The Church and the Angel

	At evening service, aside the pulpit where your speaker listens so carefully and so keenly for the sparse and often portentous utterings of your creator, you stand guard.

	Each service was relatively the same. The Well rarely had anything to say, and each time it did, predictably, a mess of speculation ended in nothing in particular. It was hardly even coherent, and you had even begun to suspect that what they hear is not a message from your god, but merely the incoherent thoughts passing through its so close-by mind. Still, it was good to listen closely; it was what brought you all into this world, after all, and it deserved your attention.

	Under colorful stained-glass light, the Well’s mouthpiece spoke; a strange creature, adorned in flowing, pitch dark clothing and a plain white mask that hid every trace of their previous identity. Supposedly, they had been appointed by the Well itself, having survived a plunge directly into the ichor and graced, thus, with a divine insight into its desires and thoughts. As everything, you’d grown skeptical; to you, they seemed a desperate attempt to make sense of an often inscrutable deity.

	Still, you are patient. You can’t help but find it all strange, being unable to suspend your disbelief like your comrades, but it’s hardly your place to tell others what to believe. You’re just a guard; a clergy guard, perhaps, but still just a guard. Under that dancing liquid starlight, though, you come to understand why things happen as they do. You see a crowd of people, hanging on every word that the Speaker says, smiling and comfortable in the reality they inhabit.

	Unbeknownst to your analytical mind, however, is that it is not meant to be.

	The clamor of battle strikes through the heart of reverent silence in your church, as the dimness of the ichorous starlight filtering in through the gorgeous stained glass transitions swiftly from cozy to ominous. You rush to the grand door separating this place of worship from the rest of your little kingdom. You can hear worried murmurings and shifting as people look tensely at the door, but you are poised and ready for whatever it is, your heavy, gilded blade hefted in two hands.

	Well… you thought you were, anyway.

	The doors are thrown open by a blast of force that sends you reeling, your blade clattering to the floor. As the dust settles and you are permitted a gaze at the intruder, your eyes burn and your skull buzzes. All at once, it’s like a thousand little tendrils of horrible, jagged noise squeeze into your eyesockets and burrow into your head, as the form of something consummately alien looms over you.

	It wastes no time, strutting into the room as if with intractable confidence and worriless grace. It is a dark figure, a withered, willowy silhouette of empty space crowned with a blazing fire of interminable visual noise, its otherwise faceless skull blossoming into an array of ever-shifting eldritch patterns that drowns all other stimuli in the room, each and every dart of the eyes or blink wringing a whole new, dizzying picture from it. You can see its distorted, colorful interference winding through the room even when you manage to wrench your gaze from it. In its hand is a long, thin and incredibly sharp blade.

	Your first instinct was to reach for your sword, but all but the most base instinct is ripped from your soul the moment you gaze into this… thing. You are not its first target, as instead it breaks into a flurry of motion. The wretched noise, a sharp and irregular ringing, almost silences the screams that its strikes and horrid form elicit. As others scramble over the pews and try in vain to weave between its strikes and reach safety, you have forgotten your role as a guard. There is obviously no denying this thing whatever blood debt it has come to settle.

	No, you opt to save yourself. Carefully, you stay low to the ground, already near the pulpit as you start to crawl away. In the dark of the room and amongst all of its other targets, it has yet to notice you or come to realize that you were not slain by its dramatic entrance, and so you make it behind the pulpit.

	There.

	The Well.

	Just below the surface, at the lowest point in your kingdom, it waits. The thickest, most potent ichor of all, the layer of insulation that protects you and your ilk from the unfettered power of something incomprehensible. A carefully guarded circle cut into the floor grants access to it, a port meant for listening to its strained mutterings. Only a fool would dare to reach into it, for its ichor would surely rend anyone apart and scatter their soul infinitely thin among the dimensional sludge.

	The devil approaches you, the last of its marks in this room. It calmly steps up over the pulpit, and sees you teetering on the edge of this darkened pit. It hefts its sword into the air, and you make your decision; you would rather die in the Well’s embrace than pinned to the ground by alien steel.

	You cast yourself into the dark, the last of yourself slipping past the threshold as you hear the blade thump into the ground. You turn as you seemingly free-fall, catching a glimpse of that creature’s visage peering into the ichor.

	You land.

	You feel your body hit heavy, thick fluid, like tar. All at once, eternity blossoms around you; the darkness fills out with a billion stars, glimmering and enveloping you and drowning out that horrible noise with healing, beautiful silence. The stellar tar drags you below, tendrils of something more than the ichor dragging you down.

	You feel an embrace. Under most circumstances, the ichor would have torn you clear apart before you could even realize what had happened; but here, under the auspices of what you can only assume is the Well’s loving presence, you feel a warm, conscious grasp around you, the star-sludge winding around your limbs and just holding you tight. Everything is perfectly silent; all you can hear is your staccato heartbeat reaching up into your ears, your ragged, panicked breathing, every tiny little movement that nudges the ichor about.

	It is there. You can feel it.

	It writhes, subtly, even deeper. It holds onto you almost desperately, as if afraid that at any moment you will be torn from its clutches. You stay as still as you can, you regulate your breathing, and you try to calm yourself, in the hopes that it will resonate with it. Above you, distant now, you see the gate; slowly, tendrils of starlight begin to subsume it, until the only light in your world is that which dances among the ichor.

	…

	You come to.

	The church is empty. The pews are scattered, the blood is still there, but all of the corpses are gone. You stagger to your feet, leaning against the lectern and looking out over the grandly empty hall.

	You spend some time investigating. You wander through the kingdom, to the castle just a short walk from the church, each and every path marred with signs of fruitless struggle. You walk into the courtyard amongst a vibrant collection of plants, each one having been gifted to the kingdom as signs of good will from the Well, their seeds bubbling from below the ichor. The pale grass is stained visibly with patches of black blood, but nowhere do you see any remains.

 	You visit the throne room, constructed of cozy, rich wood and adorned with colorful banners and rugs. The remnants of a banquet are scattered about, tables thrown over for cover and a thick stain of pitch blood over the throne centered around a small, slender hole in the fabric of its back. There is nowhere that does not tell the same story; the same spatters of black blood, no sign of victory no matter how small. You are here, alone.

	You find yourself circling back to the church, where the connection with the Well is greatest. You kneel in silence by the pit, your fingers dancing along its edge as if expecting something to reach out and take your hand. You wait, and you wait, dangling your arm all the way into it…

	and feel a few starlight fingers grace your palm, and lock with yours.