A change in air pressure heralded Angel’s return. Scribe IV hadn’t seen xem since xe’d taken Quin to be healed. Three weeks, two days, seven hours and forty-six minutes precisely. But for all the precision built into him, the images Scribe IV held in his head as he turned to look at his guest were contradictory – Angel as a child, dripping hair plastered to xyr skin and long sleeves covering xyr nervous fingers; Angel vast as the sky over the Bastion, speaking with the voice of a god; Angel burning and burning, flames crackling in xyr hair.
This time, Angel brought with xem the scent of beeswax; Scribe IV could smell it, although such a thing should be impossible. It was like a candle burning somewhere and producing a comforting golden light. Xe’d forgotten or chosen not to be human for the moment. Half xyr face was honeycomb, humming with wings. Xyr chest was open, ribs dripping with honey, a hive in place of xyr heart.
But as Scribe IV rose from his desk, Angel smiled, folding back down into something like a taller, less frightened version of the child Scribe IV had last seen. Xe still smelled of beeswax, and the ghost of what xe’d been, what xe’d become to save Quin from the Sisters, lingered behind xyr eyes.
“Are you alright?” Scribe IV asked.
The question seemed to startle Angel, xyr eyes widening.
Gratitude, at least that’s what Scribe IV thought it was. All at once, Angel threw xyr arms around him, a hug that nearly knocked him over, despite the slightness of xyr frame. When xe stepped back, grinning, it almost looked like xe was blushing.
“I wasn’t certain you’d return.” Scribe IV poured a measure from the heavy glass decanter – a comforting bit of hospitality that felt like safer ground than probing the angel’s sudden display of emotion, or sorting out how that emotion made Scribe IV himself feel.
Angel held the glass without bringing it to xyr lips. Behind the troubled expression in xyr eyes lay curiosity. Scribe IV felt studied, a puzzle for Angel to figure out. Could xe see the aches in his joints, the faint patina to his skin? Or had he only imagined all those things – an automaton dreaming of age, dreaming of the kind of death that could never exactly come for him?
“I wasn’t certain you would stay,” Angel countered, finally sipping xyr drink, letting only the faintest glimmer of flame swirl in its depths.
“Neither was I.” Scribe IV had considered leaving, but where else was there to go?
The past three weeks had been an endless barrage of people flowing through the Bastion, more perhaps than would even have attended the conclave. It had been relentless. Authorities from all sectors were trying to untangle the knot of Agnetta and her brother’s crime. Delegations from every religion, sect and branch, half-forgotten groups and orders whose names Scribe IV hadn’t heard spoken in years. Not just humans either, but bodhisattvas and saints, angels and demons, things that had been human, long ago, and things that never had. Scribe IV had even glimpsed the godling who had once been a child hiding in the caverns beneath the Bastion.
In all that time, he hadn’t seen Angel, or Quin, or even Lena.
Having no kin aside from the half-brother she’d helped to murder, and the twin who’d helped her do the deed, Agnetta had been laid to rest in the garden outside the Bastion’s walls. Her brother had been apprehended fleeing Ganymede.
Scribe IV had re-integrated the memory of the night twenty-two years ago – Agnetta, a swaddled baby, carried inside the Bastion, her mother and brother disappearing into the storm – into his primary core. The empty capsule that had once held the memory hung from a chain he now wore about his neck. He wouldn’t forget again; he owed them that much – more, but it was all he could do.
The question of who would become the next pope troubled him. The possibility of the Drowned Sisters’ return troubled him more. They’d swooped in like opportunistic fish feeding off whale fall, using the Pope’s death as a means to carry out their own plans. Scribe IV had known they’d strayed from their god’s will, but he hadn’t realized how far. They would have Drowned the whole Bastion to remake their god in their own image – horror as devotion, like the Drownings of old, but on a massive scale.
Would it have been enough? And without Angel there to stop them, would the Sisters try again?
“Will you stay?” Angel asked, pulling Scribe IV from his grim thoughts.
“I’m not sure where else I would go.”
If the Sisters did return, there was little he could do to stop them. So why stay? The Pope’s murder felt like punctation at the end of a sentence and an era. The Bastion was already half-forgotten. Scribe IV could easily see how it would only slide further into decline. What had happened here would echo, a haunting that would turn people away. Pilgrims would forget this had once been a holy site. Even the prayers might dry up eventually; a Scribe with nothing to record. He could simply let entropy take its toll.
“You could go anywhere, be anything you choose.” Angel spoke to the thoughts he hadn’t voiced.
Scribe IV supposed he could, indeed, be anything. Angel had the power to gift him as much. An extraordinary miracle, undoing him at the very base level of his existence and weaving him into something new.
Choice. A momentous thing. He had never been offered one before. It was wondrous, and terrifying. He’d spent so long feeling the weight of his age; now all at once, Scribe IV felt unprepared. He needed more time.
“Is there…?” He fumbled the words, which an automaton was not meant to do. He tried again. “Can I choose later, if I remain here a while?”
“Of course.” Angel smiled. It was soft, like a glimmer of candlelight, like melting beeswax. Melancholy still shadowed xem – a scar that would perhaps never heal – but it seemed to Scribe IV xe was learning to live with it, or would learn to live with it, in time.
Scribe IV wanted to believe that his own purpose would become clear in time as well. Faith in a world where gods were proven – maybe that in itself was a mystery worth investigating. The riddle of himself, his purpose in life, and what he might become.
“Until I figure it out, I will remain, then.” Scribe IV paused, feeling almost shy voicing the next part out loud. “Will you still come visit sometimes?”
“Of course,” Angel said again, and this time xyr smile lit xyr face, unshadowed and genuine.
Scribe IV deeply wished he could return Angel’s smile. He inclined his head instead, hoping xe understood.
“Until then,” Scribe IV said.
Angel’s smile became a flash, brilliant as a star being born, swallowing xem whole. When the light faded, Angel was gone, leaving Scribe IV alone in the room. Even so, Angel’s voice echoed. Scribe IV heard xyr words clear as a ringing bell.
“I’m only ever as far away as a prayer.”
Scribe IV had only ever recorded prayers for others. With Angel listening, he looked forward to offering up one of his own.
He tilted his head back to watch the rolling green sky and the slow progression of three rising moons.