Project Boussh: The Angel Of The North
by Policrat'

The man stood half-way up the hill. Behind him, a train rattled past,
heading south. On the hilltop, almost silhouetted against the leaden morning
sky, stood a giant.

Made of dark, burnished metal, the statue was of a humanoid, except that, in
place of outstretched arms, he had wings; not the avian wings borne by
divine messengers in so many religions - and even by some humanoid races
like the Stennax; rather, the straight-edged aerofoils of an aircraft.

The man - the figure was unequivocally male - stood erect, ready, as if a
heartbeat away from flight, but also like a sentinel, a last line of defense
against some unseen threat.

He contemplated the statue for a little while longer. The area had once been
known - and proud - as the industrial heartland of the local nation-state of
which it was part, but decades of disinterested government and economic
change had humbled it, bringing poverty and despair.

The Angel of the North had been commissioned as the old, hated government
had been overthrown in one of the nation's regular plebiscites. Its
snubfighter wings were a testimony to the fact that the magic of machinery
had supplanted the magic of myth in the minds of the people who had built
it, but its pose also echoed that in which the central redeemer-figure of
their half-abandonned religion was most often presented.

So it represented both a messenger and a redeemer. Either way, it seemed to
be a symbol of some ill-articulated hope. But for who? And how was the mute
figure to spread its message? Was its fate to fly, or to die?

As if undecided, it stood, still, silent and tense on the hilltop, staring
unshaken past the abyss, and into the future, searching infinity for an
answer. Either as an avatar of the sky-father, or an image of a son of god,
it was forever, incongruously, earthfast.

The man smiled, and began to walk. Mulling over the enigma would pass the
time on the next stage of his journey.

He had arrived dirtside from the _Admonitor_ aboard a cloaked _Lambda_-class
shuttle, but from here, he would be travelling aboard a quaint, primitive
and erratic surface transport, something known as a 'train'.