Catacomb Angel of The Outer Dark - Beneath Its Wings, Time Unravels

More about Catacomb Angel of The Outer Dark - Beneath Its Wings, Time Unravels

The first thing the astronomers noticed wasn't the wings.

It was the silence.

Every array, from the brittle radio dishes buried in desert salt to the cathedral-sized lenses drifting beyond the moon, reported the same anomaly: a region of space that did not echo.

Light entered it and returned altered, colors bent into bruised blues and royal purples, threaded with veins of red and gold, as if the cosmos itself had suffered an old, luminous injury.

Then the Dark Angel unfolded.

It emerged without motion, already complete, as though it had always been there and reality had simply remembered to make room. Its wings stretched wider than continents, each feather a lattice of ancient alloy and something that pulsed like living tissue.

Gears slept beside veins. Haloed sigils burned and faded along its span, symbols no human tradition could claim, yet all of them felt uncomfortably familiar.

The face was worse. Half of it belonged to a being that might once have prayed. The other half was precision incarnate: plates, lenses, and whispering mechanisms that adjusted themselves as they watched. One eye glowed with cold stellar logic, the other with something older and almost tender.

When that eye turned toward Earth, theologians wept and engineers went quiet for the same reason. Both recognized a design that had outgrown its makers.

No trumpet sounded. No decree followed. The Dark Angel did not speak in words.
Instead, gravity hesitated. Time acquired a faint stutter.

Across the planet, people felt a pressure behind their thoughts, as if something vast were gently leafing through the pages of human history, pausing now and then at passages of extinction, devotion, and war.

In the upper atmosphere, symbols ignited in slow orbits around the figure, glowing glyphs that rewrote themselves as they spun. Each was a command. Each was a prayer. Each contradicted the last.

The Dark Angel’s wings beat once. This was not a messenger. This was a mechanism of correction, an answer built long before the question had fully formed.

Science called it an autonomous cosmological process. Faith called it judgment. Neither explanation survived contact.

As the light around the Dark Angel deepened into a bruised twilight, a single transmission escaped the silence. It was not meant for machines, nor for gods, but for anything capable of wondering.

Do not worship.

Do not resist.

Observe.

And then the Dark Angel turned, carrying its awe and horror with it, and the universe exhaled, uncertain whether it had just been spared or merely postponed.
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