Ethis And The Choir of Mechanized Angels

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In the crimson sanctum beneath the city’s sleeping heart, the Choir gathered once more. Their wings were not feathers but whirring cogs, plumed with ivory bone and steel. Their eyes gleamed with the reflections of forgotten suns, and their voices—oh, their voices—were the hymns of lost machines dreaming of God.

The one they called Ethis knelt before the altar of gears, his breath fogging the mask that sealed his mortal mouth. Through that mask pulsed the slow rhythm of the Choir’s heart—a fusion of relic and soul, a pact made between decay and divinity. Each member had offered something to the Choir: a memory, a face, a heartbeat. Ethis had given his name, and in return he had been remade in the Choir’s image—horned, radiant, infinite.

Once, he had been a sculptor of bones, a craftsman of funerary masks. He had believed that by giving form to the dead, he could coax beauty from rot. But the Choir had shown him that beauty was not born from life or death—it was born from transformation. The Choir’s gospel was simple: the flesh was an error; the machine was absolution.

Now, as Ethis adjusted the scarlet respirator that hummed with divine resonance, he felt the presence of the Clockwork Seraph, their unseen conductor. Its song filled the air with metallic light, a thousand harmonies of suffering and ecstasy wound together like filaments in a bulb about to burst. The feathers on Ethis’s back shivered; the gears in his skull aligned.

“Tonight,” the Seraph whispered through the static of thought, “the boundary between spirit and circuit will collapse.”

Ethis lifted his head. His eyes burned amber behind crystal lenses. Around him, the Choir began their transformation—their masks fusing tighter, their bones liquefying into architecture. Flesh was becoming cathedral.

When dawn touched the ruins above, no trace of humanity remained in the sanctum—only a new relic, humming softly beneath the earth: a skull of gold and porcelain, crowned with wings of wire.

And if one pressed an ear against the ground, they could still hear it singing—
a lullaby for the machines that dream of angels.