Retired From War, Surrounded by Angels

Chapter 1

A Little Note on the World

Before we begin, there are a few things you should know about this world.

The world is made up of floating islands suspended high above an endless sea. The islands do not drift. They have remained fixed in the sky for as long as anyone can remember, with travel between them done by wing, airship, or flying mount.

Humans are a little different here. Human women are called angels and are born with wings, while human men are wingless. Other intelligent species exist too, including harpies and fairies.

Throughout the story, women and girls are used for females of any intelligent species. Angel refers specifically to a human woman.

Skybirds are large, beautiful birds commonly ridden between the islands. Pegasi are much rarer and more powerful, prized as mounts and capable of carrying riders across great distances.

And lastly, I hope you enjoy the story!

* * *

People say the end of a war should feel like sunrise, like the world itself exhaling.

Six years of bleeding for those two words, and they still landed wrong when I finally heard them spoken aloud.

It’s over. Valen, my Pegasus, banked through a column of warm morning air and Eden Isle spread out beneath me, all golden domes and white marble and angels with broad wings, and I thought: sure, sure it is.

Valen felt it first, the way he always did.

He dipped his head and pumped his great white wings in a slow, celebratory rhythm, as if the city itself had sent up a signal he could read better than I could.

I eased my grip on the reins and let him carry us lower, and the full picture of the capital opened beneath us like something out of a painting they’d hang in an academy to make young men feel patriotic.

Eden Isle was beautiful. There was no other word honest enough.

Dozens of floating islands clustered around the central mass of the capital, each one connected to the next by elegant stone bridges that arched high over open sky, their pale arches strung with banners of white and gold.

Crystal waterfalls poured from the island edges in long, silver curtains that caught the morning sun and scattered it in every direction before dissolving into the clouds below.

Gardens terraced the slopes of the upper districts, riots of green and flowering color draping over limestone walls, and the residential towers rose above them, pale marble buildings capped with gold and copper, their windows glinting.

Farther out I could see the sprawl of the merchant quarter, the wide squares and market arcades, the open-air stadium that seated forty thousand on ceremony days and had been used as a field hospital for three of the six years I was away.

The great temples on the eastern bluff stood silhouetted against the sky, their bells already ringing somewhere faint and distant.

And everywhere, the sky was full. Angels in their dozens, wings catching thermals, swooping between islands.

Pegasi in small groups, riders in bright cloth rather than armor for the first time in years.

Great skybirds carried merchants, families, and nobles on broad feathered backs, their colorful plumage flashing white, blue and gold as they glided between the islands.

Civilian airships trailed colored streamers. From up here, the capital looked like it had already forgotten everything.

I had to admire the efficiency of that.

I remembered the last time I’d seen Eden Isle from the air.

Three years into the war, riding escort for a supply convoy after the eastern blockade broke.

The sky had been empty except for military patrols and the occasional courier.

The gardens below were stripped for growing food.

The market squares were closed. The stadium was marked with long red pennants to identify it to pilots as a protected medical site.

Smoke hung over the harbor from a loyalist counter-strike the night before.

That was the city I’d been fighting to defend for the past six years.

Not this one. This one was a stranger wearing familiar clothes.

I left home at twenty thinking the whole business would be sorted out in a season.

That was the word going around when the queen’s brother raised his banner and declared the succession illegitimate.

A season, maybe two. The old veterans smiled at us in the way that veterans do, that smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, and we didn’t understand it yet.

I understood it now. I understood it in a way I couldn’t unfeel on a morning like this, with the bells ringing and the banners flying and the city gleaming like it had been polished in honor of the occasion.

Davan would have loved this. He’d been from a small livestock island three days south of the capital and had always talked about visiting Eden Isle like other men talked about paradise.

He died in the fourth year at a ridge engagement that nobody important enough had ever bothered to name.

Tam died eight months after that. Renn made it to the fifth year.

I stopped counting names somewhere around the middle of year five because counting made it harder to function and a captain who couldn’t function got people killed.

The irony was not lost on me that the one who’d made it back was the one too stubborn to properly grieve.

Valen descended through a warm updraft and the formal palace district resolved itself below us, the great complex of white towers and ceremonial lawns set on the highest platform of the central island.

The grounds were already filling. I could see rows of soldiers in ceremonial armor on the marble steps, the glint of polished plate in the morning light, the organized movement of palace staff in white-and-gold livery.

Preparation for the ceremony. Preparation for exactly the kind of public event I had been quietly dreading since the general’s aide delivered the invitation three weeks ago with a formal seal.

He had that expression of official pleasure that means attendance is not optional.

My stomach tightened. Not from nerves, exactly.

More from the awareness that in a few hours people would clap their hands together and say my name and mean it as a compliment, and I would have to stand there and accept it while knowing all the names that deserved to be said alongside mine and never would be.

Honor is a strange currency. You can’t spend it on the dead.

Valen touched down on the ceremonial landing field with the skill that had made us famous in the Corps, barely a ripple of impact, his wings folding smooth and close.

The smell of the place reached me immediately, fresh-cut grass and stone and somewhere the distant sweetness of the garden terraces, and underneath it all the faint metallic bite of the city, ancient stone and old ambition and ten thousand years of accumulated power.

I swung down from the saddle and landed on both feet and stood there for a moment in the morning sun.

The palace rose ahead of me. The banners moved in the wind. Somewhere overhead, three angels in white ceremonial flight crossed the sky in loose formation, their shadows sweeping the grass in long quiet arcs.

Six years. I was home. Or close enough to it that the difference would have to wait until tomorrow to matter.

* * *

The guards at the landing field were polite about it, which was almost worse than if they’d been formal.

Two of them, tall women in ceremonial plate with white-plumed helmets, fell into step on either side of me without a word and steered me toward the palace entrance like I was a package that needed delivering to a specific address by a specific time.

I didn’t resist. Six years of taking orders had trained the resistance out of me on questions like this one.

We moved through the outer grounds along a path of pale limestone that curved beneath flowering arches.

Palace staff moved in the opposite direction, carrying things, checking lists, doing the invisible labor that made grand occasions look effortless.

Through the archways I caught flashes of the city beyond the palace walls, the banners stirring in the morning wind, the distant sound of a crowd already gathered and already making the kind of noise that carries.

The ceremonial courtyard was vast and open to the sky, ringed by tiered stone galleries packed from bottom to top with citizens, soldiers, nobles, foreign dignitaries, and anyone else the palace had seen fit to invite.

I had been in a siege. I had been in a cavalry charge with sixty riders and everything going wrong at once.

Neither of those had made me feel quite as exposed as walking into that courtyard in a clean uniform while several thousand people craned their necks to see who was arriving.

A military band was playing something stately and ornamental from the upper gallery.

Veterans in polished ceremonial armor stood in two long rows up the marble steps, their faces schooled into the blank professional expression I recognized from every formal parade I’d ever suffered through.

I took my place among the other honorees near the front.

There were eight of us. A few I recognized, officers I had crossed paths with across the years, and we acknowledged each other with the specific wordless nod that says I know what you went through without either of us having to perform the fact of it.

One of them, a broad-shouldered general with a scar across his chin, caught my eye and tilted his head very slightly in the direction of the packed galleries.

I took that to mean welcome to the spectacle. I agreed with the sentiment.