Chapter 1: The Angel of War

Chapter 1: The Angel of War

The air in the captain’s quarters was a foul cocktail of stale sweat, diesel fumes, and rust. It was thick enough to chew, and with every shallow breath, David Rojas felt it coating his tongue. He was trapped. The heavy steel door was bolted, the single porthole a greasy smear of blackness against the encroaching night. In the center of the cramped space, a man who called himself Captain Jean-Pierre sat behind a small, cluttered table, casually sharpening a machete with a whetstone.

Shhh-ick. Shhh-ick. Shhh-ick.

The sound grated on David’s last nerve. The captain was a broad, powerful man, his face a roadmap of scars and suspicion. His eyes, small and dark, never left them. Specifically, they never left the woman standing silently beside David.

“NGO,” Jean-Pierre grunted, the word dripping with disdain. He tested the machete’s edge with a calloused thumb, a faint smile playing on his lips. “You bring medicine. For the children. A man of God, yes?”

“No, not exactly,” David said, his voice tight. He held up his hands in a gesture he hoped was placating. “I work for Global Health Access. We’re a secular organization. The manifest is clear—antibiotics, surgical supplies, water purifiers…”

“Paper,” the captain scoffed, waving a dismissive hand. “Paper can say anything. But my eyes… my eyes tell me a different story.” His gaze flickered from David’s sweat-stained t-shirt and practical cargo pants to Cassara. “They tell me you are not a doctor. And she,” he pointed the tip of the machete at her, “is no one’s secretary.”

Cassara didn’t flinch. She stood with a stillness that was more unnerving than any overt threat, her tall, athletic frame coiled like a spring. Her dark, braided hair was pulled back tightly, and a faint, silvery scar bisecting her eyebrow seemed to catch the dim, swinging light of the single bare bulb. Her hand rested near her hip, a deceptively casual posture that David knew meant she was seconds from violence.

“She’s my security,” David said, trying to inject some authority into his voice and failing miserably. His role was logistics, arranging shipments, navigating bureaucracy. Machete-wielding captains were not in the manual. “Haiti can be dangerous. It’s a standard precaution.”

Shhh-ick. Shhh-ick.

The captain laughed, a low, rumbling sound that seemed to vibrate through the rusted metal floor. “A precaution? She is a weapon. I see the way she watches. The way she breathes. She has seen war. Not the squabbles of street gangs. Real war.” He leaned forward, the creak of his chair loud in the tense silence. “And that is not the kind of security a man bringing medicine for children needs. So, you tell me again. Who are you? And who is she?”

David’s mind raced. This was supposed to be simple. Charter a ship, load the supplies, get to Port-au-Prince, and hand them over to his local contact, a hospital administrator named Savannah. But from the moment they’d boarded the Da Baron in Miami, everything had felt wrong. The crew were ghosts, sullen and silent. The ship itself felt like a floating tomb. Now, somewhere in the vast, dark expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, his idealism was being held hostage by a blade.

He looked at Cassara, a silent plea in his eyes. He’d hired her through a private security firm on a recommendation that had been vague but glowing. She was quiet, professional, and radiated an aura of competence that had initially been reassuring. Now, it was a liability. She was too much. Too real.

Cassara’s gaze met his for a fraction of a second. There was no fear in her eyes, only a weary calculation. She then turned her focus back to the captain. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was low and steady, cutting through the humidity.

“He is exactly who he says he is,” she said. “A good man trying to do a good thing in a bad world. You should let him.”

The captain’s eyes narrowed. “And you?”

Cassara was silent for a long moment. The only sounds were the rhythmic scrape of the stone on steel and the thrum of the ship’s ancient engines, a constant, deep heartbeat.

“You’re right,” she said, her voice dropping even lower. “I have seen war.”

The scraping stopped. Jean-Pierre leaned forward, his entire being focused on her. He had sniffed out the truth, and now he craved the taste of it.

David wanted to scream at her to stop. To make up a plausible lie. Ex-military, a mercenary, anything but the truth he suspected was coiled behind her stoic mask—a truth he wasn’t sure he could comprehend.

“My home is… was… a city called Penthesil,” Cassara said, her eyes becoming distant, as if she were looking through the steel walls of the cabin and into another world. “You won’t find it on any map. We kept to ourselves. We had to.”

Jean-Pierre grunted, a sound of cynical encouragement. “A secret city. And you were a soldier there?”

“I was a Guardian,” she corrected him. The title held a weight that filled the small room. “I protected the walls. I protected our people.”

“From what?” the captain pressed, his knuckles white on the handle of his machete.

A shadow passed over Cassara’s face, a flicker of something so profound and terrible that David felt a cold dread snake down his spine. It was a look of pure trauma, the kind he’d only ever seen in the eyes of refugees from the world’s most brutal war zones.

“From the world,” she said softly. “And then… from what the world sent us.”

David’s rational mind was screaming. Hidden city? Guardians? This was the stuff of fantasy novels, not a medical supply run. But the absolute conviction in her voice, the haunted look in her eyes, was chillingly real.

“What did the world send you?” Jean-Pierre whispered, his bravado melting away into a raw, almost superstitious curiosity.

Cassara’s jaw tightened. “It wasn’t a person. Not a man. It arrived like a fallen star, and it spoke in a voice of righteous thunder. It promised strength. It promised purpose. It promised victory.”

Her gaze locked onto the captain’s, and for the first time, David saw a crack in her armor—a sliver of raw, undiluted fear.

“We are a society of warriors, but we had forgotten what it meant to worship. It taught us again. It remade our faith in its own image. We… we called it Metatron.” She said the name like a curse. “The Angel of War.”

The cabin fell utterly silent. The rhythmic thrum of the engine felt like a drumbeat counting down to doom. An angel. She was talking about an actual angel. David’s world, a world of logistics, budgets, and predictable outcomes, tilted on its axis.

Jean-Pierre stared at her, his mouth slightly agape. He lowered the machete, placing it on the table with a soft clink. The threat of physical violence had been replaced by a much larger, more terrifying awe. He was a man of the sea, a man from a land where the spirit world was a tangible, breathing thing. This impossible story resonated with a part of him that David’s spreadsheets and manifests could never touch.

“An angel…” the captain breathed. “And you… you fled from an angel?”

“It demanded a new kind of sacrifice,” Cassara said, her voice a hollow rasp. “A new kind of devotion. It began to burn away everything we were, to forge us into something else. Something holy, and something monstrous. I would not burn. So I ran.”

The revelation hung in the air, thick and suffocating. This wasn’t an interrogation anymore. It was a confession. A prophecy. David looked from Cassara’s haunted face to the captain’s stunned expression. He had thought the danger was the man with the knife. He was wrong. The danger was the world Cassara had just unveiled—a world of secret cities and warring angels, a world of shadows that had just swallowed him whole.

The lock on the door suddenly seemed insignificant. They weren’t trapped in a cabin. They were adrift on a dark sea, in a world far more ancient and terrible than he had ever imagined. And they were sailing straight for Haiti, a land where, David was beginning to fear, such angels and their monstrous appetites might feel right at home.