Messenger of El burst like a ripe fruit struck with a hammer. Gobbets of its aura sprayed the walls, ceiling, and floor. Its head and upper body were gone altogether. The lower parts and the arms and wings lost coherence and drifted apart, settling in various parts of the cabin. The effect was somewhat like how it had been at Elkirk when Adam and Eve had stood in the lower chamber with many new souls, scattered about the place, barely holding themselves together. The stuff that angels were made of was brighter. Yet the fragments of it lacked the coherence even of new souls, so powerfully had the blow dealt by Cairn disrupted Messenger of El’s form. Scarce any part of the cabin’s interior had gone unspattered, and the whole place was alight with the fizzing and fluctuating shine of the angel’s aura. Adam reached out to comfort the six of the infants who had come under the knife, then drew his hand back as he noticed that it had been spattered. As he gazed in fascination at the gobbet of aura on the back of his hand, the stuff spread out and melted into his flesh, which glowed. This presently faded but he could feel something new coursing up his arm and into his chest, whence it spread through his body, making his head swim and his extremities tingle. He reached out again, this time to steady himself on the table where Messenger of El had done the cutting. The little boy lying before him had stopped crying. Patches of angel-stuff were soaking into him, setting most of his body aglow, and Adam could only assume that the boy was experiencing similar sensations.

Eve was up on her feet, gathering handfuls of it from places where it had spattered on the floor or the walls. Much of it had sunk into the earth. Adam fancied that the ground was shifting under his feet, though perhaps this was just the result of Cairn shambling out the door.

Cairn’s rough form was silhouetted by a brilliant light, which caused Adam a moment’s fear that more angels were coming, but when Cairn stepped aside, revealed was Walksfar, approaching the cabin holding the sword that the angel had left leaning against the tree. This had reverted to its original radiant form. “I did not expect that today was going to end with us in a fight with angels,” said Walksfar, “but if that is the case, Thingor would want us to make use of this.”

The talk of fighting was more than Adam wished to hear and so he turned his back to see how matters now stood in the cabin. Most of the angel-stuff was gone, for it was too chaotic and volatile to linger for very long in any one place without an organizing soul to keep it collected. But what had not disappeared yet Eve was scooping up and applying to the infants’ bodies as if it were a balm. Seeing the way Adam looked on her she said, “The more of it is in us, the less is there for the use of El or any of his minions.”