Ariel

I awoke with the memory of sweet scent and a chill wind against my bare chest. The rocky ground I had lain on was warm where my body had made contact. Wiping the sleep from my eyes I looked around the scorched surroundings, remembering how decimated this world was when we first arrived. I then realised that she was no longer with me. My eyes scanned the barren land in search for the white lady. Her glow could be seen for miles but the horizon remained a sooty red. Red, like blood. The effect of the devastation that had blasted this world into total ecological collapse. No life could be found anywhere on the planet, no life could ever survive in such an environment. This world will remain dead for all of eternity.

Wearing only a pair of tattered jeans, I can stand on the frozen surface without feeling any of the harsh elements that would kill a mortal man in seconds. I am the only sole survivor of a once stubborn and greedy race. Humans. By pure luck I survived the Armageddon that had wiped out the rest of my kind.

I had been working as a janitor at a medical facility that was researching some radical new medical treatment. They were assured it would make anyone completely immune to nearly all forms of disease. It worked by strengthening the outer protein wall of all the cells in the body and reprogramming their DNA structure to adapt to any new disease they might encounter. It was administered by an injection then activated by bombarding the entire body with some sort of safe radioactive wave.

I had inadvertently volunteered for the first test run by walking into the room where they were discussing about who they would test this new treatment on. They asked me in passing as I emptied the bin if I was up to being their guinea pig. I shrugged and replied: "Why not?"

I wouldn't have said anything if I had known that their funding was being cut if no new breakthrough was presented. So I was marched to the bombardment room three days later, still scratching at the shoulder they had injected the serum into me an hour after I had agreed into testing the procedure.

Lying on the bed I waited for the gigantic machine that surrounded my body to finish it's sequence. It was then that a war had begun and an atomic bomb fell on the city some 20 kilometres away. The shockwave ripped through the facility like it was made of paper, completely destroying it. What had saved me was the machine, acting like an armoured shell and protecting me from the majority of the devastating blast.

Counting my luck I crawled up to see what had happened, taking in great breaths of scorched air. Looking out towards ground zero I realised that the nuclear down fall would kill me in hours. So I waited, not knowing that the core of the machine had leaked, radiating me with its steady flow of strange rays.

A few days later I walked out of the blasted creator, the cuts and bruises I had received had completely healed. The treatment had worked, although to a degree that was far beyond what the scientists had ever hoped for. My body was invincible, no matter what kind of damage that was dealt, it would rapidly heal itself and leaving no trace of it ever been touched. I also found that my body needed little or no sustenance, the cells feeding off the nutrients from the very air itself! I was amazed at how much my body could take.

But I couldn't test myself completely for the war had dug its claws into the citizens of this world. I never knew who started it all, but I did know how it ended. Every country, believing the other had fired the first shot, retaliated with their own deadly arsenal.

Within a week, Earth's had lost 80% of its population. The surviving strands of humanity slowly died out less then half a generation later. With the atomic attacks pounding its surface, the world fought back, sending radioactive dust high into the atmosphere and scattering it on erratic winds. What had once been fertile land became a deserts of radioactive dust, quickly killing plants and animals. The sun was blanked out behind a choked sky and the weather became unpredictable and cold. A perpetual winter cursed the surface, killing millions in just one year.

My enhanced body survived the onslaught that the dying world had cast, suffice to say I felt every pain I received in such a climate. Wandering through the bleak and ruined terrain of a forgotten country, I had found the last human half frozen and driven completely mad by hunger and cold in the shelter of a ruined building. He was a boy of about twelve years and from his inane babbling I deduced he was the survivor of a desperate caravan of eight searching for food.

One by one they all died until he was left alone, cold and half dead from malnutrition to wander aimlessly on the dead surface. And now he was following those last survivors into the blissful sleep of oblivion and I watched as I held him in my arms as his eyes closed for the last time, never to open again.

I never mourned for the loss of humanity, instead I blamed its destruction on itself. Humans as a whole had always been a stupid race. Arrogant, selfish and completely lacking in self preservation, it had started the fatal wheel of genocide with the production of weapons of mass destruction.

How I loathed at being who I was and tried without success to end my life numerous times. But my cursed body stubbornly healed and replenished itself, making me a solitary god and forcing me to wander without reason over a dead planet.

Countless years passed and my body still refused to relent, suspending my ageing process indefinitely and keeping me alive in a place that held no value for me. One day as I wondered, more for the act of moving then any other reason, I saw something streak across the sky, leaving a flaming path in its wake and landed some distance away with an impact that shook the very ground. I decided to investigate, for what else was there to do?

Reaching the creator the missile had made I was completely stunned at what I discovered. That was the day my life had truly changed, for that was the day I met Ariel.

I searched the horizon again but this time with my mind, sending my thought wide over the landscape. I had learned to awaken my dormant ability of telepathy from Ariel. From the moment she opened her eyes and looked up at me as she lay comfortably in the middle of the creator she had created, she had used her mind as a primary medium of communication. She came to earth in no spaceship or pod but instead in her natural nude form, her body, unlike my own, was unsusceptible to any type of physical harm. I don't believe she can even feel pain.

I was rewarded then with the warmth of her thoughts flooding my own. I could never overcome the awe I felt at the eternal knowledge that is her mind. I smiled as her thoughts turned to me and beckoned me to her. Spreading my feathered wings I obediently followed her thoughts.

My wings. Black feathers, soft and smooth, covered the pinions that protruded from my back. It was a few hours after Ariel had awoken, her initial greeting still echoing in my mind, when she asked me why my wings had not yet sprouted. We were talking about the destruction of my world and what had started it all off when she suddenly faced me with it.

After a few moments of trying to reply through a shocked, half choked throat she reached across the space between us and gently both placed her hands on either side of my head. Her touch was cold, like ice but it filled my mind with a comfortable warmth as she reached in and opened the doors that were once firmly locked. As her mind bridged across to my own to help me better understand what I needed to know, I sensed in her a mind that was so vast and so incredibly strong I felt overpowered just by briefly touching it.

When she was done she let her hands drop and gave me time to adapt to the knowledge that was once previously denied to every human being before me.

For countless years we continued to communicate through our minds. She spoke only briefly about her own doomed world, which I discovered was almost identical to earth, its inhabitants looking so similar to humans I had to constantly remind myself that Ariel was a complete alien to me. Her race had evolved early, their scientists accelerating their bodies to reach their final form. But such a rush had completely collapsed their social structure as those who did evolve scorned those who had not and visa versa.

War was inevitable and millions died under the onslaught of highly advanced weaponry. Ariel escaped after she took her final form, taking to the air and rushing out of the atmosphere at an incredible speed. She looked back once in horror as the surface was bombarded, wishing she could have done something, but she continued on, turning her back to her home world and went in search for another.

For centuries she wandered through the cold void of space, her ultimate form keeping her alive like mine had done. She vied to find a home, even one that was already inhabited, and start a new life. She would teach the inhabitants and prevent the destruction that befallen her world from happening again. She never found one.

She had only landed on the blackened surface of Earth to rest. To sleep for as long as she wanted to. She told me that her last 'nap' had lasted a few thousand years. Once she had landed she had curled up and had closed her eyes when I appeared. Sensing the curiosity and awe I had felt when I beheld her she decided to forgo her rest and instead began to communicate with me and teach me everything my mind could achieve.

She also taught me about my new found 'talents' as my body, acting from commands given by a fully evolved mind, changed quickly to compensate for the sudden evolutionary leap from human to our ultimate form.

Although both my mind and body had reached its final form, my personality and emotions had not changed in the slightest and Ariel was confused by what she saw in my mind each time I thought of her. She had no concept of love or hate and the intimate act of reproduction completely baffled her. She was anatomically perfect to my eyes, and she became irritated when she occasionally picked up images out of my mind, not knowing what they fully meant.

So one day after about three hundred years or more, she finally got sick and tired of those images and asked me bluntly to put them into practice.

It was something she never regretted asking.

The sun was washing away the remains of darkness that was early morning when I found her. Her face a pale red from the light of the sun, her naked form passive and resting but standing erect facing the warmth of the morning. Her wings lay in her early shadow.

I landed at the tip of her retreating shadow and followed it towards her, watching her wings slowly spread to make way for my approach. I followed them as they towered over her slight form. Her wings, unlike mine, were made of leathery flesh, bleached to the same hue as her pale skin. Eight long pinions, over five times her own height and split from two points on her back just below her shoulders, spread majestically above and around her.

I reached her and drew my arms around her waist, a human act that I did not even think of doing. But what surprised me was not my action, but her reaction. She lent her weight against my chest as her wings came down over my arms and shoulders.

Surprised by the comfortable closeness of our bodies, closer then we had ever been for the last millennia, my mind was blasted open. Ariel gently held it with her own, soothing it, calming the torrents of thoughts and emotions that had eluded her only a few hours before, and guided me down to the beauty of the moment. Her mind turning my own towards the sunrise, blocking out the devastation and keeping only the fiery colours that filled the sky. And the immortals that watch it.

"There is still beauty in this dead world," her voice seemed distant but clear within my head as she used it for the first time outside telepathy, "But one must learn to look for it, then could one appreciate the beauty that is."

"True," I said, not sure it was my own voice for it had been decades since I last used it "Once again you have opened my mind to my mistakes and ignorance,"

She drew closer, resting her hands on mine, her head on my shoulder. She closed her eyes, seeing through my eyes and mind taking in the thoughts and emotions that I felt.

'You are only human'

She had whispered within my head. Those words once again reminded me of the grim reality that I was human and she was not. Casting the thoughts aside I wrapped my wings around us, the soft feathers crossing before her naked form. It was not to shield her from the cold for I alone could feel such things but to let her know I will shield her from anything and to let her know I will always care.

"I know these already," her eyes were closed but our minds were still linked, her voice echoed within my head, "I have always known ever since our moment of intimacy, when our minds and bodies were one and we shared the same thoughts, memories and emotions. I still do not fully understand these emotions but now I have them, I will share them. I too will shield you and I too will care."

She opened her eyes and we both watched the remaining beauty this world had left to offer.