The woman inside the cell was naked.
It was almost a crime itself, her careless beauty. In fact, there was something about the girl that should only exist in the forgotten strands of a runaway imagination. Her skin was dusted golden, and even in the dark light of the prison, a certain glow illuminated from her. Large, doe-like eyes were flecked with sparkling emerald crystals, and gleaming waves of hair swung near her hips, brushing the curve of her bare bottom with an ease that should have been reserved for none other than her eternal soul-mate.
Beyond the bars, the uniformed man had never been a particularly artistic soul; his wife often taunted him for the stark, desolate way he viewed the world. Clouds looked like clouds, not the beckoning dragons and wild horses his spouse often pointed to in the sky. Living with the blunt reality of the world was something he was long used to.
The moment he saw the prisoner, however, Aris wished he were an artist. Whether he were a master of a brushstroke or a sculptor of clay, he did not care. He simply longed to capture the chained, otherworldly woman forever. The way she looked at him as she passed, (head held high, upturned nose pointed towards the dripping, rotting tiles on the ceiling), shifted something in him. This instant in his mind stood sharp against the dull, gray world he had lived in for so long; a scene worthy of being framed in a museum.
Time seemed to slow when she was pushed into the cell that he must now watch with constant vigilance. The girl fell forward, seamless knees knocking against the cold floors with a clatter.
“You bring her to the block in an hour,” the tall leader huffed at the executioner.
Then the guards left, their hot, teasing breaths no longer able to leave traces on her perfect face.
—
Aris was not one for making conversion with his prisoners. Normally, he sat in front of their holding chamber, bored.
His life was strung together in sounds, the distant melody of an offbeat song.
Swoosh. The drop of the guillotine vibrated the walls of the cell block.
Crack. There went the spine.
Thud. The head was on the floor.
Cheers. A roar of celebration from the young children and adults who celebrated death vouched through each cell.
Again, and again, and again,
sound after sound after sound.
Swoosh. Crack. Thud.
Cheers.
Swoosh. Crack. Thud.
Cheers.
Cheers.
The people on the platform shared the same solemn expression, though they ranged from tall muscled men with tattooed thighs, to weeping schoolgirls, or slanted old men. It made no matter, for in one fell swoop, their reign was over.
Gone: a light blinked out.
Swoosh. Crack. Thud.
Aris had never felt an ounce of sorrow for any of the people he guarded, or the people he killed. These demons, these twisted souls deserved whatever they went through: they had engineered their own demise. He tried reminding himself of this, that the perfect woman in front of him had brought her own death upon her. He couldn’t wait to kill her.
—
There was nothing unusual about the fact that the girl had yet to move from where she had fallen. The guards had pushed her hard; no mercy shown for someone so beneath them. But still, it struck him as strange.
The moments passed slowly in the dark room and eventually, she shifted from her broken position on the ground. Her hair fell off her back, moving to shield her breasts. And there, in the place of her naturally cascading locks were bursts of red.
Blood.
Aris’s words tumbled out from their self constructed dam. “What did they do to you?” he breathed, the question leaching into the stale air around the strange, lonely pair.
The dark, molten liquid dripped down from her shoulders. As he looked closer, two deep gashes strung along either side of her spine. The holes were deep, and fragments of what looked like bone peaked out from within.
He hadn’t expected her to respond, and unless she had, he would have wondered that the woman had only been a figment of his non-existent imagination.
“Who? Them?” the girl laughed, as if the idea of the kingdom’s ruinous guards hurting her was unfathomable. The voice that came from her rang like the bells atop the kingdom’s towers. “They did nothing to me.”
Her chains rattled as she turned to face the so-called guard that sat outside the flimsy bars she was contained behind. He could have sworn her shimmering hair made a halo above her head.
And this was when Aris’s breathing caught. For if the guards did not cause the gaping holes on her back, who did?
“Oh, weak boy,” the woman’s swirling eyes were magnetic: it was as if he surrendered all his willpower gazing into them, “there is so much more to be afraid of than the rulers of this little world.”
And in that moment, his heart quickened, each beat faster than the last, color rushing to his normally pale cheeks.
Pulsing, pounding; there was something feral and violent in the gaze of the flawless girl.
Suddenly she was at the front of the cage, her movements too graceful for someone so carefully wrapped in chains.
Her hands fell through the bars of the cell, and once again, her simple existence seemed to rival all versions of reality the man thought he had known.
Her hands were decorated with rings. Seven, to be exact.
They were silver, and large, each decoration glinting on her bloody hands. It appeared as though each ring captured the stars in the sky, for they resembled the galactic beauty the woman so powerfully illuminated.
Her eyes darted to where he was looking, stuck on her only possessions.
“They are the seven rings of Saturn,” she said, twirling the bands, the words sending shivers down his spine.
The legend of the angel who had stolen the seven rings of Saturn was a fable known far and wide in his religion: a rogue thief’s deviation from the line of flawless beings before her. He had classified the tale as something similar to the legends of the gods: mystical and magical and far away from the life he knew.
But here was this woman claiming to have the rings from a different world on her fingers. Where had she come from?
The caged woman, the fallen girl from the stars, seemed to be enjoying herself now; the confusion from Aris fueling her ache to tell her story.
“I stole them, you know. These rings. So for that, I suppose I am no different than my companions in this rotted place you call a prison.”
He had forgotten she wasn’t clothed until the unbroken eye contact overwhelmed him, and he had to look elsewhere. But there were the rounded hips, the sculpted thighs. The shifting muscles beneath the powerful, unmarred legs. There was no right place to look.
“I understand thieves, for they are unlike many in the sole regard that they do not live to be remembered. You see, thieves live instead for the forgotten thrill of disappearing acts, the craft of manipulation. They live for the unruly heartbeat of seduction and for carefully crafted fabrications.” Her tongue came out of her mouth, licked her faultlessly rounded lips, “There is nothing incidental about the art of thievery.”
He had to devote almost all of his focus to slow his breathing, the woman in front of him seeming more and more like a curse. Like most humans, it was hard for him to accept that there was more to the universe than the small bubble that he lived in. And still, this bland man- a man who spent his days dropping the blade of a guillotine or guarding the cell of a doomed prisoner- could not help but voice his curiosity.
“Why did you take them?”
The exquisite creature laughed, the sound of her joy echoing over the tiles. In the background, rats skittered away from the waves of her voice. “It is no small task to steal the Seven Rings of Saturn. As one of the most publicly displayed prizes in the universe, to discreetly hide the matter would be an impossible feat. I came into the heist aware of this fact.”
There was something behind the smile, the smirk, of the girl that made Aris almost regret her capture. Regret the fact that though she was a thief, he would have to kill her in a few minutes.
“Where I come from, the seven rings sit almost mockingly in the sky. They have always been something to envy, something to worship. Saturn, the angel who had put them there was deemed a forever remembered entity: an unforgettable hero. And quite frankly…”
An almost human-like emotion flickered across her face.
“I was jealous.”
She twisted the rings on her fingers. “You see, I grew up alongside this now called ‘god.’ She doesn’t deserve that title. And so I took from the sky, and I got caught.”
“They were angry,” she whispered, sitting on the ground in her cell, as if talking about the beings that ruined her, took so much out of her, that she could no longer support herself. “They were angrier then I thought they would be.”
As someone who killed for a living, Aris didn’t dare draw breaths after even the mention of such demons.
“They tried to get them back, take the rings off my fingers to return the gift Saturn had given to its rightful place. I know I’m about to die here, on Earth.” The intoxicating eyes met him again, looking up from her bare feet on the floor. “But they have already taken my wings. I am as good as dead.”
He didn’t ask the question because he knew she wanted him to. The word angel ran along the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t allow it to fall past the brink of his consciousness.
Instead he asked the holy-grail of questions for thieves, for wrong-doers.
“Would you do it again?”
“No.”
She looked at him then, an ancient creature against a ruined man. “Sometimes greed is not worth the cost of glory.”
—
He was waiting at the platform where the guillotine stood.
Did the people who chained her know what power she held? Or had they thought her merely a ruined, Earth-born thief?
If she really was an angel, Aris was surprised at how easily she confronted her impending demise. It was to happen fast, the parade to her untimely end. More guards rushed in, and the executioner escorted her out. They didn’t seem to care about clothing, covering her from the crowd, or the brisk autumn air.
When they took her out of her cell, he grabbed her hand. Unlike his, it ran smooth as silk and was cold to the touch. Wait! He wanted to say, You cannot accept this fate!
She seemed to hear him then, and seemed to realize that he hadn’t relocked her chains; that if she wanted to live, now was her final chance.
But if there was anything she hated more than fear, it was failure, and though both were intrinsically humanistic traits the angel wondered if she was suddenly capable of both. Yet, she made no move to run.
So, the parade to the angel’s death marched on. The path from the prison to the guillotine was straight. Enclosed so the thieves couldn’t escape, long enough to make each step taken seem like a march straight to hell.
There were more people there than normal, the crowd ready to witness the fall of humanity’s perfect blueprint.
She was strapped down, her crimson stained hair falling from her breasts, exposing her golden curves to the sky she stole from.
She shook her hands at the sky, her silver rings glinting in the weak sunlight.
He took one last look at her before dropping the blade.
The majestic eyes didn’t break contact with his bland blue ones.
She winked at him as the knife fell.
Swoosh. Crack. Thud.
Cheers.
It was over, her head rolling down the steps, bounding to a stop at the feet of the bloodthirsty crowd. Her holy figure looked so mortal, so common, as it lay limp on the blood soaked chair.
The guard took one last look at her body.
The glistening rings from her fingers were gone.