It's December 31st 2004, just a few minutes before it's midnight, and we get to January 1st 2005. Just a few minutes before fireworks explode in the sky to celebrate the new year and the birthdays of millions of Koreans, as my father gives out his last breath. It really is the night he died. We really are back in time. And I really am seeing the silhouette of my dad stuck inside a car turned upside down. The silhouette of my own young body lying on the floor.
I really am back to a moment I've tried to forget so hard. And I only realize now that I've actually never even remembered it correctly.
Because from what I knew, I'd been found inside the car, that day, barely scratched. Yet, the more the convertible gets close to the accident site, the angels nearby and my body on that day, the more I see clearly that the small glass that was supposed to be the thing that caused my left eye a temporary blindness that healed was, in reality, a bigger piece of the shattered window stuck deeper and going all the way to my forehead. Yet, I barely have a scar on it, and neither do I have any on my arms and my legs, although the skin on them has been scraped off because of the friction with the ground from what I can see now. My knee has been fractured in such a way that my right leg is standing in an odd position and the rest of my body is covered in deep wounds I can see through my ripped clothes.
Why?
Why did I live until this moment I had a second car accident in my life?
Why didn't I just die in the first place?
Because the little girl I'm looking at, the one who hasn't put on her safety belt that night... she's not alive. The light has left her eyes for some time. She's now staring at me, her mouth still wide open to let out blood.
"Why are you showing me this?" I can't look at the... thing driving the car, next to me. Not ever since it's completely turned into a talking skeleton covered in a large black cloak, whose empty eyes are made of a black pit that's threatening to swallow me whole if I stare at it, all the more terrifying when I can see, from the corner of my eye, its big mouth stretching as he laughs, showing its tiny teeth looking like they're a thousand.
"I have this habit of showing instead of telling the answers to questions before they can be asked." Its hoarse voice, softly spoken but dautingly clear, quietly penetrates my skin and raises the hair on my dead arms, showing me, one more time, its presence is the only thing that can make my body believe I'm still alive. "When you've been in existence as long as I have, beings you meet become too predictable and their questions just lose that little savor of mystery. Of course, I could be a boring one and do a whole melodramatic speech to explain to you everything that's happening and find new ways to brag about my own capabilities and powers and how eloquent I am and sure, I would have had more screen time too and... wait, why didn't I just do that? I just lost a great shot to make a big speech! You know what? Next time, I'm waiting for the questions before showing the answers. Ha! If there is a next time. Ooouh, I can already taste the sweet retirement coming my way. You'll understand what I mean soon."
"What—What are you? An angel? A demon? Some kind of deity?"
"Oh, dear, I'm something beyond that. As you are."
Our car gets close enough to my father's for me to catch a glimpse of his unconscious and wounded face, so I twist my head to the other side to avoid it. Because that view alone would convince me to open the door and jump out of the car despite the warning that there would be no coming back from wherever I would arrive.
Fortunately, the headlights of the cars in stop, reflecting through Gabriel's spear, catch my eyes in a blinding glimpse. I focus on it as the smiling angel makes his way, still flying but close to the ground, to Samael who remains on his knees, breathing through his nose as rain keeps falling on both of them like it does on my body and my dad's.
"You could have had everything... but now look at you." Gabriel's smooth and harmonic voice sounds like an ethereal melody coming from another realm, at odds with the dreadful situation we're in, highlighting all the more that alarming aura he has all over him as he readies himself to kill his own brother with the most charming and naive face and the most smooth-looking hands someone could have. "Pathetic." He smiles one more time as he rolls that word on his tongue, spitting it on the stern face of his Samael.
The latest doesn't say a thing. He keeps looking at the ground, breathing through his nose, shaking because of the cold rain or of what's awaiting him, I don't know.
But as time slows down for a second time, I do manage to differentiate the rain drops soaking him from the single tear rolling off his cheek and falling on the ground, the moment Gabriel's wings stretch to the back with his slim body. His hand raises the spear high in the air to let the light hit the blood on it, giving it a clearer shade. He pulls it down in a shot with a terrible scream, but as the spike of the spear was about to dig deep into Samael's flesh, something arises from the shadows. The next moment, Gabriel is pushed to the other side, his body stretching inwards as his face slowly distorts into an expression of pain, and feathers of his wing and their golden trails fly in the air.
When his slim body hits the ground, time suddenly goes back to normal, and I can finally make out the silhouette of the person who's came out of the shadows to push him, now standing still with his back turned to Samael. His deadly gaze is fixated on Gabriel who tries to get up in grunts of pain, the corner of his forehead bleeding.
And holy shit... here I was, thinking I couldn't see anything more grim than literal Death sitting right next to me, yet this man standing there proves to me that I shouldn't be so sure of anything at all with these people.
His skin is slightly tanned, oddly rough and made of small marks of laceration and healed scars disrupting the well drawn features of his hatchet face, the most apparent wound being the burnt skin of his entirely closed right eye, partially covered up by his black fringe styled in a traditional Korean way. It leaves me to see only the black iris of his left eye, looking up Gabriel in such a way, I fear he can tear him apart with his stern yet deadly stare only, while his face doesn't even distort to express any kind of emotion. His highly tall and well-built body is dressed in a white shirt, slightly open on top to reveal the beginning of his scorched skin, a sign that the rest of his body has even deeper lesions than his face and that's probably why his hands are covered in black gloves. He remains still and expressionless even as Gabriel now gets back on his feet, breathing loudly and grunting in anger, making me fear what he's about to do.
But my distress has less to do with his face than the first thing you could possibly look at when you see him : the wings in his back, stretching so high in the sky, it's making me dizzy. Yet, it doesn't draw attention for the same reason Gabriel's immaculate and flawless ones do.
His wings are as white as Gabriel's, but that's precisely why it distraughts me all the more, because it's painfully obvious that some parts are more vacant than others, showing he's lost some feathers that can probably never grow back (if it even does to begin with). These areas have been deeply burnt, so much so that at some spots, there are half-cut roots of some feathers, while at others, I can see all the way to his scaled back, with his bones being slightly exposed because of the thin veil of skin he was left with. That sight alone could have made me throw up if I could.
How could an angel look like this? When I picture the ones depicted in religious texts, I can only see people like Gabriel and even Samael, who, except for some small cuts here and there on his face, probably because he fought to run all the way here, is flawless. Even that man is looking as perfect as his brothers when you take away his injuries. But that's the thing : you can't ignore those injuries. They've become a part of his aura, taking up all the space to suffocate me as he keeps remaining still, even now that Gabriel has taken back his spear and is stretching his wings, obviously readying himself to jump forward to attack him.
"Get out of the way!" Gabriel's loud voice makes the cars around us shake a bit, with only ours staying unaffectionate. "He's my prisoner!"
Gabriel spreads his wings the further he can and takes a few steps. Time slows down the moment his feet take off the ground as he darts on the man, his spear high in the air.
"Be very intelligent when you pick fights with any being that's threatening you," I jump off my seat when I hear the thing talk to me with a different voice.
When I turn my head to face it, I find it back to a human form, with the same exact features and hair color as earlier. Except that this time, they belong to a woman's face.
She smiles, showing her perfectly white teeth. "Humans or demons don't pose a serious threat if they don't have the right weapons and knowledge. But angels are the closer that can get to beings like me and to what you'll soon become. They can be a real danger, especially the most ancient ones like those three." She tilts her head at the scene right before me, still slow in time with Gabriel getting closer to the unknown angel still besides Samael, and still motionless. "Most of them will think the same of you once you get more experience like me. At that time, you might even be able to win against angels like Gabriel who love to put on a show whenever they have an occasion. But no matter what you do, no matter how old you get, no matter who you fought previously, don't do anything if you ever have to face him."
She points her perfectly manicured black nail at the third angel, whose clothes and hair quiver at the wind provoked by Gabriel's wings as he is now mere inches from him. He stands straight while he takes off one of his gloves, to reveal a perfectly normal hand, unlike what I expected given the injuries on his body.
He suddenly stretches it in front of him.
And at that moment, the wind coming his way starts going in the opposite way, to push back Gabriel. He gets his feet back on the ground to anchor himself, as he tries to resist with his wings. He tries stretching his spear forward to hit the other angel, but as his hand gets closer to the third angel, the wind suddenly starts to rip his skin, first leaving the fresh red flesh on the tip of his fingers, then going all the way to his arm, his shoulder, his face, his torso and soon, his whole body. He gets on his knees, folding up, as his dreadful screams of pain rip apart the deadly silence in the air and mine die in my throat, my hand covering my mouth. Even if I know I'm in the middle of a flashback, I fear that the third angel might hear me if I make the slightest noise.
As the wind starts blowing less and less and Gabriel's screams die out to leave him laying on the ground, unconscious, the third angel lets his arm fall back on the side. He doesn't even grunt in pain as he gets on his glove again, not even when the material rubs his own hand turned skinless after what he did to his brother.
"Did he—did he... did he die?" I hold on harder to the door handle, turning my head everytime I come across Gabriel's skinless and unconscious body.
"Who? Gabriel? That drama queen won't dare to leave this universe without a grand exit! It took him some time, but he regenerated after that, recovering his flawless beauty and his big mouth that talks and brags too much. You need to attack an angel's internal organs with some very special weapons in order to kill him. Their biological functions don't work the same way : their cells regenerate themselves, so they recover from external injuries. That's why they're immortal unless their death is provoked by some external cause, most of the time that external cause is another angel."
"But, that guy, he has scars and wounds everywhere on his body! He's an angel too, right?"
"Those wounds you see all over him will last forever as will his burden."
"What do you mean?"
"Azrael is the ultimate gatekeeper of the orderly chaos the universe is."
Azrael.
The angel of death in Abrahamic religions.
He's still standing there, barely seems to breathe, as he slowly turns to face Samael, who hasn't even moved an inch while staring at the ground. Yet it takes one quick head sign from Azrael for him to get back on his feet and start running far away from there, without looking back.
Only then does Azrael start walking under the rain to get past his unconscious body and start approaching... my dad and I.
"I don't... I don't understand." I blurt out, as I keep following him with my eyes to watch him stop near my young body and crouch next to it.
"Chaos, Soo-jin! Figuratively speaking, the universe is a chaotic system. When you apply the chaos theory to the universe, the tiniest of changes in the path you've chosen can lead you to unpredictable results. And if you're off by even the tiniest bit, you'll have no idea what the system is doing! Let's say you're at an intersection and you have to choose between one short but sharp slope and one flat but long road that will both lead you to your house, in the end. If you decide to take the slope, you will choose path A and encounter outcomes A. If you go on the road, you will choose path B and encounter outcomes B. There might not be a big difference between taking the sharp slope or the long road, since they both lead you to your house in the end, but in reality, the chain of events you've provoked by choosing one path or the other are drastically different and highly unpredictable. While it may seem like a random complex system, you can actually find an underlying self-organization with a large number of elements interwoven and mutually interacting. You wouldn't have had to make the decision between those two paths if earlier in your life, you hadn't chosen to live in that precise house you're trying to get to. Life then becomes an infinite amount of possible cause and effect trees. It's an orderly chaos."
"Is that fate?"
"Fate is a deterministic force and, most importantly, a belief system. And chaos is only deterministic in the sense that no matter the chains of effect you live by, whether they're predetermined by some kind of ethereal force or not, your existence as you know it will ultimately come to an end. In that sense, I'm the ultimate chaotic order. There is no pattern to death, no discernable regularity, I don't "choose" you based on any logic, I simply happen, yet I'm part of the ultimate order of existence itself. You may exist in another form, but that will never be the same as the existence you led on a quantum level. You are standing next to me as Soo-jin, who died not even an hour ago, yet you're already leading a new existence, the old one ending the moment you clinically died. Even more so, it ended one time the moment you clinically died for the first time."
"But what do you mean when you say Azrael is the gatekeeper of the orderly chaos?" He's still inspecting my body, barely moving, yet even from this distance, I can feel that his gaze is thorough.
"Let's see... some choices in their causality trees have led humans Kim Mi-ran and Mun Dong-il to meet each other, get married, have two daughters and sign up their youngest daughter, human Mun Soo-jin, to a school. Human Sung Il-hwa also had a daughter at some point in her life named human Kim Cho-Hee and decided to sign her up to the same school. The girls met because they both ended up at the school infirmary somehow, became friends, and on December 31st 2004, Cho-Hee begged her friend Soo-jin to come and spend some time with her and go back to her own house to celebrate New Year's with her family. But because they decided to do one more round of yut nori, it was too late to take the bus, so Soo-jin called her father Dong-il to pick her up. It was raining, they got stuck in the traffic and the moment they came to that exact spot on the highway was the moment human Cheon Sang Kyu, an insurance company worker, drove there too. He started working at that company because of the choices he made earlier in his life, leading him to that causality tree, and that day, he decided to work late because he had nobody to spend New Year's with anyway. He was then too tired while driving back home, fell asleep behind the wheel, and boum, accident : Mun Soo-jin and Mun Dong-il both died that night. Now, let's say that the insurance company worker was driving there that night, but he hit the father and the little girl's car because earlier in his life, angel Samael decided to not partake in a war against his own siblings, became a fugitive, and long years of runaway brought him all the way to Seoul on the last night of 2004 and have angel Gabriel run after him to kill him. In order to not let him go away, Gabriel knowingly spread his wings to disrupt the drivers on the highway and provoke a chain accident to block Samael's way, making Cheon Sang Kyu hit Mun Soo-jin and Mun Dong-il's car. Boum, they're dead. Do you see the difference?"
"The accident that night was provoked by something external that forced the driver to unintentionally kill us."
"Even more precisely, two humans died that night because of two angels. Two categories of beings that have been created from the Alpha like all things in this universe, including the universe itself, and that will both end up in the Omega like all things do. But nevertheless, they are from two different categories of beings that are supposed to exist in different planes of existence independent of one another. Meaning the causality tree that's been created because of the implication of two angels in the death of two humans wasn't even an option among the infinite and unpredictable outcomes of the chaos theory. It was an unnatural orderly chaos provoking the irreversible ending of two existences. And that's what gives most beings that deal with death a headache. So Azrael's role and eternal burden is to prevent something like that happening, because it'll be exactly the same if a human provoked the death of a demon, or if a ghost drastically changed something in the chain of events of an angel's life leading him to die. Beings of different planes of existence can't meddle with each other. Otherwise the universe gets very... itchy. It starts to do everything in its capacity to give back a proper order to the unnatural chaos. And the extent of things it can do to be effective... believe me, you don't even want to know."
"But what happens when things like that happen?"
"Retribution happens."
When I spin my head back at the accident site, I suddenly realize that there's now another figure standing right behind Azrael, that I got to know very well this past hour : Death itself. As I look at her present version sitting right next to me, her lips stretch in that same smirk her past version is presenting to the angel, now looking at her too.
"Well, well, well!" her past version screams, too excitedly given the context. "You ripped Gabriel's skin to let Samael go? That's a sort of sibling loyalty I never thought I would see from you, Azrael! You're still on the angels' side, right? You didn't suddenly decide to join the Fallen ones, right?"
"I'm on the universe's side." I open my mouth in disbelief as I hear Azrael's voice for the first time, distraught by how deep but soft it sounds when compared to the image he's giving off. "Gabriel can't have what he wants after causing a disaster like this. That was retribution on behalf of everything unnatural he's set in motion in the universe."
"Then what about retribution for these two humans?"
Azrael sighs when he gets up, giving off what's probably his first real emotion of the night. He doesn't immediately answer the question, and takes his time to get closer to my dad, still inside that car, to analyze him for a while, with emotionless eyes.
When he finally talks, he barely looks at Death.
"Give up on him."