Divinity

Chapter 20

"Travis?" I gasped, shaking my head in disbelief. "How are you.... why are you... here? How are you alive?"

He stood before me, his dark eyes twinkling as though they housed tears - his stance was rigid, his head bowed. He was sad, deeply so, I could tell just from one look at him. 

"I'm not." He replied, looking down to the ground intently. "Not really." I had to resist the urge to run to him and hug him as tightly as I could (whether he was truly alive or not didn't matter, it didn't change the fact that he was here). He seemed so real, and so familiar - but this could be a trick. There were plenty of powerful people that wanted me dead, it wouldn't be surprising for them to go to extreme lengths to do so. 

"Is it... is it really you?" Did I even dare to think that this was real? That Travis might truly be standing before me? 

"Yes." He nodded. "It is." It shouldn't have been enough to convince me - in truth, it wasn't. But there was some instinct inside of me, something assuring me that this was real, he was here, and he needed my help. 

"I'm so sorry." I spoke quickly, like the words would burn my mouth if they were kept inside any longer. "It was all my fault, I can't tell you how sorry I am! I wish I'd never gone near the sword-"

"Don't be ridiculous." He cut in, though his tone was gentle, reassuring. "The sword was calling to you, for many reasons. No one could expect you to resist that for longer than you did."

"What does that mean?" I asked, confused. The sword was calling to me? Yes... it had been recently, but... this entire time? It was true that I had felt a need to find it, to do something with it, surely that was my own mind, not the sword calling me from afar. 

"There are so many secrets hidden in that sword." He gestured to the weapon in my hand. "Answers to questions I had never even thought to ask. It is far more than we ever thought it was, and now I know everything."

"Everything?" I echoed, wondering what he meant. "What do you know?"

"The sword doesn't just take lives, it keeps them." He explained. I shook my head, still not understanding. "Every angel it has ever killed, it took a piece of them. It took their soul, and kept it. The lives of those angels have been trapped within the sword ever since, that includes me."

I looked down at the blade feeling newly cautious. could that be true? How many hundreds, if not thousands, of lives has this sword taken? How many souls have been trapped within it, since the beginning of time? "What does it mean, to be trapped within the sword?"

"It's like a whole other world in there. A small one, but still. Cut off from the rest of the world, we only knew what was happening to the sword, nothing outside of that. We have each other, but the same, sad faces day on and day out gets tiresome. There are hundreds of souls within the blade. It tried to trap yours too." He commented, "But it couldn't."

"Why?" I looked up at him with furrowed brows, "Why couldn't it kill me?" 

"The sword has no effect on humans, it can only trap an angel. The sword was only able to take one half of you - your angel side. It split you into two pieces, one remained within you, the other within the sword." He paused for thought, "The sword didn't like that. You can't truly split a person, not really. Those two sides will fight to find each other. It wasn't the sword calling out to you, it was yourself."

"You say the sword didn't like that... but it's made for a Nephilim, for someone like me." I lifted up the blade so that I could see the foreign scripture written along it. "Half and half, the steel assents. Expulsion and admittance. Recompense, the graze of bruise - it's an instruction, telling a Nephilim how to get back their powers. Why would it say that, if it wasn't supposed to attempt to kill a Nephilim?"