Destroying Angels
Destroying Angels The Underworld’s bureaucrat-assassins. Grandmother Possum takes especially promising paper-pushers and breathes a legacy into their eyes, which germinates in their orderly minds and blooms into a fruiting chaos through their mouths and ears and nostrils and empty eye sockets, encasing their whole head like a fungal rocket ship. Then they hone themselves for 7 years, fighting the rattling cold in cages made of razors, wrestling jaguars made from dead pets to bone-deep blood-soaked exhaustion, until their minds break sharp and clear and perfect, and the legacy chokes on them, burning to a char-black bramble cage. They smell like sweat and charcoal. They sound like like a phone call from a submarine. They’re the ultimate enforcers of the Underworld’s order: To every life, a name. For each name, a life. To every name, a soul. For each soul, a name. To every soul, a death. For each death, a soul. Most violations of this