Chapter 33 Feather
Feather
Iwasn’t sure how long Gavriel flew. His wings of light never faded, and his hold on me never slackened. He sang the entire time, and I listened, trying to remember the melodies and lyrics. I knew some of them, but many I could tell were his own compositions.
It made the helplessness I felt less onerous. And I could sense his joy at traveling to the Celestial Realm. But after what felt like days of flying, I could also feel his frustration and despair. And hear it in his songs.
On my part, my mind had grown almost as calcified as Sanctuary had seemed.
My spirit felt like the thinnest of bone china: fragile and translucent.
Already cracking and ready to break entirely at the slightest disruption.
I had no energy to sing in my mind, or create memories to share with him.
When Gavriel dipped into my thoughts, it was as if he were calling from one shore to the other across a vast ocean. Communication was impossible.
I know you can’t speak, Feather, he said into my mind. But I hope you can still hear me. Rafe spoke to me, shared something with me, before we left. Before he… flew away.
I was glad he stopped there. I was barely holding myself together, and hearing even a thought that Rumple was dead, unmade, would break me completely.
He believes the void is what may save you. He says it was what kept him alive, in the Abyss. And I think he’s right. I can sense those currents moving through you, small wisps of the void breathing energy into the shadows that lie under your skin. It’s keeping your body alive.
He laughed, and the sound almost made my heart thump.
I concentrated on feeling what he had mentioned, though my thinking was growing hazier by the hour.
Was the Abyss sustaining me somehow? Perversely, I liked thinking it could be true.
That I was doing the angelic equivalent of growing gills and breathing water.
No, that I was like one of those microscopic beasties, the ones that looked like they had butts for faces, and baby shrimp arms for legs.
Tardigrades. They could survive in space, in a complete vacuum, being beaten on by x-rays, starved, dumped in toxic goo, digested by an entire high school football team on chili dog night, frozen, anything.
Yeah, I was a Feather-shaped tardigrade, in suspended animation, breathing the void like the unkillable bad-ash I had always been.
I’m grateful to the void, Gavriel sent, echoing my own thoughts. Well, echoing the boring parts of my thoughts. I really wished I could move my lips and impress him with my scientific knowledge and stunning metaphors. Grateful to it for keeping you alive.
He started singing again, and I made a fuzzy mental note to teach him some more peppy tunes. I didn’t think the emo songs he was on now were exactly the sort of jaunty numbers that would see us back to my other mates.
What does it say about me that after a lifetime of fighting the Abyss, doing everything I could to eradicate it, and swing the balance to the light…
I would be grateful to it now? Have I lost my direction?
I could sense he meant that question in more than one way.
Perhaps that is why I fly and fly with no direction or guidance.
If the Singer of All Songs had blessed me on this journey, in these thoughts, wouldn’t She have sent something to guide me home?
Has She forsaken us?
I wanted to tell him to cheer the fudge up.
I could feel the weight of his fears and doubts pulling him down, away from the path that I knew led to my other two mates.
The closer we got to them, the more I felt the residue of the silver line that was strung like fragments of spider silk across the void.
But I was stone in his arms, weighing him down as well. And his angst was infectious.
I could feel him losing hope. Following logic down a path that led to nowhere good.
I couldn’t help in any other way, but I was good at impossible things.
And if the only thing I had left that I could do was hope, then I would hope with all my remaining strength, while he flew.
So I let my mind narrow down to a pinprick of energy.
One small, glittering scrap of light, of faith. And I believed.
I believed in Gavriel’s strength. I believed the Singer of All Songs had Her eye on us. I believed that we would make it home.
My tiny pinprick soul clicked its glittering shoes together three times, clapped its tired hands at the endless void, and said a hopeful choo-choo under its breath.
I believed, because I could never accept that this was the way the story ended.
And then, at some point, somewhere in the void, I slipped back into the numb dream state I’d been in before in Sanctuary, after I’d made love with Rumple for the first time. I was particles again, and there was no pain, so that was good.
It had to be good, right? Not being hurt anymore. Not feeling anything at all.
Then I felt my eyes close, and knew it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.
It really was the end.