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Lost in dreams of vengeance and murder, I had not noticed Sarakiel’s arrival on the battlements. Something in the way she looked at me made me feel shame, as if her eyes were boring into my soul and seeing it for the barren and rotten place it truly was.
But she smiled as she approached, instantly silencing my darker thoughts.
“Long day,” she said, her pink hair whipping with the wind, the gust ruffling the feathers in her white wings.
I turned to look at her. Nodded. “Indeed,” I said.
She stood by me, leaning against the parapet edge and casting her eyes across the horizon. Night had fallen, and the sky was full of stars. Millions of them, as far as the eye could see. It was a beautiful tapestry of flickering light, and color, and wonder.
But it paled in comparison to what I saw in her.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
My defenses went up. I could feel my skin prickling, my jaw tensing. “Proceed…”
“Are you…ok?”
I was surprised, and she must have noted the confusion as she continued without waiting for the response.
“Ever since you got here, you’ve been different,” she ventured.
“How so?”
“Well, I don’t know how to describe it, but you seem a little less rough.”
“Rough,” I paused. “I appear lessroughto you?”
She shook her head. “You’ve been through a lot. The last few days can’t have been easy… and I guess I expected you to just fly off and leave us to our doom while you went looking for revenge.”
“When I arrived, you had nothing but contempt for my presence. Would you have blamed me if I had flown off?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Rage makes people do things they regret.”
“Rage is strength. Were it not for the anger I have felt on the battlefield, I would not have survived as many confrontations as I have.”
“Maybe it’s good in a fight, but it has no place between two people who are supposed to care about each other. It divides, there—it fractures, and weakens.”
“I do not feel anger toward you, Sarakiel. I left everything to come and find you here, and I do not blame you for what happened.””
“Maybe you should.”
“Why would you believe that?”
Sarakiel looked at her feet. “I left with Aithen, against your orders, and I convinced myself that somehow you were to blame. If I hadn’t… maybe he would still be alive, and maybe your Bastion would still be standing, and we wouldn’t be here…”
“It is done. You will drive yourself mad thinking on how things could have been if only you had or hadn’t.”
“I can’t help that I care.”
“You care too much.”
Some of the light went out of her eyes. I had disappointed her with my words. “Maybe…” she said.
Rectify this mistake.
“I mean, that you allow your care to turn to rage,” I explained. “It is why Medrion uses those you care about against you. When you saw me with Kalmiya, when I was foolishly blindto what was happening in front of me. You cared about… me… so much that it hurt. I understand why you left.”
Sarakiel half-laughed and turned her eyes toward the stars again, her faced bathed in their light. “Somehow you make all of my flaws sound almost nice.”
