May the blessings of Our Lord descend upon all who read these words. I know not who shall find this manuscript, for the nature of the holy work I must perform has necessitated that I travel widely, and thus I have had to secrete my writings in divers places that I have passed through, in hopes that they may be found by individuals who are pure of heart, and thereby distributed amongst the faithful in order that they might learn from my experiences.

It is my fondest hope that these writings shall one day make their way into the hands of the Holy Mother Church, where they shall provide the basis for my eventual canonization, but the extent of corruption and sickness within her bosom at the present time prevents me from consigning these writings to the Church directly. It saddens my heart to behold the extent to which the hand of the Adversary has been able to affect the inner workings of the House of God, and more so that many of the chief perpetrators of this blasphemy have been angels of my own kind, of the order known among the Spaniards as La Sombra, who have fallen from the holy mission assigned to them by the Lord into corruption and foulness.

But to remedy this evil and punish the malefactors is a part of the work the Lord has set me, and I hope that one day the Church shall again be purified, even if I myself am destroyed in the process. And so, dear reader into whose hands this precious manuscript has fallen, think well upon the state of the House of God in your time before consigning these words into its care. For if corruption still flourishes therein, I lay upon you the task of guarding these words and sharing them only with the hidden faithful, outside the reach of the Church, who do God's work in truth.

But if the Church has been redeemed by your time, and become once more the Holy Mother it once was, rather than the Whore of Babylon I now behold, then do you deliver this manuscript in all haste into the hands of the appropriate officials, in order that my work in the service of Our Lord may at last be suitably recognized.

I entreat you, be certain to inform them that I have performed far more than the requisite three miracles needed for canonization. I perform miracles each day of my existence! I have healed the sick and dying with my blood! I have beheld the innermost nature and deepest secrets of men and women with a simple glance! I have stricken the minds of evildoers with holy visions so intense they ran screaming and maddened into the night! And I have destroyed, with my own hands, an angel fallen from the service of the Lord. For I write this missive by the light of the flames that now consume the body of he who initiated me into my current condition, vulgarly known as my sire. And it is the reason for this action, and the manner of its doing, that I now seek to explain.

Perhaps it is best if I start with a brief account of the events that led me to this juncture. Prior to my initiation into the ranks of the angels, I was a sister at the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, near Land's End, in Cornwall. Now, I must confess that a part of my reasoning for taking vows was the simple fact that it appeared to be the only way that a woman of my intelligence might pursue an education, and avoid the piteous fate of being married off to some mindless lout of a noble, who knew not Thomas Aquinas from Tom Thumb and whose greatest intellectual accomplishment was the establishment of a system of taxation for his serfs.

So yes, dear reader, you might perhaps deduce from this that I lacked a true vocation at this time, and perhaps I would, in retrospect, agree. True, I was intensely drawn to the religious life, and to the study of doctrine and scripture, but I think that at this time it was more as an intellectual exercise than anything else. I read the writings of Christian theologians and pagan philosophers with equal fervour, and although I certainly considered myself most Christian, I had never, myself, had a vision or revelation, never known the ecstasy of the saints and mystics of whose lives and work I read. And while at the time, I would not have thought that made me any less a believer, looking back, with the experience I have now, I know that my professed belief, as the professed beliefs of most, meant little without direct revelation to substantiate it.

That revelation came on a dark night, in my eighteenth year, in the woods near my convent. Now well you may ask what a godly woman might have been doing out in the woods at night, when all her sisters were abed in their cells, where she too should have been. The reason, like my reason for coming to the convent in the first place, was twofold:

For the thought had come to me, based upon my readings, that if one wished to become a personage of some importance in the world of religion, then a holy vision or revelation of some kind was required. And holy visions, it seemed, did not accrue to one during the daily drudgery of convent life, but in dark and desolate places, far from the distractions of worldly life.

But also, in truth, it must be added that after three years within the convent walls, the religious life I had so eagerly sought had begun to bore me. There was more mindless drudgery and tedious repetition than true intellectual endeavour or spiritual illumination, and it had come to pass that I felt compelled to court danger through numerous small acts of disobedience, if only to keep from dying of boredom.

Thus it was that, on the evening in question, as on many evenings before, I slipped out through a small opening in the garden wall that I had discovered some time previous, and set forth on one of nocturnal journeys into the surrounding greenwood. Now had any known of my venture, they might have found this night's excursion exceedingly foolish, given that it was the eve of the feast day of St. Walburga, known to the Germans as Walpurgisnacht. Tales abounded of witches and other dark and dangerous things riding abroad on that night, but given that it was, despite the beliefs of the peasantry, the eve of a saint's day, I had no fear. Or perhaps I feared a little, but counted upon my faith to protect me. Perhaps I was, as I have said, deliberately courting danger. Or perhaps I was simply maddened by the tedium of convent life. In truth, I do not remember, for the events that were to pass that night were sufficiently dramatic to quite eclipse whatever thoughts were in my mind when I ventured out.

I had not wandered too far from the convent walls when I heard the distant sound of music -- faint trumpets, bells, and other sounds that I could not identify. My curiosity was aroused, and I followed the sound. It was difficult to trace; each time I thought I was drawing near it, it seemed to move further off. From this, I reasoned that the source of the sound must be a procession of some sort, and indeed, on a few of my closer approaches, I thought I could hear the hooves of horses.

Then all at once, the sound began to draw much nearer, as though the procession were coming directly toward me. The mysterious riders had, perhaps, detected my presence, and were coming to see what manner of person dared spy on their nighttime revel. At this, I began to be afraid, and tried to flee, but their horses were swifter by far than my feet, and I could not evade them for long. I had not long to wonder at the identity of my pursuers, for as I fled through a clearing in the woods, I found my progress halted by a swiftly flowing stream, and as I tried to gauge in the near darkness how deep it might be, and how hazardous to cross, the riders broke from the trees, and I beheld them for the first time.

Immediately, I knew that what I looked upon was no ordinary host. The horses glimmered white as the moonlight itself, or loomed black as the night, and their eyes glowed with unearthly light. And the riders! They were beautiful beyond compare, beyond anything I had ever seen or even imagined, comelier by far than anything human could be. To this day, I can scarcely recall their exact appearance, so awed was I by it. It was like gazing into a light too bright to behold, while knowing that even if the price of looking is blindness, it would be harder by far to look away. But the memory of the effects of that sight are burned into my mind strongly enough that when, many years later, I met the fair Angelina, who told me that angels of her order are sometimes entranced by things of beauty to the point that they cannot move or speak, I could well understand how that might be.

I knew, then, that the revelation I had sought had finally come to pass: I was looking upon an angelic host. And I realized, too, how little the common Christian understood of the nature of these beings, for they were not the vapid, pretty creatures of popular imagining; they were as terrible as they were beautiful, and what rooted me to the ground where I stood was as much fear as awe.

They rode directly toward me as if they would trample me, but at the last moment halted just before me, the horses stamping and snorting, and the riders looking down at where I cowered before their majesty. Then the lady at their lead, who was the loveliest of them all, bedecked in silver, black and violet, with hair the colour of midnight and eyes of the vividest purple, raised her lovely hand and pointed at me. She spoke a word in some tongue I did not know, a language that no human voice could have spoken, and it was as though a bolt of purest lightening seared into my mind. Then she laughed, a bright sharp laugh like the shattering of glass, and she turned and rode away, the rest of the host following in her wake.

And myself? For a few more moments I stood, still rooted, paralyzed with awe, fear, shock, and more. The flash of bright fire in my head seemed to have stripped away all illusions, all pretences, all order and predictability from the world. Nothing was, any longer, as it had seemed. Spirits and ghosts, angels and demons, seemed to whirl in the air around me, the stars danced overhead, the ground shook, and the very trees themselves seemed to sway and undulate as though moving to some deep rhythm I was only now becoming aware of. The stream beside me seemed at one moment a vast sea, and the next a tiny trickle. The world stood on its head, and I danced on the starry floor of the sky while my arms reached up to touch the grass above. And there was more, sounds and sights and feelings that words cannot begin to describe, as for the first time all illusions of stasis and mundanity, the stultifying numbness the unenlightened call sanity, was stripped from my mind and I beheld for the first time the world as it really was, in all its beauty and its horror, its terrors and delights, its holiness and its corruption.

I do not recall exactly all that I did that night, but I know that I screamed myself hoarse in my terror, and chanted hymns with a pure devotion I had never known before; that I ran howling through the woods like a mad beast, and danced on the holy ground in rapturous ecstasy; that I clawed at my hair and skin and clothing in stark madness, and lay still, entranced by divine visions in the sky. And I know also that I was not alone. For although the angels who had gifted me with this blessing had departed, an angel of a wholly different kind observed me in my rapture and terror. And as the night drew towards its close, in the final moments before dawn, he approached, silently, as I lay exhausted in the grip of my visions, my habit rent to near-shreds, and gathered me into his arms.

Of what came to pass next, all I recall is a small, sharp pain in my throat, a sweet, sinking feeling as though I was drifting into sleep, or perhaps death, and then, faintly, a dream of drowning, of trying to breathe and finding my mouth filled by a bitter, salty fluid like the waters of the sea, of struggling, yet finding myself held motionless as the suffocating waters filled my throat and I went down into darkness a second time. And somewhere in that darkness, in those last dying minutes of the night, he carried me away to a dark place to await my awakening, the next night, as an angel in my own right.