Chapter 37 #2
I fidgeted awkwardly, not at all sure what to say. “Um, sure. I mean, you came out to help us get back to the Limen, so we’re kinda even.” Then I noticed the Head Guide’s wings. They had been shredded. “What happened to your feathers?” I gasped, horrified.
Tradition straightened, holding their tattered wings out proudly on both sides, showing them off.
“I learned how to love. From you.” They seemed overjoyed to see the missing patches, that resembled a kindergarten classroom glockenspiel missing many of its keys.
But their face was wreathed in smiles. “Did you know, Great Soul, that when you give up your feathers here, there is no pain? And there is such joy in the sacrifice. In seeing your own soul being used to create something new. I never understood why parents on Earth—” They moved forward suddenly, but Gavriel extended his wings of light and stopped the Head Guide’s momentum.
They bowed again, flushed with embarrassment.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I just… I’m so grateful to you, Leader Feather.
For showing the beauty in sacrifice. I made you these. ”
They had a bunch of roses in one hand, tiny pink buds that hadn’t opened yet. I stepped around Gavriel and accepted them, taking a deep sniff. “Thank you so much. They smell amazing,” I said truthfully, offering them up to Gavriel.
He leaned down, placing me squarely in front of his torso while he took a short sniff. “Very nice,” he gritted out when I leaned back against his sudden, raging erection.
Pervert, I thought.
Don’t kink shame me, he replied.
Perception cleared his throat and moved past Tradition, who was now bowing to me yet again.
I enfolded Percy in a hug, and he clasped hands with Gavriel before explaining what had happened here.
“For the first months, we had no external source of power. All the former Guides and many of the Protectors gave up feathers to help keep the younger ones replenished, and to create more space in the actual Limen as well. When I told Imriel what they were doing, well…” He backed up and led us to where they had been looking.
“Precious!” I shouted when a woman who had been kneeling moved, and my glittery daughter’s form was revealed.
She whirled around, her multi-colored eyes flashing, and yelled “Mama!” She flung herself across the space between us, embracing me and covering me with her signature mixture of sticky, roasted marshmallow goo and glitter.
I noted that many of the smiling Angeli nearby were covered with patches of the same glittery paste, and wondered at it.
Every last one of them was smiling indulgently at my daughter, like doting aunts and uncles, as she jabbered in her usual mix of demonic and baby talk.
I peppered her face with kisses, noting how much she’d grown in the months since I’d seen her. I was grateful she even remembered me.
I felt a pulse of sadness in the feather on my chest, and glanced at Gavriel.
Before I could hand her to him, her dark wings bristled with excitement.
“Gaga!” she shouted and threw herself just as excitedly into his embrace.
She seemed extremely worried when she noted his missing limbs, but then he extended his new wings, and her eyes went saucer-wide.
She stroked through the light-feathers with one gentle hand, making cooing noises.
“Where’s her puppy?” I asked, and at least half of the previously smiling Angeli adopted expressions of concern. Well, okay, maybe terror.
“DADO!” Precious shouted, obviously understanding what I’d been saying, because she was a total genius. In less than a breath, an enormous, silvery-gray beast came racing out of the clouds—no, through a cloud wall.
One Angelus grumbled, “I just built that,” but no one else complained.
“This is Shadow?” I wondered, petting the enormous mastiff-looking beast. He’d been a blindingly pure white when I left, but now he was a shimmering hematite. A very familiar color—the precise shade of the void-matter under my skin. “Why’s he gray now?”
“His diet,” Sunny said with a long-suffering sigh. “He won’t eat anything but burned marshmallows.”
“I’ll correct that soon enough,” Perception said, steel in his tone.
“Ooh, Perception, are you the zookeeper here?” I teased.
He rolled his eyes at me, but Sunny sent me a thought.
More like a headmaster. Professor Perception, He’s Not Mad, He’s Disappointed.
I think it suits him; a whole lot of the younger ex-Protectors have been having kinky sex fantasies about him calling them in for discipline in his “office” after class.
I giggled, and let it go. Except… “Can everyone still hear all the thoughts?” That could get really weird for Percy. And for me, considering how much horizontal catching up I’d been doing with my mates.
Sunny wiggled a hand back and forth, but gently pulled me along the cloud wall to sit on the ground next to what looked like a basketball-sized mud puddle.
“More or less. I can’t hear the more mature Angeli.
And you’ve always been a special snowflake, so stop worrying.
” She smirked. “Though we do all still have ears, so you might want to stuff a sock in your mouth. Or Ry’s.
What have you been doing to that boy, birch? He’s a screamer.”
I felt my cheeks flame. “Things, Miss Merge Expert. Things. So what are we looking at?”
I peered up at Gav, who was holding Precious and eating marshmallows—well, mostly pretending to eat them and sneaking them to Shadow behind his back. Truth hunkered down next to us, and stuck his whole hand into the mud, then lifted it to his mouth.
“What in the name of sweet baby pickles, Truth?”
“I’m mining soulfire,” he explained after he’d swallowed. He had an enormous glowing mud mustache, and I had to laugh. “Try some. Sunny likes to sing hers into truffle form, but I prefer it straight from the source.”
I dipped a finger in. Sure enough, it tasted better than the finest chocolate fondue I’d ever had, but the zing it gave me made it clear it was pure power.
“This makes no sense at all,” I mumbled around a mouthful.
Sunny was dipping a small cup into the puddle, and handing it to the others behind us.
“Does it need to?” Truth said, smiling. All the other High Angeli, with the exception of Gavriel and Perception, had wandered off and were methodically looking around on the ground for more soulfire springs, like beachcombers, or treasure hunters.
“The Limen was never meant to sustain Celestials. Perception says Imriel hinted that he gave some extra power”—Truth slapped a hand over his mouth at the slight lie—“but I worked out pretty fast that Imriel actually sacrificed some of his own soulfire to provide these… upwellings.”
“Imriel did this?” I asked, glancing at Sunny. She shrugged, and I could tell the jury was still out for her.
But Truth went on. “I’m almost certain what he’s doing is on the magnitude of a Great Sacri… No. It’s close to that, though. Close to a Great Sacrifice. He’s given up something significant so that we could all be out here.”
I knew Truth couldn’t say it if it wasn’t precisely accurate, so I accepted it.
“Well, good. We’re kind of refugees, aren’t we?
” I stared at the wall. “That seems like the kind of thing a leader ought to do. Take care of their people when they can’t get home.
” Although for some reason, it didn’t feel exactly like home.
Home was where my loved ones were. “No one can get back in?”
“Not even Shadow, and Imriel thought that might work. The temple puppies have always been special. We’ve all tried, just to see. But you know what? Gavriel hasn’t ever gone through the gate; he could still…”
“No,” my mate said, settling down next to me and dipping a marshmallow into the cup of liquid, then offering it to me. “I have all I need here.”
Truth burped at that. “Maybe not everything. You know you could go in and back out. You’d get your Celestial gift.” His eyes were troubled. “We may be out here for a very long time, and we don’t know what we’ll need. Percy says Imriel had something to send out anyway.”
And that was how, not two hours later, we found ourselves at the Celestial gate, tying Gavriel up. For some reason, he’d asked Mikhail to do the knots, even though he’d seen clear evidence of my knotting abilities in Sanctuary. He’d mumbled something about “my sort of knots” being “private play.”
Whatever. He’d agreed to go through, as long as we had a tether on him to yank him back if the gate stopped working or something.
I mentioned that he was still glitter-speckled, even after our trip through the Abyss, and they might just throw him out.
He said he didn’t care, and that all the realms could use a little more sparkle.
I sighed in agreement, noticing the tiny dots of glitter on the ground all around us.
Most of it was Precious’s, though some had fallen off Mikhail’s t-shirt.
“What I wouldn’t give for a hot glue gun and enough glitter to actually do something with it. I’m an artist, trapped for the foreseeable future in a world with no art.”
Hope frowned at me. “We have musical instruments, and our voices. We can dance. And there are odd plants growing on the newest sections of the Limen. We’ll harvest them, weave yarn, and do holy macramé.”
I argued with her about the hierarchy of art forms, trying not to look at Gavriel, and pretending that I wasn’t nervous about what was about to happen. I had plenty of past trauma from being cut off from my beloved soulmates by this very same gate.
“That’s enough riling up the Missus, birch. Come kiss Gavriel goodbye.” Sunny took my hand in hers and walked me over to him.
“Mik, you made it too tight. Loosen it a bit!” Gavriel was buck naked except for the braided rope of golden soulfire he’d produced from his vast reserves.