The creak of the old bed in Sophia's hut was a crude parody of the fragrant harmonies of Aethelon, the realm of soaring spires. The pillow smelled of herbs-not the subtle amber of Nephelarion's marvelous gardens, but the dampness of the earth. Every awkward movement of her paralyzed legs, every observation of the hut's simplicity cut Plissiades deeper than the splinters of the shuttlecraft that tore her wing.
Lying on her back, she closed her eyes. Instantly, images of her native Home rose before her: towers of dazzling alabaster opening to the dome of the Heavenly Mother; gardens where trees trembled with fruit of unearthly hues; shallow lakes like floors of liquid platinum... There she soared, her wings - the pledge of blood purity and primacy of the race - catching the rising currents of power. The inhabitants below? Only servants, lesser angels. Absolute Order.
And here? It creaked. It smelled rough. Here a woman with wiped hands and a dull stare was helping, talking about "equality" and "community." Pettiness! The lot of those who can't look beyond the horizon of their own pathetic field.
A bitter grin slid across Plissiades' perfect features. All this "rescue" was no mercy. It was torture to her divine essence, one long curse of downed wings. Nephelarion revelled in the fathomless sky above the pointed spires of its grandiose majesty. Plissiades now had to content herself with a low view of Sophia's inner world. Humiliation pierced her sharper than any pain.
Aethelon's ghostly splendor evaporated, washed away by the hell of the present. It was not the memory that returned, but the scarring of the body. A trip to one of its magnificent border outposts had turned into an ambush by enemy factions.
A sudden impact shook the shuttlecraft, snapping Plissiades out of her meditation. The lights went out, leaving only purple flashes of alarm. The uncertain music of war played through the roar of engines on the limit - the unmelodic rumblings of traditional explosions mingled with the shrill whoosh and fffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz of energy bullets burning through the hull somewhere nearby. A cold burn of fear, unfamiliar and alien, pierced her arrogance for a moment. A shot! Another shot! The fastening by the chair cracked. The emergency siren sliced her ears, its shriek a funeral march for her former life.
And then the shuttle, a panting metal bird, made its final gesture. The ejection system kicked in with a brutal overload. Not a smooth ejection, an outburst. Like garbage. The white body, shrouded in a protective field, was thrown out into the night darkness, flashed by a wall of broken windows.
The free fall lasted a moment of eternity. The air slammed into his face. Instinct told me to spread my wings, to catch the flow... But the world stopped spinning. Instead of the sky - the gaping maw of the forest with clawed branches. Impact! Not on the ground at once, but on a living trap of wood. A deafening, crushing crunch from below mingled with her own scream, a stranger's, skewed with unbearable pain. The branches shredded the feathers of her snow-white wings, tore the silk of her clothes, threw her body down like a splinter. Another blow! A fiery wedge into her upper back, just below the shoulder blades. Her spine - the organ of her power, the fulcrum of her will and wings - coiled into a tight torture knot. The pure shock turned off the light in front of her eyes for a moment.
Silence. A deafening, deafening silence after the chaos, punctuated only by the dry crackling of the still-burning wreckage of the shuttlecraft somewhere off to the side. She lay on the blood-stained forest floor, unable to move anything below her neck. The world swam before her eyes - disturbed trees, tattered branches against a moon-distorted sky. The pretty face, usually expressing nothing but cold certainty, was squirming with physical pain and the chilling horror of realization. Infernal pain throbbed in his back and right wing, which protruded unnaturally and painfully to the side. His voice was unheeded; only quiet, hoarse moans escaped from his parched throat.
She tried to push the fear away with a mental tug, like she always did. To find a way out, control, power over the situation. But it only worked: turning her head, feeling the generous needles pierce her neck. To see bloody feathers and inaccessible feet a couple of meters away. To lie there. Breathing through the pain. Gathering the squandered dignity drop by drop. Not waiting for help. And even thoughts of revenge - that luxury of victors - were out of reach. There was only dirt and pain and the curse of powerless wings.
A few hours later...
A deep unnaturalness enveloped the place of the fall. The hushed rumble of battle was replaced by the absolute, almost sacred, silence of the forest. The rays of the sun, breaking through the vault of the green canopy, glided slowly across the ground. One of them, almost divine in its insistent radiance, fell upon Plissiades' face.
Her beautiful, though pale, cheeks and closed eyelids seemed carved from cold marble, only a soft blush emphasizing the life under her skin. The sunlight played in the long white lashes, cast a faint silver in the still strands of hair scattered over the dark earth. It was the light of a monument, not a creature of breath.
All around, like strange mushrooms after a rainstorm, the fragments of her fallen world were rising from the forest moss and clay: broken, charred panels of the Chelonok's hull with wiring harnesses sticking out like exposed nerves; warped power frames jammed black metal into the clay; small dead rubble of melted parts stuck in the soil loosened by the explosion. They were a foreign, violent outgrowth of the ancient forest.
The silence was not emptiness, but a full-sounding presence. The birds that had survived the rumble were already filling the air with uncomplicated but lively trills - the indifferent cheerfulness of nature. Leaves rustled high in the crowns, obeying the lazy breeze. Somewhere far away dripped moisture from the branches. This peaceful symphony contrasted with the drama that lay here.
Plissiades, by her very absolute calmness, this perfect sculpture under the sun, seemed the most motionless and mysterious detail in this landscape. Only the almost imperceptible, barely perceptible movement of her ribcage-a deep, tortured inhalation followed by a long pause before an equally silent exhalation-speaked of a life shackled in a stupor of pain and emptied strength. It was as if the earth itself temporarily held the angelic creature with her back pressed against the dirt, and her wings - helplessly spread and wounded - were the boundary between her heavenly past and her earthly captivity. The silence of the forest absorbed her moans, and the sun watered the forced weakness of the fallen star with light. She did not sleep - she existed on the edge of her senses, body stiff, mind clouded, immersed in a silent hell of stillness and physical torture.
The silence, lively and singsongy after the noise of the fall, was broken by a new sound. Not a rumble, but an almost naive clicking - Tap. Tap. - like light blows on the bottom of a woven basket. Through a clump of bushes to the right came a soft muttering, indistinct but clearly human: something about thorns, unwanted stems, and ripe bunches. The sounds drew closer, pushing the veil of the thicket.
The leaves moved more violently, and a ray of sunlight burst into the gap, illuminating a figure. It was a girl of perhaps eighteen. Her simple, homespun, protective-colored clothes blended into the forest, and only her face and dark cap of long, slightly disheveled hair stood out against the green. In her hand was a wicker half-filled with ruby berries. Her eyes, accustomed to looking for fruit in the foliage, were downcast... until they rose.
She stopped talking at half a word. And froze. The basket slipped from her weakened fingers, spattering scarlet berries across the moss carpet. She shrieked, stepping back involuntarily, her hand going to her mouth.
"Holy powers..." - I could not believe it," he said in a hushed whisper, full of primal horror at the unexpected sight of destruction and pain.
At the foot of the mangled, still smoking metal, amidst a pile of unnatural debris, against the peaceful moss, lay what seemed to be the embodiment of fallen majesty. A figure in white - mangled and stained with earth and blood - with a wing unnaturally pressed down. The face... The face of the angel, lifelessly pale beneath the frozen gold of dawn, possessed such swooning beauty that it crashed into memory like a vision. But nearby, the nightmare of war was smoking, and the body was broken.
Fear was replaced by an icy intelligence of analysis. The girl looked at the scene: the deep furrows in the ground from the fall, the broken branches, the unnatural tilt of the wing on the angel's back, the frozen suffering on the perfect face, more like a marble relief of Hell. My heart ached with pity. Wounded... Most likely mortally. She knew the Legends. She knew of the Angels of the Distant Cities of Aethelon. They were whispered about in the evenings around the campfire. Beings of unearthly beauty and incredible intelligence. Regal, powerful... and ruthless to the "inferior" races, which she herself undoubtedly was. The thought of the leering, proud stare, the arrogant judgment - flashed through her mind. They will despise us. Will consider it a blasphemy to touch us. Will put us to death for daring....
Fear wove its webs, but another spark ignited in the girl's chest. An ancient and profound one. Looking at this helplessness in the midst of cruel splendor and devastation, she suddenly realized with an eerie clarity: she couldn't. Couldn't turn away as if she hadn't seen it. She couldn't leave the victim behind. Not a beast, not a bird - anyone. Not even a Fallen Angel. It was blatantly wrong.
Her hand, trembling, dropped to her heart, clutching the rough fabric of her shirt. Her eyes clouded with the moisture of empathy.
"Oh, maiden... How on earth did you do that?" - she exhaled quietly, her voice trembling. Then, taking the deepest of breaths, as before a leap into icy water, the girl stepped firmly forward - to where the proud occupant of the Heavenly Towers lay, now but a wounded soul in the mud. Doubt was paved with rails of determination. To help. Not to be left in the lurch.
She knelt beside the snow-white creature, the shadow of her simple figure touching the helpless angel. Now face to face with the Legend that had become a reality of suffering, Sophia felt a strange thrill: a mixture of holy terror and an overwhelming need to reach out.
The fire in the hearth crackled its wooden ballad, casting dancing shadows on the log walls of the small hut. In the center of this humble world, on an old bed with sagging straw, lay a creature from another reality. Plissiades seemed a ghost, straying from the world of light into the rippling space of shadows. Her face, usually marble-cold, wore the blush of fever-unnatural and dangerous. A fine perspiration silvery on her forehead, her lips, dry and cracked, whispered incoherent words in the language of the Star Towers. Her angelic body, designed to soar above the world, fought internally - with inflammation, with pain, with the humiliation of diving into this fate. Her breathing was shallow, intermittent, like the fluttering of a caught bird.
Sophia, kneeling by the bed, was absorbed in a titanic task. Her dark hair was poking out from under her shawl, traces of soot from the hearth smearing her cheek. In her hands was a clay basin of thick ointment that smelled of honey, bitter herbs, and something animal. Her movements were painstaking, infinitely gentle and determined. She applied the ointment to the deep abrasions on Plissiades' arm, the heavenly skin, slightly glowing even in sickness, submitting to the earthly remedy. Then threw over her unpretentious flap of bandages.
But the main test lay where a large, luxurious wing humbly clung to his body. The left wing. The right wing... The right wing was the cause of the agony of hell. Sophia held her breath as she approached it. The unnatural curve, the broken feathers in clots of caked and fresh blood, the terrible curl of bare, glistening with moisture, muscles and tendons beneath the torn skin. Greatness turned into a ghastly wound.
Sophia touched the edge of the skin around the wound, barely touching it, just enough to apply the ointment. She didn't blink an eye.
Scream.
It wasn't a groan. It was a cold point thrust into the silence of the hut. Shrill, animal in sound, but with a metal of mad majesty and pain. Plissiades, who had seemed almost lifeless, arched on the bed, eyes wildly open-not seeing Sophia, but seeing only the inner abyss of anguish where the sanctity of her angelic essence had been desecrated by the touch and the wound. The wing twitched convulsively, like a nerve caught alive.
Sophia cringed to the floor, an icy wave of fear and guilt rushing to her heart. "Easy, easy, marvelous..." - She whispered surreptitiously, her voice trembling. She waited a second, two, until the spasm in her frayed wing disappeared, until the horrible scream was replaced by a quiet, almost bloodless moan, and Plissiades' tense fingers loosened the bedspread. Only then did Sofia continue, with even more care, with trembling hands but inexorable determination: ointment, bandaging - turning the wing into a thick, ridiculous bundle of bandages and lapping wipes.
Then it was the turn of the heavy majesty. Sophia unfolded and removed Plissiades' garment, which glittered with aquamarine threads and pearly fireflies, as reverently as before a holy veil. It was of indescribable beauty, magically light, but smelling of the bitterness of pain and the earth of the forest. Its priceless radiance was replaced by Sophia's simple, homespun, hastily tailored shirt, a coarse grayish linen, impossibly large on the angel's ethereal figure.
Sophia corrected the ridiculous object on Plissiades, her fingers unconsciously stroking the heavenly forehead. Only the crackling of the fire and the patient's hoarse breathing sounded in the silence of the hut.
"Get well, white falcon, get well..." - Sophia chanted, the bandage contrasting with the radiant beauty of her face. - "Let your veins be filled with gold, let your strength return to your wings..."
Her words were an incantation addressed to the three elements: to the power of the angelic nature, to her modest but tireless care, and to the mute log walls that now held the most marvelous and most terrible secret of Sophia's life. A greatness, subverted into the earthly rhythm of hearth hisses and whispered prayers.
Time flowed with thick honey and burning smoke. The first week in the hut on the edge of the village was a heavy lead stone on Sofia's shoulders. Day and night she was a shadow at the white-washed bedside, burning herself on the altar of unthinkable care. The night had become an agonizing watch. Sitting on a hard chair, bent over a body quivering with heat, compress cloths-forever damp-in her hands. Eyes, sunken from chronic sleep deprivation, inflamed, tracked every wrong breath, every dozing moan. She wrung herself out with a sponge - told tales meaningless to unconscious ears, changed the bandages on the horrible fracture of the wing (each time - with hardened heart, waiting for a new nightmarish cry), gently wiped the body with a cloth soaked in cool water, trying to bring down the persistent fever that nested inside the proud angelic body. The armor of Plissiades' flesh seemed to reflect death itself-her body, inconceivably resilient, fought fiercely, but the price was high: convulsions, searing heat, drops of alabaster blood seeping through the bandages at her collarbones.
The food became a silent battlefield. Sophia boiled broth from the game, mashed root vegetables, brought the pulp of sweet berries - crumbs of her world offered to the divine guest. But the answer was a terrible, absolute rejection. Even in delirium, when reason clouded, Plissiades' body resisted. Lips clamped tightly together, jaws becoming as if carved from granite. A churning of saliva, a gag reflex, a faint but inexorable turning of her head away from the impure, from her point of view, meal. It wasn't a whim - it was an instinct for blood purity. Sophia felt a cold wind of contempt wafting from this stillness. Sometimes, in a fit of despair, she prayed: "At least a spoonful, for the powers of heaven! I need strength!" - but her pleas were shattered by the patient's marble stubbornness. The angel fed only on pure water and the vague energy of the body's struggles.
Sophia's weariness no longer fit within the walls of the hut; its reflection lay across the village as well. The community whispered at the well, at the mill, in the stuffy forge. Children, squealing in the evening games, asked, "Where is Aunt Sophia?" and mothers only shook their heads, shrugging their shoulders helplessly. Sophia herself was rarely seen: a shadow with an empty basket instead of the full ones she used to carry, pale and droopy, with shaking hands unconsciously adjusting a dirty bandage on an invisible wound. At the sight of this people averted their eyes. "Quite withered," murmured muffled voices in the shadows of the houses, "not a blood in her face, as if she were a shadow walking. The fever has dried her up, has it?" "A longing has sucked her dry," answered others in the fields, "but the maiden was orphaned long ago. She hasn't returned from work now... I don't see her". Sofia rejected offers to help with household chores dryly and harshly, becoming an impregnable fortress. Her mission became a lonely candle flame in the wind, burning and ready to die out. Only the insistent smell of herbs and broth wafting from her hut connected her to the world, and even that was only a disturbing incomprehension.
The seventh dawn was dawning behind the black cloth of the frosted window. The hut, so full of the smoky breath of fever and silent moans for so many days, seemed to freeze in anticipation. Sophia, who had at last rolled off the death-wave of wakefulness, sat curled up by the stove. Her fingers still clutched the damp cloth, the last attribute of her sleepless watch. The dream was deep and unthinkable, like a fall into the abyss, but short and poisoned by images of scorched wings and hot burns under bandages.
Click! The dry, loud crack of a burned log in the stove went off like a gunshot. Sofia shuddered, as if struck by an unhealed wound. With an effort, as if lifting a slab of stone, she tore her eyelids away. The world floated in the gray light of morning, the smell of ash and medicinal bitterness.
And that's when she saw Him.
Not the first awakening in a half-slumber, with a misty gaze drifting beneath his eyelids, or a wheeze slipping back into delirious gloom. Consciousness lay on the bed. Plissiades' body was motionless, as if still a block of marble sculpted by pain. But the breathing... Every cell in Sophia knew it after seven nights of suffocating courtship. Now it was even, deep, commanding. Not scattered in fever, but focused, like a laser beam in a frowning gloom.
Eyes wide open. Violet deep, piercing. They were like two rain-washed skies suddenly opened after a long storm. But not washed and clear - but burned by lightning and streaked with steel. There was not an ounce of the ghostliness of fever in them, only an eerie, crystalline calculus. They absorbed the squalor of the hut: the sooty ceiling, the rough walls, the clay floor by the ashes of the hearth. They slid with cold, appraising indifference over the wounds on their own bodies, over the bandaged ugliness of the majestic wing. And finally... Stopped at Sophia.
Sophia felt that gaze like a physical touch - prickly ice on her skin. She froze under the examining eye. She saw her own shadow reflected in those starry depths: hair in a disheveled shawl, a dirty, patched shirt, inflamed eyes with the blue of hidden bruises, a face exhausted by lack of sleep to the point where the young girl resembled a haggard old woman. Plissiades wasn't just looking at an exhausted body-she was looking at the embodiment of human weakness sacrificed to divine life.
Not a sound. Only the hoarse crackle of dying embers and the deep, measured breathing of Angel, the patient jailer of his own suffering. The pain was no longer restrained by the immobilizing nets of unconsciousness. It was now forged in every nerve ending by the drive to consciousness. But no cry or moan escaped from her pale, tightly clenched lips. Only power over patience.
This awakening was not a miracle for Plissiades. For her it was a descent from painful darkness into the full, unbearable brightness of her own body's torture chamber. But beneath the helplessness-the glassy sail of a fractured wing-the fury of realization was maturing. And the silence that sat in the room was an oppressive union between the reef of Angel's wounds and the unsolicited, mercy-weary human detritus. The silence was not quiet; it hid a hum that tensed like the cord of a bow before a shot of stinging words or iron vengeance when the body would let it.
The icy silence between rescuer and rescued, drawn like a bowstring over an abyss of fear and pain, suddenly shattered.
BAM. BAM. BAM.
The heavy, insistent blows on the sturdy wooden door made the log walls shudder and the cinderblock crumble. Sophia jerked away from the bed, clutching her own shriek in the palm of her hand before it escaped her lips. Her heart was pounding as if it would burst through her sternum.
From behind the door, struggling against the wooden barrier, came a clot of life too loud for this barely breathing hut: a voice. Teenage, masculine, painfully familiar - the voice of Mickle, the neighbor boy, the handyman. Cheeky, young, soaked with satiety and health.
"Hey, Sophie? You all right there, you sizar?!" - came from the threshold. "Everyone has heard that you are not well, your beacon in the window is dim! The grandmothers at the lake whisper that Sophia has withered away! Here, I've brought you the proceeds!" An uncomplicated pause, a surprised sigh, and the voice grew louder: "Hoo! I've got a big duck! What a good one it was! You probably don't live in modesty, you good meat! Here, I brought it ready... Hey, Sof? Give me an ear, did you raise your hand at the door?"
Sofia stood between Angel's bed and the door to her home village, which had suddenly become a gateway to the scaffold. Mickle's gastronomic offer burned like a slap in the face. A whirlwind of panic rumbled in her head, which a moment before had been numbed by the pain of hell and the glow of other people's awareness: If he enters... If he SEES... As if by magic, she saw the whole village: curious old women, suspicious glances of men, a fairy fire of fear of everything unnatural. An ocean of trouble splashing danger right on her doorstep. Curses foxed through her thoughts, feverish and sharp: Why NOW? Why him? Why a grave pit instead of help?!
She cast a frantic glance at Plissiades. Angel's violet eyes, which had just measured her infirmity and fury of pain, now focused. Like the light of a flashlight spitefully casting a net of shadows. Without the slightest emotion - just seen. Saw the sizzling bonfire of fear burning Sophia from the inside out. Saw the feigned calm on her face, the mask cracking at the speed of her thoughts. The objects in the hut shrank: the shadow of her wing elongated Plissiades's chiseled features, the low rafters pressed down from above.
Sophia turned sharply toward the door. A gray light covered her slumped shoulders. Silence. Outside the door, an eagerness rumbled out of place, "Sophia? Why are you as quiet as a mouse under a broom...? Open the door!" - said a voice from the other side.
The silence in the hut was unnatural, almost palpable, like a fog of angelic reticence. Plissiades did not utter a sound. Her gaze, cold and unforgiving as a glacier under the stars, was fixed on Sofia. She wasn't just watching - she was analyzing. Every nerve that trembled in the girl's face, every drop of sweat that appeared on her temple, every suppressed breath - all of it was being weighed on the invisible scales of her powerful intellect. She saw not a human being-she saw an open book of fear, confusion, and abetted weakness. Her humiliation of helplessness began to crystallize into the first experimental growth of an idea.
Behind the door, human annoyance was bubbling. The knob creaked under Mickle's rough palm, the wood sagging pliantly. A creak. A ghostly slit opened in the wood, letting in a slice of dim light and the sound of a loud voice:
"...that bird is delicious, Sofya! I wish I could lick its paws..."
The sound was raw, carnal, like a fist hitting a lush painting of a solitary symphony of pain and strange affection. It physically tore at the connecting veil of silence that had fallen between angel and man.
Sophia darted a frantic glance from the ajar abyss to the bed. A moment of panic-and the decision seized like a spasm.
SPRING.
BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM!
Sophia didn't think; her body reacted with the instinct of a hunted animal. She pushed off the rough floorboards with her foot, and with the weight of her fallen axe, she slammed her shoulder and back into the oncoming door. The wood howled, shuddered, and closed with a sound as sharp as if the eighth wonder of the world had been severed, along with the gauntlet of hospitality.
Outside, there's a loud: "Uh-oh!" - Mickle's cry was a mixture of pain, fright, and deep, manly resentment. "I almost blew my cheek off! What have you got there, Sofka, a bear in hibernation, and inadvertently put its head under the door?! Look what kind of guards you've got!"
Sophia braced herself with her back against the trembling door. Her palms, flat and wet, dug into the rough wood. Her heart beat like it wanted to jump through her ribs and bury itself at the feet of a surprised Plissiades. Did you hurt yourself? Didn't see? God, I wish he hadn't...
The angel, the all-seeing center of this human storm, only micromoved his pupils. Their gaze crept from Sophia's slumped back to the ominous door vibrating with indignant cries, and back again. No fear, no protest. Just pure intellectual registration. This act of comic defense, seemed to her just another illustration of the chaotic and primitive emotionality of inferior beings. They make noise. They invade. They bring roast ducks. For Plissiades, this scene was a valuable first experiment: how a subject's stress response affects his ability to keep a secret. The results were recorded in Plissiades' whirlwind of absolute memory.
Sophia pressed her forehead against the cool, rough wood of the door. Each word was hard to get out through the lump of fear in her throat. Her voice wasn't deliberately hoarse-it was actually broken, cracked with sleep and nervous tension. She didn't speak out of breath, but almost a shriek, trying to block out her own doubts and Mickle's insistence:
"Mickle!... S-Listen!" - she shouted, exhaling sharply as if after a long run. The pause was a short, greedy gulp of air. "I-I'm terribly ill! I don't go out because... Everything inside is burning! The sweat, the chills..."
She pressed harder against the door, as if the pain could be displaced by the pressure. Her eyes darted wildly toward the bed, where Plissiades's violet stars shone unbroken, then back to the gap above the latch, to the void.
"You can't be in here!" - The voice soared to a falsetto of despair. "That sticky contagion ... circling! God forbid you should grab it yourself!" - A pause. The thought of danger to others, real or imagined, gave her a modicum of conviction. She exhaled, and her voice became lower, huskier, almost a whisper, adding, "I can't get any air... I can't breathe... You don't want to go to bed, do you?"
Another convulsive breath. This conversation was turning into torture. It had to end, to get off. "Thank you. For the duck... Thank you so much!" - the words of gratitude sounded exhausted, hastily, as if discarded as an unnecessary weight. "Just... just... just LEAVE it at the door! Okay? I'll... pick it up later. When I have... strength..."
The end of the sentence hung in the silence, which was immediately broken by the icy chord of her own voice. It intensified sharply, changed to an almost hysterical demand through the wood to the world beyond the threshold: "GET OUT! HEAR THIS?! YOU NEED TO DRINK WEED! STOP AND GO! I CAN'T RIGHT NOW!!!"
The last "You can't!" came out of her lips almost like the cry of a hunted animal, desperation and fear taking over. She was silent, breathing hard, leaning against the door, unable to move. Her gaze dropped down to the cracks in the old floorboards. Had he believed it? Oh gods, let him believe...
They froze for a second outside. Then I heard a grudgingly agitated voice: "All right, all right, all right, don't shout! You're waving your illness like a flag... I left it. Well, get well, apparently... oh..." Footsteps, hesitant, receding. The sound of a clay bowl being set against something wooden at the very threshold.
Sofia allowed herself to hunched over, letting out through the tears that sprang to her eyes the strain of the last minute. Plissiades' gaze was still blazing on her back. A cold, unappreciative contemplation of human hysteria and primitive lies. The silence returned, but now it was electrified by the contrast-the fresh cutting prayer of lies of lurching words and the platinum silence of Angel lying in the shadows.
Sophia had to shift. Every muscle groaned under the strain of exhaustion, but the bed of the celestial being pulled like a magnet. The weight of the unthinkable task of caring for an angel had used up the last drops of her strength. The icy exertion at the door, the running for water at the wild spikes of fever in the sick, the nights by the hearth-all compressed into leaden fatigue. But to give up? Not in her nature. Stumbling to her feet, she staggered like a drunk, the world swam in greenish blurs. Her fingers dug into the edge of the rough table, the only point of support in the swaying reality. The movement toward the bed became an agonizing procession through his own weakness. Her hand reached out, rested on the harsh log of the headboard. And then she collapsed on the stool next to her. Her back slumped, her body turned into a bag of bones. Her forehead was covered with sticky vapor. This proximity to the source of her fears and hopes came at the cost of the drops of bloody sweat that her body wiped away.
Plissiades kept her gaze fixed on him. Violet pupils, colder than the mountain keys of Aethelon, dissected every detail. The upturned hand... The hesitation at the table... The shaky step... The slumping of the stool... This three cubit journey was an unfolded scroll of human weakness. And the feeling of an insidious prick of intolerable humiliation swelled again at the base of his wings. Hide? Her? Her Palatine ring should have been gleaming on the throne. Thoughts, honed like constellation knives, plucked at reality: This is sacrilege. A spit in the face of the divine!
But on the crest of the wave of rage was a flash of icy logic. The mind's command charts were rapidly lining up. Fact: this human mediocrity, this Sophia, she had kept me alive. Against heaven's contempt for the inferior and the likely danger to her pathetic self. Conclusion: the act broke out of the patterns of rationalizations of insanity or fear, became an anomaly. Anomalies deserve research. The strategic calculus of the moment: "Life itself is of undeniable value, even in this humiliating cocoon of ashes. Saving me is worthy of a favorable evaluation, no matter how repulsive the circumstances. But why? To recognize the anomaly is my interest. For what is such a sacrifice?"
Silence hung a thick web before Plissiades' voice cut through it, hoarse and unaccustomedly faint, like the rustle of parched wings:
"- Why?"
The word sounded like a blade in a velvet sheath, silent but with indelible steel at its core. Sophia flinched, startled, like a frightened bird. For a moment, her eyes - sunken, like tired mirrors - reflected pure shock. The hoarse echo seemed like thunder after a week of mute stone.
Surely I know, ran the icy corridors of her mind. Their human "morality" is the crooked support of their nothingness. Sticky webs of debt woven with tears and fear. Chains of primitive reflexes called "goodness". But the hypothesis needed confirmation. It was an experiment of pure consciousness.
"- Why did you save me?" - squeezed out Plissiades louder, forcing the weakness to bend under an effort of will. Her pale lips stretched into the semblance of a grateful smile, a gesture as unnatural as a flower on an icy rock.
Push through altruism, whispered the cold algorithm of her thoughts. Let her see weakness, let her see an answering shadow of gratitude. Disgusting but necessary mimicry.
She caught every microscopic wave in Sophia's territory: dilated pupils (fear? compassion?), the sudden softening of features at the sound of pain (pity? duty?). This algebra of the human soul was an exact science to her. Which particular string was touched by her question? Divine faith? The tribal "do not forsake your own"? The dusty fetish of abstract "virtues"?
To endure this beastly semblance of a temple... Her touch, the stench of earth and cheap dedication? The bitterness of humiliation flared like a star supernova beneath a broken wing. Her place was on a pedestal of sapphires and songs of Eternity, not in the bed of an orphan! But the cold seed of logic was sprouting through the ashes of rage. The preservation of this divine life is an act that transcends the filth of fulfillment. From a purely practical standpoint... worthy. Technically.
The scales were wavering... But why? An intellectual paradox. A motive hidden in the chaos of the human gut demanded extraction for the sake of future moves. Tactics dictated: build a semblance of a bridge. Create a trusting rapport.
Plissiades moved her hand slowly over the coarse linen blanket with a faint moan, an act brought to automaticity by a nerve. Her palm turned toward Sophia, fingers relaxed but not reaching out, a gesture of eager but restrained gratitude. An empty token of generosity without reward. Outwardly, a victory of humility. Inwardly - the first move in a game where the pieces are another's conscience and her steely will. This girl must feel that behind the angel's suffering lies the poisonous honey of understanding. Let her think that the heart of the great being has been softened by the sacrificial bowl and the odors of bitter herbs.
A quiet exhalation, more like a moan of exhaustion, escaped from Sofia before words. Her gaze slid to the bandaged wing, where the rough bandages revealed a terrible fracture, and then to the angel's face, burning with violet-cold fire. Her voice sounded muffled and hoarse, torn by weeks of sleepless fighting:
"I...I don't know how else..."
She averted her eyes, her tired fingers nervously fumbling over the edge of her dirty apron. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts in a haze of extreme exhaustion.
"Would lying down... leave it there in the woods? In the rain? With such... wounds?" - the words sounded not like a question to an angel, but like an agonizing appeal to herself, to some inner law. A bitter crease lay at the corners of her lips. - "She'd be dead by morning... or the crows would be circling..."
There was a moment's silence. The silence of the hut was poured over with a chilling dew of superficially expressed feeling. Sophia jerked her shoulder in a restrained shudder. The movement was abrupt and emphasized.
The silence hung heavy after Sophia's confused words. The girl didn't look up, her fingers still nervously tugging at the rough fabric of her apron, as if trying to grasp at something familiar in this unthinkable dialog. The shadow of painful images-the raven, the rotting flesh beneath the broken wing-still lingered in the heated air of the hut.
And then it sounded.
Plissiades' voice remained weak, but gained an unnatural clarity like frosted glass, "- I see."
One word. Cold. smooth. It cut off Sophina's confused thoughts. The girl's hand froze on her apron.
Angel slowly, as if overcoming an inhuman heaviness in every muscle and bone, opened his eyes a little wider. The violet depth of his pupils caught that very moment of frozen infirmity in Sophia's eyes. And then Plissiades did something unimaginable.
Her pale lips stretched into the semblance of a smile. Soft, warm, grateful. Exactly the semblance. The corners of her lips trembled faintly under the effort of will. His forehead remained marble-smooth, without a wrinkle of sincere feeling. His eyebrows lifted only slightly, seemingly in a gesture of genuine emotion, but more like a bird of prey hatching prey.
"Not everyone..." - The voice was suddenly quieter, warmer, almost trembling with an imagined emotion. Sophia was involuntarily alarmed. - "Not everyone would be willing to save... a creature like me."
The last words were spoken with such an artificially emphasized humble note that goosebumps of tingling untruth ran down Sofia's back. But an unnamed impulsive shiver of sound subconsciously traveled along the strings of the girl's hitherto lonely heart.
"Thank you, Sophia," Plissiades added almost in a whisper, deliberately putting a strange, almost tender undertone into Sophia's name. She even moved her lying hand weakly, as if trying with an incredible effort to reach Sophia's palm, but failing to reach. The gesture was strangely helpless and contrasted wildly with the regal equanimity of her features.
The light haze of the past three days dulled the sharpness of the nightmare in the hut, but did not dissolve it. Sophia snapped out of her voluntary shutter. She reappeared in the village streets: her shoulders square, her step firm, her eyes no longer sunken. The pallor of her cheeks had given way to the light blush of her walks to the stream for clean water, and the purple shadows beneath her eyelids had been replaced only by thin, bluish crescents, mute evidence of a still shallow sleep. But it was only a carefully constructed semblance of life. Beneath the tranquil surface there was a deafening unease splashing about. Her new look included an untouchable rule that grew like a thorn around the hut: do not enter the house. "You've had a hard time, Sofya, are you relieved?" - Agafya shouted once at the well, winking slyly at her neighbor. Sofia only nodded, carefully untying the can: "The sickness is gone, aunt. God has had mercy. But... the cough still bothers me a lot sometimes. I'm afraid it's contagious. It's better not to come in!"
The lie was embedded in the threshold. The word "ailment" that Sophia had thrown out at the well had stuck to the hut like a stigma. The village recoiled. The eyes on the hut became sharp - a plague house. The women crossed themselves as they passed by, the children shunned it. Sofia received the pots and pans with food only on the porch, through the slit of the ajar door. She heard whispers: "...how can she be alone there, poor thing...a cursed place...".
Inside, a different kind of pestilence reigned. The air was thick with the unspeakable. Plissiades lay shining with the whiteness of her skin of dead-artificial pearls against the smoky walls. Her violet eyes, perpetually open, tracked Sophia's every movement with the cold precision of an anomaly seeker. Angel hardly spoke at all. Only the occasional - sharp as a crystal shard - question or command: "Water," "Bandage rot."
The realization hit like a physical blow. Plissiades tried to rise, but only the agony in her broken back and the dead weight of her legs answered. Not a single impulse. Not a flutter of muscle under the foreign skin. The paralysis was absolute. The bitter truth pierced her consciousness with an icy needle: her body had become an earthly prison. Celestial posture, soaring stride? Disintegrated by the mists, buried in the wilderness of this foul world. She is a prisoner of her own flesh.
Space had shrunk to the size of a hut. The world remained behind thick walls of rough wood, accessible only through narrow window slits and scraps of sound: the coarse stirrings of men at the well, the crying of a child, the inarticulate hum of the market on Thursdays. Her all-seeing eyes of violet ice had become her only instrument. Sophia, shadowing around the hut, her rituals, her micro-grimaces, her long stares into the stove - everything was recorded, sorted. The village appeared as a chaotic code through the slits in the curtains: here was the crooked line of an old woman's back carrying a bundle of kindling; here was the disk of the sun on a muddy puddle. Helplessness became a millstone for the mind.
Helplessness did not kill the thought-it sharpened it into a diamond. Lying captive in her own broken body, Plissiades felt a bitterness sharper than any physical pain. The stuffiness of the hut, the squalid reality of the village behind the clouded glass, the touch of the coarse homespun cloth-all were a mockery of her essence. The whiteness of her skin seemed to absorb the filth of the world from which her wings had once soared. But despair is for the weak. Or stupid.
The violet gaze, unbroken from Sophia, became her tool of exploration. This earthy girl... A trembling vessel of fear, guilt, and a primitive thirst for significance. Her weakness was as obvious as a crack in a clay jug. Her fear of the village, her reticence, those piled-up lies about "sickness" all strained the strings of her soul to the point of ringing. Plissiades saw every nervous tic, every attempt to avoid her icy gaze.
Potential. This creature had the potential of a tool. It needed only to be forged with the right manipulation. The prospect of recovery shone before her inner gaze with more than purity - it was the only possible avenue for her fallen greatness. And the path lay through Sophia. How? All she had to do was find the levers.
The first outlines of a plan were snaking in her mind: to strengthen her duty (she was her cross!), to reinforce it with the non-existent hope of being chosen ("Only you are capable, Sophia"), to isolate her finally from the village, replacing the outside world with her own dependence. Let fear be replaced by blind service. Watching Sofia timidly place the bowl of chowder, Plissiades was already building a bridge to the future - the sacrificial love of a fool for his executioner and savior at the same time. Every false smile of the angel, every feigned word of gratitude, was the first step on the journey from the cot in the mud back to Aethelon's porcelain attic. The price? Paltry. But...
When Sophia was not in her native hut...
A slit of light from the ajar door cut through the semi-darkness. Mickle, awkward and worried ("How sick... I wonder..."), staggered to the threshold. His rough fingers clawed at the doorjamb. Words stuck in his throat. His gaze fixed on her.
Plissiades. Not a dream. Not a delusion. A creature of otherworldly, frightening beauty, mangled and caught unawares on a filthy cot. Shining violet eyes, wide open, collided with his dazed ones. Face to face. A momentary shock hung in the air.
She fluttered her wing - trying instinctively to take off, but to no avail. No escape, no defense. Her first thought was a needle: The whole plan was a pitiful handful of ashes. Disaster. A cold wave of pure, clammy fear ran down my back...