!