Page 47 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

“I envy you,” she said, trailing the tip of her finger on the open edge of his leather jacket. “Wish I was afraid of nothing, too.”

“I might have lied to you, Silene. There are things that terrify me.”

“What could ever terrify a God like you, Gabriel?”

“Ask me if I have ever been in love.”

Silene hesitated, staring up at him with a plea in her eyes for him to take back his words. Her voice was small as she asked, “Have you ever been in love?”

Skies overhead rumbled with thick thunder as he admitted, “I am.”

It felt like every clock had stopped moving at that very second, stuck onto those two words as Silene uttered two quiet words of her own, “You are?”

“Yes,” he said as the wind picked up and grew into a tempest. Even nature wanted to stop him. “There is this secret I’ve kept since forever, you see.”

She tucked a wind billowed strand of hair behind her ear. “What secret?”

Thunder struck close by. “One night, as I was sitting and staring at the stars, watching wishes being sucked into their bright bellies, I happened to hear one. One made for me, but not to me. All of which was strange because who could ever make wishes in my stead,” he said with a forlorn smile. “The wish had been for me to vanish, to disappear, to find the worst ends one could ever find, to die a death so deadly I would never wake.”

A tear streaked down Silene’s cheek as she stared at him aghast.

“Nothing had made me laugh harder,” he admitted, staring back at the owner of that wish. “After the amusement wore off, I remember staring at the skies for a long while wondering—wondering what I had done. It nearly gnawed me alive until I stole that prayer from the stars and went to find its owner.” He tilted his head towards the stormy skies warning him and threatening him to remain silent as he had remained all these years. Begging him not to tempt fates. “I still have that prayer by the way.”

Trees and grass and even the foundations of the hills around them shook from the wind that swept across.

Another tear dropped down her face, and he made to reach for her, hand halting mid-way the forbidding space between them.

“I found her,” he continued, tucking that desire in the place he buried every other desire of his, deep in the chambers of his heart that had grown so big to accommodate his only love—the chambers that had become a graveyard where he’d had to bury his love, too. “A few times actually. I couldn’t stop watching her from afar. I kept wondering if such a lovely ghost had been left behind by my brother. I kept wondering why she was still in my lands, amongst my living. Until I saw her tears. Then there she was, my sad girl, alive and all mine yet not mine at all. I could only get so close to her. Even the earth beneath her feet hated me, the walls of her home screamed at me when I’d dare steal any glance, the forest around her home would laugh at my efforts to get her attention. Nothing impressed her. Whenever I’d send her sun, she would go out less. When I’d send her rain, she would curse at it. When I’d grow flowers under her feet, she’d stomp on them. When I’d send her friends, she’d cower in fear. Her being would fade in and out of existence. Sometimes I would not be able to find her for days, nature tricking me and disguising her home. I didn’t see her for a long time after. But then she made another prayer for my ruin. I wanted to see her again, but she had to let me somehow.”

“And did she?”

“She did.” A bitter laughter poured out of him. “But it was only to spite me. She was already in the arms of my brother when I got there. She’d hated me so much that it had made her longing for him almost seem like love—deep, profound love. A love so strong that she’d drank poison for.”

Another tear slid down Silene’s cheek and Gabriel resisted every urge that commanded his holy existence to have her in his arms.

“I begged him,” he confessed, finally free of the truth he knew would make her hate him even more. “I begged him to leave her. I asked him for a favour. But there isn’t much he could take from me. So I gave him the only thing I could give him—the thing I would come to desire most. And he left her. The debt for her life paid in exchange for what I’d come to desire most.” He ran a hand over his eyes, feeling a painful sting burn across them. “I’d made a mistake in my calculations. I’d underestimated just how much she hated me and loved him.” A choked laughter sputtered out of him. “The moment we’d left and she’d woken—she’d woken desperate for her one true love and had bled out in the bed I’d left her alive in exchange for the last thing anyone could take from me. Then I saw her walk through the gates to my brother, right back in his arms. She’d taken something from him. Twice. He was not gentle to her. For she then had to serve him for five hundred years and bring him one hundred thousand lives.”

The sob that drew out of her shook his entire being. Unable to see her crumble right there, so close to him, unable to hold her, he forced his eyes closed and put his hands over his ears. He couldn’t see or hear her—he could not. He’d hold her, and she’d vanish in his hands like mist along with any memory he had of hers. He couldn’t—he couldn’t live without a fragment of her memory.

Her tears spilled—they’d spilled worse than any blood in any battle Gabriel had ever witnessed. Then rain fell down on them with the fury of a thousand storms, bleeding into the land just like her cries.

And again, all he could do was watch.

Her cries had eventually stopped, but her tears had not. And their silence was most unbearable. Her tears had endlessly poured as he’d helped her dry off and change. They’d not stopped as he’d tried to gently brush her hair, and then help her get into her bed.

Laying on her side, facing away from him, she hid them, too. He’d laid beside her with her tucked to his chest as close as he could get, yet somehow it was the furthest he’d ever been to her.

His fingers tangled on the ends of her hair, playing with the strands and marvelling at the softness, remembering how her touch felt the same, so silky and gentle.

“Tonight,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and defeated. “Azriel has asked me to collect my last death. What will happen after…with you…and me?”

“You will be reborn.”

“And you?”

“I will get to watch you live.”

“Will I see you?”