‘Do you think we have such a luxury as time, especially now you are not so hidden? Get the Cultivation into the pandora and bring it to the conservatory. The Faelands are pliable enough, let me see how far I can reach.’
‘As you wish.’
Pitch’s body had no weight to it, no more substance than one of the feathers upon the Morrigans’ masks, save for his head, which may as well be a cannonball, one he had no hope of lifting. So he gave up trying, and just stared as Seraphiel’s sinful creation sought a way out through Gabriel’s winged shield.
He’d never once imagined that what existed inside of him, buried in his ugliness, could be more beautiful than all the human skins he’d ever worn.
The wildness was not a large thing. In fact, for all the trouble it had caused, it was diminutive, no bigger than the peacock it held some resemblance to.
An eye, like a sliver of topaz, found him. The beast’s wings moved in a deliberate, steady flow up and down, colours flowing like a mist from their edges.
Pitch stared up at what had once been a part of him. And he and the wildness watched one another in an erudite moment.
Seraphiel had thought himself a god, if this bird truly held the Primordial Flame.
And Pitch had borne its weight all this time.
Survived it.
He blinked slowly, understanding the heart of his own madness. The Berserker Prince had been driven to the brink by this exquisitely beautiful creature.
The beast stretched its long neck, and strained its golden beak towards him, the pale pink crest atop its head the most divinely delicate fan.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pitch said, hoarse with the damage done, and weightless with loss. He could inhale deeper than he’d done in decades, but only on account of how hollow he was at his centre. He barely existed, his skin was paper thin, the seams barely holding.
The wildness swept down on wings tinged with violet. Pitch’s eyes stung as he was touched by feathers soft as downy chicks. He’d been expecting harshness and a return to pain, so certain this creature was monstrous.
A tear worked its way free and traced a warm line down his cooling flesh. The beast, the beauty, stopped the fall with a carefully placed wingtip, tilting its head to study him. And stupidly Pitch wondered what it thought of him. Was it disappointed perhaps? That its vessel was not so strong as Seraphiel must have imagined.
‘Hurry now, Gabriel. What are you waiting for? The spellwork won’t subdue the creature much longer. Get it in the pandora, at once.’
A low growl might have been the Archangel’s reply.
‘Come. Leave him now.’ Gabriel spoke gently, right up near Pitch’s ear.
But it was not a fading daemon he instructed.
The beast turned away so readily, lifting that sculptured head on its sinewy neck and setting those topaz eyes upon the one who had it bewitched.
Pitch whimpered and didn’t even have the strength to hate himself for it.
The Archangel Gabriel eased his wings back and the terrible weight upon Pitch’s head eased. He lifted his head, his neck muscles clenching in protest, but his body still absorbed by a sense of nothingness. As though he were already one of Silas’s lost souls.
‘Don’t touch…don’t…’ He tried to speak, to protest, but his mouth was far from recovered. He sounded the opium-addled fool, spitting rather than making any sense.
And no one paid him a lick of mind anyway. He might as well be a slab of meat upon the hook. All in the room seemed to have forgotten he hung there.
Gabriel lifted the box and opened the lid. The container was minuscule compared to the beast, but as Pitch stared down into the darkness inside, he understood with horrid clarity what the pandora was.
‘No,’ he choked, forgetting he was far from capable of conversation.
Gabriel paid him no mind either way. ‘Come.’ He waved the wildness forward and uttered those indecipherable words of the Higher Angels. The creature’s head slithered about like a serpent testing the air, and for a hopeful moment, it seemed possible it would defy the Archangel.
But whatever power there was here lay in the hands of the angel.
The wildness spread its wings and swept down, moving in such a way that Pitch could see nothing but sunrise and sunset merging, feel nothing but aching softness against his dry, aching skin. A tug came at his belly, an echo of what had once filled him.
When the air cleared, the wildness was gone. Gabriel was closing the lid on the pandora and locking the creature into a darkness that Pitch knew better than any here. That was the bleakness of an abaddon he’d glimpsed inside the pandora, a torturous nothingness where the wretched were left to rot. The pandora was a sinister, portable prison.
