Chapter 18
ABADDON
My ward doesn’t seem to be faring too well in her physical conditioning.
“You’re injured,” I remark, finding her resting on a bench outside the training dome, hidden in the overhanging shade. She lies on her back, a bag of ice draped over half her face. Even if I can’t see it, I can sense the blooming bruise on her cheek.
“Hello, Abaddon,” she replies without moving. “Good afternoon to you too.”
“Should I send for a healer?” If I weren’t one of the worst healers known to my kind, I would attempt it myself. Unfortunately, I’m likely to do more harm than good. Perhaps I should keep a healer on staff, from now on, if she is this clumsy and fragile.
She removes the bag of ice from her face, revealing her scraped and swollen cheek. I’m unable to withhold my frown upon seeing it. It’s a miracle that whatever the girl did to her face managed to miss her eye, for it’d likely be swollen shut now.
“I’m fine,” she grunts, groaning as she moves to stand up.
I don’t know if I should offer her my hand or not, so I watch as she slowly comes to her feet. My training will allow her to focus on something less prone to injuring her. That is the best thing I can offer at the moment. “You need not spend so much time on your physical conditioning.”
Flashing a strange, possibly aggravated look at me, she collects her bag of things from the ground. “Where are we going?”
I scan my eyes across the yard, finding Dal and Gul perched on the outer walls. With a nod of dismissal to them, I turn to leave.
“Come. I’ll show you.”
Kae reluctantly follows me as I lead her up the winding, abandoned path behind the training complex, ascending a rough-carved recess in the cavern walls.
This pathway, and the cliff it leads to, is one of the few areas within the city rings that wasn’t developed.
We began to gut the walls a few decades ago with the intention of starting a fourth tier, but upon learning we were unlikely to have another half-millennia in the Abyss, the project was terminated with little to show for it.
The cooler, stronger air up here—courtesy of our closer proximity to the wind tunnels—blows the girl’s scent towards me. She must douse herself in warm vanilla and honey perfumes on a daily basis for it to be so prominent over her perspiration and the leathers she wears.
I watch as she completes the climb up behind me, her pace slowed by exhaustion.
Such a young, young woman I’ve been charged with.
She can’t even be more than a decade from her first bleeding, tasked with an honor most angels will never have bestowed upon them in the entirety of their eternal lives... I will never understand the mysterious Will of the Creator.
When she finally arrives, I find a place for us in the middle of the clearing before turning around. Again, the girl has lagged behind, instead choosing to stand at the edge. Despite my efforts to be polite, I come so close to demanding she quit wasting my time, but…
She’s looking at the city. My city. And, for reasons I do not understand, she’s taken her long, dark hair out of her braid, allowing it to blow around in the breeze.
It sways like a weeping willow, calling me to sit under its branches.
I approach on instinct, and as I do, her distinct sweet smell only becomes stronger.
So much so, I decide to dial down my olfactory receptors. It is infuriatingly distracting.
“This is where you’ll train for the rest of the day,” I remark, and her brilliantly human eyes turn towards me. Compared to the vibrant colors of an immortal’s, the muted hazel is refreshingly natural, like a walk through a forest. I can’t keep myself from staring.
The words I mean to say are sucked from my breath, lost to the wind.
“Why here?” she asks when I do not continue.
I avert my attention from her eyes to the city to regain my thoughts.
“The isolation will be better for you to concentrate on your metaphysical training. You need to be spending at least half your daily efforts on this. The power may be held by your physical form, but it cannot be accepted by a soul unwilling to meet it.” When I notice her eyes crinkle in confusion, I try to rephrase myself.
“Your body is merely a conduit, and one you will be unable to use if you do not learn how.”
“For… magic? Or whatever you call it?”
I give a small nod, conceding. “We, and the Nephilim who once roamed the earth, use two types of what you humans understand as ‘magic.’ The small skills—the supernatural manipulation of existing matter—is formally known as Angelica. Celestia, on the contrary, is the essence drawn from the Aether to power a specialty skill.”
“Why not tell me that before?”
“Such terms are only used in Theory courses at the Academy these days. We normally have no use putting names and explanations to things so foundational to our nature.”
“Why’s that?”
So many unnecessary questions from this uncouth, tenderfoot dilettante.
“A human knows how to breathe without understanding how oxygen exchange occurs in the lungs. Only those who intend to use physiology for medicine endeavor to learn it in such detail… You, however, cannot have the luxury of simple explanations for understanding concepts, it seems.”
“I can never tell if you’re complimenting or insulting me, Abaddon.”
I blink. I had not intended to do either. Her meddlesome curiosity is quite grating, but not enough for me to lose my composure over. “I do not see how that is relevant.”
“It’s not.” She rolls her eyes at me. “How do I use my body as a conduit?”
“It would help if I understood more about what power you possess.”
“None, as far as I’ve ever known, but you guys seemed to be convinced otherwise.”
Yes, my patience is certainly wearing thin. “Then you will allow me to inspect it.”
Her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “What the hell does that mean?”
Ignoring her incessant need for over-explanation, I close my eyes so I can better concentrate without her staring at me in the way she does.
I reach out with an invisible touch, delicately grazing her soul—despite how much I’ve deliberately avoided doing so since she’s arrived—and the tethers attached to it.
This young human is just so unbearably full of life.
Her soul is a geyser of it, pouring out her emotions without inhibition. Angels are seldom so unguarded. Seldom so emotional. But not her.
It’s difficult to stop at just the barest touch.
The emotions born from her physical body are the most obvious. She’s exhausted and hurting from her injuries today. They’re simple, very understandable emotions, that I should stop my investigations at so I may continue my quest in peace.
But I do not.
I am inexplicably drawn into her deeper emotions, a roaring river of feelings, arising from the core of her soul.
The first thing I stumble upon is the complex tether between her and the Messenger. She is so frustrated, angry with him, yet still encumbered by a dull longing that makes my lips downturn as I abandon any further investigation of it.
In my haste, I switch my full focus to the growing connection between Kae and me—and I’m not prepared for what I find.
When was the last time I had a connection to someone anywhere near as vibrant?
The humans I briefly encountered on Earth are long, long deceased. The locusts operate on a different sort of wavelength of emotion. And any angels I’ve acquainted in the past two millennia, even the harlots I’ve bedded, have known better than to open themselves up to me.
Nobody leaves a river of emotions free to flow into The Destroyer.
Nobody dares to.
This was not my intention, I remind myself. I was looking for that fragment of power embedded in her soul. I’m aware this is a very opportunistic distraction.
And yet… I cannot stop myself from taking advantage of it. What she doesn’t know, what she doesn’t understand, cannot possibly hurt her.
So, I fully open up my reception to every minor thing Kae feels towards me.
Intense loneliness, yearning for companionship.
Frustration, born from a fear that has little to do with me.
There is a lingering fear of me, but it is not for her own safety.
On the contrary, she holds a brave, yet fear-born protective instinct to shelter the people she cares about from me—likely something to do with that very human-nature awe she still has for my heavenly nature. And then there’s also a hint of… of…
Arousal.
Kae Lambros is attracted to me.
My world tilts slightly off-balance, sending my thoughts free-falling.
I did not expect to find any warm feelings. I certainly did not think she harbored anything for me so… enticing. Such sinful, forbidden lust, both revolting and incredibly appealing to me.
I don’t even have words to describe the way such a little flicker of light feels after centuries of melancholy. A fierce protective instinct rises from somewhere deep and forgotten inside of me. To shield that little shred of positivity from fizzling out. To cherish it, hoard it, devour it—
“Abaddon,” she graces my name in a breathy whisper, stealing the air out of my own lungs. I could sip my name from her lips for an eternity and never be satiated.
I look at her face, her beautiful face, finding an exotic expression that I can’t quite describe.
It draws me in, like a moth to a flame. Her heart beats faster, yet still, I do not let go of that tether between us.
I let it grow, watching in earnest as it becomes even hotter, more dominant of her other emotions, as if she senses my interference—even if she doesn’t understand the first thing about it.
My base nature, the beast inside me, awakens. I become alive. My body has a carnal response, craving an outlet that can only be found between her thighs.
I have to stop this.
Despite the painful emptiness it brings me, I force myself to let go of her tether to me, pushing beyond all her emotions. I drive deep into her soul, aggressively chasing the faint, foreign signal.