Two Aeons Pre-Great War
Carefree laughter floated on the aether, pierced by Adrianna’s bossy voice.
“No wings! You’re out!” she shouted, frowning in disapproval and pointing, her brown fingers smudged with dried yellow paint, at Eva.
Spots of yellow dotted Adrianna’s high cheekbones and her lean jaw; another spot clung to the tangled tendrils of her soft black hair, which blustered about a bronze face with honeyed tones that belied her fierce, fiery nature. She stood at the highest point of the Crescent Arch, a raised section of Heaven’s play area where unevenly spaced marble tiles were held together by thin bars of gold. Their small group of friends was playing Skip Aether, the idea of the game being to cross the arch without using wings to get from one marble tile to the other.
Currently, Lila stood on the downward slope of the arch, and the lineup went as follows: Lila was in the lead, with Eva standing on the same tile as her, literally clinging to her robes. Adrianna stood two tiles behind Lila and Eva, and Castor stood one tile behind Adrianna.
At that moment, Adrianna was as high above Heaven as any of them ever were, being among the youngest student angels. The last to have been created, at least until the Creator popped out another batch: eighty-four angel children every half aeon, with precision. Sometimes Lila thought the current half aeon would last forever.
In her current pose, even dressed in her standard white student robes, Adrianna looked like one of the warriors, stern and annoying, but Lila wasn’t the object of her wrath, so she didn’t care.
Eva was, and she demanded, from her position behind Lila, “What wings? You’re seeing things.” She winked at Lila, twirling the ends of her strawberry-blonde locks. Earlier, she’d plaited them with an assortment of flowers from the dormitory garden, and they hung in two golden braids on either side of her round ivory face. A pearl and gold circlet sat askew on the crown of her head, the pearls protruding from gold wires like so many sprigs of berries, and a dusting of petal pink makeup, stolen from one of the older student angels, coated her eyes and cheeks. She’d get a nice scolding for the makeup at dinner, but she’d reapply it as soon as Master Tabitha washed it off.
“Cheating!” Castor yelled, probably because Adrianna had said it and he didn’t want to be left out. He had Eva’s ivory face and Adrianna’s sharp features, lean body, and long, dark hair, but he’d pulled half of his hair into a messy knot, and that was where any similarities ended. For if Adrianna was the ringleader of their little group, and Eva was her second-in-command, Castor was the wedge always trying to come between them and assert his own authority.
Lila had the unpleasant duty of keeping Castor in check so the group didn’t constantly explode into dramatic disputes, falling in and out of friendship with each other as if there were endless opportunities for friendship in their class and not a mere eighty-four students.
The group, largely, exploded anyway.
“Was I cheating, Beni?” Eva pouted to their group’s final member. Beni was the calm, cheerful sort, always tasked with bringing them back together. Lila didn’t envy him that one bit.
“Uhhh…”
Twisting back and forth, Eva batted her eyelashes.
“I didn’t see.” Beni shrugged, his fingers dragging through a scalp of curly black hair. A solid wall of an angel, he had a face cut sharp as diamonds and skin the rich brown ocher of terracotta. Many of Lila’s classmates had a crush on him. Lila knew him too well and did not.
Maybe Beni hadn’t seen Eva cheat, or maybe he had and just wanted to keep the peace. He had little backbone but made up for it by being soamiable and amusing that no one could stay mad at him for long. Hence, his role in their group.
“Oh, come on!” Adrianna protested, looking as if she might fly off her tile simply to accost Beni.
Eva whipped around and blew her a raspberry. She giggled as she turned back to Lila, and Lila snorted.
“You’re still not beatingme,” she informed Eva, toying with her black braid.
“Oh, of course not. Just make sure I’m second, okay?”
“How do I do that? I can’t read Beni’s mind.”
“But you can make sure I don’t fall. Let’s stick together.” Eva latched onto Lila’s robes again, and Lila nearly toppled off the marble tile hanging in mid-aether, taking Eva with her. She steadied herself and gave Eva a look.
“Sorry,” Eva said, lacing her pale hand with Lila’s dark brown one.
Beni, the game’s arbiter, called out for another set of numbers from one to one hundred.
“Ten!” Castor yelled.
“Forty-six,” Adrianna replied.
“Twenty-three,” Lila offered.
“Ninety-nine,” Eva said.
“The number was eleven,” Beni announced. “Castor moves up a space.”
“Ugh, great,” Adrianna groaned as Castor landed on the same tile as her.
