Original Snippet - Twilight Travellers

For a prompt on comment_fic, on a theme of '200 words'.

Twilight Travellers

There was an angel walking down the road. There was dust in his hair and on his wings, and a sword balanced across his shoulders. He walked slowly and steadily, his smile serene, in no particular hurry.

In the distance, hovering above the horizon, a thousand leagues distant and never less, a great and golden city cast an invisible glow across the world. The road he walked was a tired ribbon of asphalt, vanishing into the heat-haze beneath that far-off gate, its terminus unknown. Whether it might carry him home, at some undetermined place and time, or pass without hope beneath his destination, he could not know.

Beside him, keeping pace at one remove, a gentle shadow, there walked a demon. Unarmed, bearing no counter to the angel's sword, the creature walked with patient serenity, as calm and true as its companion. There were no words between them, no thread of animosity to carve the soft glow of evening. Instead, only a kind of peace, the companionship of a thousand, thousand leagues walked in tandem, the relentless promise of thousands more.

They walked alone, unseen, unhindered and unaided. To some faded future, side by side, they walked.

And were content.