The burst of a two-ton shell, hurling steel and mud skyward, was a beautiful thing, in reflection. At least, in the eyes of Corporal Lockwood, as long as it remained still, fragments and particles glimmering in mid-air like the men frozen across the pockmarked field. This close, with the flash of muzzles caught like moths in amber, they looked... human, even, the downturned bowl of their helmets the only difference, really, amid all the gray-brown muck of the war.

Perhaps there's something about the nature of being so sure it comes close to being determined, that one's about to die, something that makes the world seem brighter, slower, like a ripple on an iced-over pond. Perhaps, Lockwood reflected, as he coughed into the still air, this was the moment of his death. Perhaps he was doomed to wander, tracing the lines of machine-gun fire with his fingertips - there, one was hanging in the air, the little mote of lead already half-flattened in its path - and this was all there was, until the sun faded out.

But no, there were no marks on him, as far as he could tell, his hands checking his pockets absentmindedly for the letter, for his cigarettes, for the puncture of lead and bone. Nothing but the sodden cloth of his uniform, the same as all the other poor bastards stuck in mid-fall behind him.

For a while, it was all he could do to wander and wonder, the silent world swallowing up even his footfalls. Over the lines, where the other lot had their little tents and scraps of normalcy, photographs pinned to a sniper's parapet and letters in a foreign hand tucked hastily away in a box of mud-soaked cigars. Even the sky looked the same, over there, with great black flowers blooming with hate at their center, flames stilled in their licking out from inside clouds of cordite smoke.

There was, though, the song. Lilting and unceasing, a low, smoky rise and fall that slipped its fingers around the heart of anyone listening. Not in any tongue the corporal could understand - theirs, his; it didn't matter. It was a song he knew in his bones, even if his heart and head didn't, and soon enough, his feet followed the tune in slow, dragging stamps through the red-laced mud.

Here there was a bird, its wings mid-beat, and there a cloud of flies, their buzzing humming in his mind for a moment as it filled in the gaps.

A few steps more, and there, sitting in the air above a shell-crater, was the angel. Raiments in the color of blood, scarlet that seemed to flicker despite the sun's dead rays, sheathed her, and where she gazed, the air itself seemed to shimmer and bend. Hair with a hue like ice flowed around her, and in one pale hand sat a sphere of lead; in the other, one of steel.

Above her, hanging in the air, was a halo that didn't seem to glimmer or glow, nor do anything much but hang there, like a dead thing, the thin strands of wire that made it up pricked by twists and barbs.

Corporal Lockwood had eyes, like any man, a brown that had turned to rust in the mirror. The angel did not, not in the way that anything born on earth had. Black. Just black, her face like a statue except for the windows, like the hollows between stars, that swept across the landscape and came to rest, as it were, on the man before her.

And the angel smiled.