Ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
se non che la mia mente fu percossa
da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne...

She felt it in her teeth.

The vibrations had been a constant background thrum since the Iron Maiden; from the airship's vantage, the sand had accumulated until it had been sliding across the desert in great sheets, rippled by the wind and fissured like a crowd before the Pope's sedia gestatoria. The collective quaking of the sandstorm had crescendoed, as it drew closer to Carthage, to a dull roar that had forced her to steady herself on any available walls and doorways to keep from being knocked on her backside. She had clenched her jaw and stiffened her shoulders to keep her teeth from chattering or her tongue from bleeding. As she descended into the ancient spillways and aqueducts beneath the Cabral Élissa, she began to feel the vibrations in her aching head, her brain churning to the consistency of beaten egg whites between her ears.

But, as Esther Blanchett cracked open a wary eye, she grew wise to the fact that her back molars were no longer rasping against each other; it no longer felt as though someone were setting a fret buzz in her periodontal ligaments. The sudden stillness was an abrupt shift in momentum: her legs had grown so accustomed to compensating for the rumble of the sandstorm that her knees began to knock together, like those of an untried deck hand passing the last spit of land and committing to the ocean.

It worked.

It was over.

"We did it," murmured Esther.

As though to emphasize her point, the Iblis computer system winked off without fanfare. The lighted panel on the console grew dark, the plexiglass and polycarbonate interface becoming as much a dusty relic as everything else in the bowels of the tomb: knowledge scrawled in dead languages and hidden away for the catalogue of generations hence. Something for future treasure seekers to muse and mumble over...

She felt breath at her ear, lips against the top of her hair, and Esther nearly leapt out of her skin.

"Yes... yes, it would appear so, Miss Esther..."

With the master unit controls deactivated, there was very little light; Esther couldn't see him as much as she could feel him, their bodies suddenly pressed together in the darkness. This close she could sense the slightest tension in his posture, readying himself to fight or flee.

At some point, Abel Nightroad had inched his thumb across the deactivation panel, pressing the nun's small fingers between his own. It wasn't quite a handhold, and the enormous, blood-crusted talons erupting from his nail-beds ruined whatever trappings of tenderness his fevered mind might have interpreted in the gesture. He could feel sweat and gore tacking their skin together, the dirt and darkness making little distinction between where he ended and she began. And yet, Abel was in no immediate rush to remove his hand from beneath hers, and he couldn't help but notice Miss Esther had made no move of her own to pull away.

Whether due to curiosity, cowardice, concern for her well-being, or crippling, crushing loneliness –– or some cross-pollination of all four –– Abel found himself closing his eyes for a moment. He breathed in the dusty smell of the girl's hair, sweat-soaked and sandy and starting to come loose from her cornet. He wondered if he was only imagining the feeling of the heat of her skin or the way she seemed to be leaning back against him, ever so slightly, the shotgun holster under her habit digging into his knee.

Miss Esther peered over her shoulder, blinking curiously; the top of her head barely brushed his sternum. She was so small, enormous blue eyes drinking in the sight of him with an exacting thoroughness that made Abel want to wither on the spot. No doubt she saw a creature at her back lean and feral and frightened and hungry, something liable to forget what his hands were for when they weren't shaking in terror or shredding things to ribbons.

Grimacing at the thought, chiding himself for relishing even this piffling point of contact, Abel attempted to retract his hand.

Esther anticipated his flightiness with a preternatural intuition, countering his movement with a mere whisper of a gesture, precisely and only as much as was required to keep him from slipping away.

The nun found herself tightening her grip before she realized quite what she was doing. She was all too aware that the Father could swat her hand away like smacking at a wayward mosquito, likely breaking every one of her metacarpals in the process.

She took his lack of protestation –– and lack of bone crunching –– as tacit acquiescence.

Esther lifted his hand with two of her own and held it close to her face, eyes squinting in the gloom. She turned it over with the care of an auctioneer appraising a priceless antique, with the single-minded focus of a dying man searching for God.

His hand was as white as porcelain, and where blood had not conspired to conceal the details, his knuckles were almost bursting through his tissue-thin skin. The topology of the back of his hand was strangely geological. Stones and flinty bones. Crags. Hills. Furrows. Fissures. His skin resembled a frozen lake crust, ice reticulating in skeins across the water, molecule by molecule.

"Miss Esther..." At first he thought he had spoken too quietly for her to hear, but her fingers stilled and her breath seemed louder in the recesses of the tomb, disrupting the unearthly stillness deposited in the Iblis's wake. If he turned his sensitive ears to the task, he reasoned he could hear her heartbeat beneath the sediment of silence that had washed aground like a tidewrack, snarled in the sand and calcified like bleached white bones.

His pursed mouth, and behind them, a pair of razor-edged fangs, were a mere crouch and a fistful of inches away from the back of her neck. The air between them felt dense in a way that was almost suffocating, and suddenly Abel realized he needed to be well shut of this place, this tomb, this city... this desert land that bled bodies dry and soaked up suffering with thirsty, greedy persistence.

Esther, however, seemed insensible to the sudden turgidity of the air... or had elected to ignore it. She scratched her fingernail against one of his talons, ridged and calciferous, then pressed the pad of one thumb into the flushed flesh of an inflamed cuticle. Before Abel could manufacture some kind of appropriately nonchalant response to the unexpected poking and prodding, she noted benignly: "The tips of your fingers are black." The words were tentative, quiet, as if voiced in an effort to avoid startling him.

Too little too late, Abel feared. But he would not begrudge Miss Esther her questing curiosity, not when the subject of that same curiosity had landed her in hospital from shock not five hours prior.

Abel had no license to reprimand her for frightening him...

"The..." Nanomachines? Alien bacilli? Demons?Few of the words seemed sufficient, and none would answer more questions than they would invariably create... "The creaturesresponsible for the transformation have autotomous and regenerative properties. They... clusterat the wound sites where the Krusnik cells dedifferentiate into progenitors to form blastemata. Then the blastemal cells undergo proliferation, differentiation and growth."

"Like stem cells," said Esther astutely. "Your body not only regenerates itself, but it can grow talons... wings..."

Abel blinked, staring at the top of the girl's head. He had blurted the technicalities –– parroting some notes the Professor had scrawled in Abel's medical record –– in an effort to curtail Esther's avenue of inquiry. But she was so humble, so unpresuming of her own gifts, that he often forgot that Miss Esther had finished at the top of her class at the seminary. In addition to Bible interpretation and practical theology, she had taken papers in Hebrew and Greek, ancient philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, medicine...

He ought to have known better; Miss Esther was young –– compared to him, almost appallingly so –– but she was not ignorant. Not by long chalk. Her understanding of human complications and mankind's remarkable capacity for violence had doubtless been gained through her hard experiences in István, giving her a core of steel beneath her disarmingly fragile exterior. At the same time, this was balanced by an acute curiosity and insatiable thirst for knowledge: she would ignore authority, march into situations that she couldn't control, and lie her way out of trouble with impunity if it meant getting her answers.

Abel wondered idly if perhaps that was the reason Miss Caterina seemed so... chilly around Miss Esther. Versatility was a trait only tolerable to the Duchess of Milan up to a point. She had long cultivated having a cautious distrust of talent beyond utility. Nothing aroused her suspicion quicker than genuine, all-around proficiency - she had been betrayed and double-crossed a few two many times to tend towards a belief in any person's sincerity. Miss Caterina at fourteen had welcomed Abel's serendipitous intervention with open arms. Cardinal Sforza, at twenty eight, under similar circumstances, would just as soon put a bullet between his eyes and save herself the unnecessary risk.

Abel felt the tiredness swamping him afresh. Hardship, he supposed, would one day make monsters of them all...

Yanking him from his thoughts, Esther brushed a thumb over his knuckles –– Abel felt his heart leap into his throat at the unconscious tenderness in the gesture.

Until, at last, she lowered his clawed hand to the panel.

Abel took a deep breath, momentarily relieved, and very nearly choked as she spun around to face him, her left hand grasping the elbow opposite, her back reclining against the console.

Esther stared up at him, doing her damnedest to ignore the fact he had been standing so close behind her that, facing the opposite direction, her nose nearly collided with his torso.

She was transfixed, unable to look away, committing this face –– foreign and familiar, monstrous and melancholy, frightening and fiercely afraid –– to memory. The Krusnik had muted itself somewhat: Esther didn't understand the activation system at which the apparition operated, but she intuited enough to know Abel's current form was a far sight removed from the creature who'd loomed over her in Carthage city proper. But the lack of wings, weapon, and lightning bolts did very little, despite what she suspected was his best efforts, to diminish his otherworldly appearance. In his torn and tattered and blood-spattered black trousers, boots, and armored cassock, with his long silver hair erupting towards the ceiling and his pale countenance dusted with rusty flecks of autojäger innards, he looked like something out of Milton or Dante, silent and still and softly forlorn. Not horrifying like Satan and his threefold maw, frozen and alone in the Judecca, nor beatifically radiant like Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's Blessed Virgin. Father Nightroad owed more allegiance to the likes of the wheels of galgalim, or the divine Empyrean... something so strange and magnificent that his likeness exceeded her own powers of description, a beauty which could only be comprehended by Him whose knowledge had no bounds.

Abel's scythe had retreated back into the strange stigmata of his palm; if Esther concentrated, she could just make out the thin white scar. As though wise to her attention, the Father clutched the offending appendage, rubbing it as if it had gone to sleep. The sudden motion made Esther realize that portions of his back and shoulders were slightly misshapen, hunched and bulbous, as if too much mass had been compacted into too small a form. His posture, never much to envy even under the best of circumstances, appeared almost contorted, as though his bones weren't quite bending in the direction to which they were intended: rubbery in some places, knobbed in others.

A marked contrast to Esther's scrutiny, the Father's gaze glanced off her like a blind man tapping out an outline of a door, as though gauging the volume of the air she occupied in lieu of looking her in the eye. Rendering her a human-shaped hole in the world...

Esther frowned.

"You're not..." she took a deep breath. "You're not healing as fast as you usually do..."

Indeed, Abel never appeared ill: he never seemed tired; if he rested, he did so alone; if he slept, he took good care to sleep apart or at odd hours. The last time the Father had looked so honestly and plainly ragged, he had been near dead on his feet after the fight with Brother Petros, back when he was actively refusing to regenerate his injuries lest he unleash the Krusnik –– lest she see the cross he had tried so hard, for so long, to bear out of sight, out of mind, and entirely alone.

Even with the secret exposed, Esther could hardly blame him for continuing to be circumspect. She had made any kind of unequivocal trust on that count impossible, she thought bitterly, numb with remorse and regret and some other, uglier emotion like self hatred. She had begged Abel to tell her the truth, imploring him even in the teeth of his own desperation to spare her knowledge of his torment. He had been so frightened of what she might think of him, and in the end, she had proven his every fear justified. She had made of him a monster, and it had nearly destroyed him. He had been the one to shoulder the burden of her ignorance and cowardice, and as much as he had been made to suffer, his suffering had not purified the sinner.

Whatever apologies she made, Esther knew there were some wounds that struck so deep that the blows were never registered by the flesh. No bones to reset. No burns to soothe. No bruises and abrasions to mend.

There were some hurts even the Krusnik couldn't heal.

"I'm... I'm afraid I'm rather tired, Miss Esther. It might take a small while, but I will be all right. I'm just... just tired."

The words stung in a way she didn't entirely expect. Something occurred to her, then, a memory bubbling unbidden to the surface of her thoughts. She had been so intent on blowing holes through Dietrich's disgusting creatures that she hadn't given it much thought at the time, but when she found the Father, he had not been fighting...

"That's what I heard you say," murmured Esther, eyes widening, "right before I saved you. 'I'm so tired'..." She broke off, physically unable to say another word. She opened her mouth and closed it, like a stupid fish gasping for water. She was struck with the sudden irrational fear that, in moments, her mind would be as blank behind her face as it was beneath its cornet, leaving only a dark abyss, ceaselessly whirling like the Iblis, inside her head. Terror gripped her, and it occurred to Esther then that she had almost arrived too late to rescue him... and not necessarily from the autojägers...

"You weren't moving... you weren't resisting at all..." she managed, fighting the snarled urges to strike him senseless or to snog him silly or to scream herself hoarse –– to do somethingto purge the bilious, corrosive emotion from her insides.

"Miss Esther... I..."

Before she could stop herself, her fingertips reached out to trace one rawboned, bloody cheek. "Father, when the autojäger had you on the floor, you weren't... you wouldn't––"

He leaned down, far enough that the silver ends of his hair brushed feather-light against her face, caught in her lashes.

"It's over now," he said quietly, in apropos of something that passed between them unsaid. "I am all right."

"You wouldn't tell me even if you weren't..." she protested. Esther hated that she sounded like she was whining. She didn't trust her voice; the only consolation she had for her eroding self-respect was that Abel was in all likelihood looking everywhere save her face. She followed suit and glared at the dim motes of light reflected on the polished stone floor. "I know... I knowI've done precious little to earn your trust. My actions are unpardonable, but you needn't forgive me in order to tell me if you're injured or not! Please, if we have to trek back to Carthage, it's... it's practical!"The Father said nothing for a long while, inviting a kind of silence that recalled nothing of the familiar awkwardness stemming from a lack of anything to say. Rather, his felt like an appraising, interrogative quiet, a vantage from which to examine the complexity of her intentions towards him... and perhaps his towards her.

As the silence lingered, and the contemplation turned to stillness, and the stillness to a strained restlessness, Abel, for his part, had to keep himself from staggering under a surge of affection, like a petroleum seep, welling from what felt like the pits of his empty stomach, opposite his sacral bone... a seizure of emotion that nearly knocked him sideways. His sternum throbbed with an ache that was not so foreign as he had lead others –– even her, especiallyher –– to believe. It was acute, almost physically painful, like acid reflux.

"Mi... Esther. Esther."

Esther took a surreptitious swipe at her nose with her sleeve, gritting her teeth. "What?"

"You have done nothing that warrants my forgiveness. Nothing at all. And even if you have, you have my pardon. Always."

"I called you a monster," she muttered mutely.

"You were acting on instinct... trying to shield the injured Count Memphis..."

Any sane person would have reacted in much the same way. The Krusnik had chosen to play God, the gestalt entity caring shockingly little that the post was already adequately filled. During an outburst of fierce, feral over-protectiveness, they had saved Miss Esther from the Baron of Luxor, but Esther, quite simply, had not been prepared for the shock of what such a rescue might entail, least of all when it came at the tooth and claw of such a horrifying creature. Out of the frying pan, indeed.

She was viewing him with suspicion, however, and Abel held his tongue against an effort at rationalization. "Instinct is hell's own substitute for ignorance, Father," she announced.

"It was not your intention to cause me pain, Miss Esther.

"Intentions, mine or yours or anyone else's, don't matter; they never matter and they never excuse! The Lord judges us by our actions, and you have been nothing but kind to me, Father. Kind to the Earl of Memphis, to Father Tres and Sister Kate... even to Brother Petros, for Heaven's sake!" She straightened her shoulders until she stood at sternum rather than merely stomach height - small victories, Esther supposed. "You and the Krusnik may well be chalk and cheese in terms of personality, and the pure springs of rescue are a little muddy in the whole "drinking Ion's blood" area, but neither one of those things are proper disavowals of the fact you acted only out of a desire to protect us... you would never willingly do another person injury, Father Nightroad."

Shame and loathing were so intensely felt then that the memories, thin and bitter, caused bile to burn in the hollow of Abel's throat. Oh, how little she knew... how fiercely he fought to conceal the truth from her...

Abel could have told her about suffering the likes of which she could never hope to comprehend, death tolls with counts so large there would be only so far her sensibility could take her before it started to fail.

Abel could have told her that he had become a witness working within silence and shrift because there was no cognitive mold in Esther's own mind into which he could pour a painting of such anguish and torment.

Abel could have told her that compared to the bedrock atrocity of his sins, the Krusnik was mere surface erosion.

Abel could have told Miss Esther many things.

But he didn't. He could barely stomach the thought of bearing his blackened, benighted soul to this child whose kindness and compassion radiated warmth like the break of dawn after the darkness. The possibility simply phased through his mind like solar radiation - his the body which cast the shadow - leaving only invisible impressions and subtle yearnings.

"You're missing the point, Miss Esther."

She sulked with an odd sort of dignity. "That well as may be," said the girl categorically. "I might be missing your points, Father, but that's only because you're much too busy dodging mine. I..." she swallowed, the motion catching in her throat. "I hate seeing you so afraid and ashamed. And I hate myself for being the cause of it."

He said softly, after a long silence: "The shame is far older, and far crueler, than you know, and very much not of your doing."

It was evident in his tone that there was no forthcoming elaboration, and Esther knew better than to press for one.

Abel, in that moment, seemed ages away, staring at some indefinite point in the middle distance, as if the utterance had lent him a degree of indifference... detachmentmight have been the better word. Esther had caught glimpses of it several times before, always at the crater edge of a quiet moment or an absent thought, apathy and despair competing for primacy.

Yet another unnameable hurt became solid in the stale, sandy air, an exhaled cloud of heartache drifting through the tomb, too small and silent even to echo.

Esther could not tell whether it belonged to her or to him, and there was no immediately obvious way to find out. Accepting the ambiguity as just one fact among others was all she could do, at least until a better plan presented itself. Esther might wish she were better equipped to make heads or tails of it all, but getting angry and frustrated in the meanwhile certainly wasn't going to help.

"Perhaps," she acknowledged, her tone flat and definite, inured by the confirmation of her own inertia. "But I didn't do you any favors."

His expression fought against a jumble of childlike sincerity and faint astonishment as he slowly shook his head. "On the contrary, Miss Esther: you said you were not afraid of me. In light of such kindness, I could excuse any trespass."

It was all she could do to keep her exasperation in check. "You're entirely too forgiving, Father," she murmured. To her mortification, her eyes began to sting. She couldn't name the emotion that caused it, didn't want to. Hopefully it was just a wayward eyelash, an errant grain of sand...

"Well, it's rather in the job description."

She made a derisive snort, looking at the floor because she reallydidn't want him to see her expression. She could feel Abel peering at her quizzically, realizing with a start that she almost preferred his stubborn unwillingness to make eye contact. Sans the bulging effect of his bottle-bottomed spectacles - no thanks to her, remembering the splintered pieces tucked safely away inside her habit –– his eyes appeared a hair narrower: less wide and guileless, affecting bumbling innocence, and more knowing... perspicacious in a way that reminded Esther of a hot spot of sunlight brought into focus by a magnifying glass.

She almost leapt a foot in the air when she felt the gentle, concerned touch to the top of her forehead, tracing her hairline with intention.

"Do you think I care about you so little that a few words spoken in haste would make the slightest difference?"

Esther could not say what possessed her to do what she did next - the heady rush of gratitude, perhaps, for his being alive and whole, or maybe to soothe her own hurt - but she found herself closing what little distance remained between them. She heard his swift intake of breath as she wrapped her arms around his middle and held him.

He smelled to high heaven, pungent like an electric motor and rancid with sweat and sand and gore, the iron tang of blood ripe and nauseating, the heavy wool of his cassock holding the ozone stench of the Krusnik the way the carpet in the Professor's office retained the amaretto odor of pipe tobacco.

He was shockingly thin, to the point where even Esther's short arms could circle his torso and clasp the elbow opposite.

He seemed unmindful of the fact the bone-cold silver of his rosary was pressing into the side of her face, knicking her skin with its myriad sharp edges, certain to leave an impression on her cheek.

In spite of it all, however... Abel was a disconcertingly pleasant person to hug.

For months, his embraces had held more common stock with good manners than sincere closeness, like an expectation of a handshake. But as his absurdly long arms rose to fold over Esther's back and shoulders, pulling her to him even harder, and as he lay his cheek against the crown of her head, at the edge of her hood, Esther knew this was something entirely new. She inhaled sharply, her hands sliding under his outer robe, along the scratchy wool at his back. Her cornet fell off as she pressed her head into his chest, but she made no move to recover it. Esther imagined herself submerged in a still, traces of cinnamon warmth reminiscent in her stomach and her tongue pleasantly on fire, going boneless with delicious numbness. With each passing moment Esther felt slightly more off balance, reveling in the whiskey-like warmth until she was swaying on her feet.

His arms were strong despite their skinniness, holding her steady while his breath fell in moist, hot surges against the top of her head.

Oh, he was so good to her. He was so gentle, so kind...

Esther Blanchett would never forgive herself.

It brought still more tears to her eyes, an acid-hot pain that burned stubborn and silent. It was the first time she had cried since the start of the whole accursed Iblis business, and Esther found she couldn't even do thatproperly, her chest seizing with some base, primal thing that couldn't really be called a sob.

"Oh, Esther." Her name was little more than a shaky breath escaping his lips.

Time and tide. Love had its own circadian rhythms, and they'd slipped into a comfortable somnolence. Perhaps they would continue on indefinitely, but it was all too likely that, instead, they would drift gently, quietly apart. The moment would not last, and Esther made her peace with it by clutching him tighter.

"... I don't think I shall ever understand you," he murmured.

She spoke directly into his cassock to hide the fact of her runny nose and reddened eyes. "Says the man who played the Krusnik so close to his chest he nearly gave me a coronary when it showed up," she sniped.

"I might say the same of a certain freedom fighter, Csillag."

"At least my secrets were discreet."

"I beg to differ, Miss Esther... I could smell the black powder on your cloak from across the István train station."

"Oh, hush... right now you reek of microwaved pennies."

Abel expelled a half laugh, most of his attention fixed on the slow, deliberate slide of Miss Esther's hand down his spine, from the knotted, warped muscle between his shoulder blades to the final vertebral links of cartilage. She lingered on two long, narrow furrows running parallel to his backbone, and too late Abel understood why.

"Can I see them?"

Her senses dim from exhaustion and a heady post-adrenaline drowsiness, dizzy from the scent and feel of him so close to her, it took a few moments for Esther to register the fact she'd spoken the words aloud. She felt her cheeks reddening to a shade that rivaled that of her hair.

There was no reaction to the statement, no sound or movement. She twisted to glance at Abel, who was staring at her as if she were some kind of exotic fauna he had never seen before. He seemed dazed, his eyes narrowing, his pursed mouth going bloodless, which effectively turned his surprise into something more akin to a wince of pain. He colored clear to the roots of his silver hair, flustered, although the effect was mitigated somewhat by the fact that Esther was blushing even more fiercely.

Feeling hot and prickly with embarrassment, Esther amended: "I... I have to see them again, Father." An incoherent protest started in his throat, but Esther shook her head. "Please. I have to show you... I can't just..." She was burbling like a simpleton, and only just stopped herself from thumping her forehead against his breastbone. "I have to make this right..." she finished lamely.

The muscles of his face fluttered on the flighty side of confusion: nonplussed, wary, perhaps a little frightened. But transcending the fear, or at least creeping around its edges, Esther dared to imagine she saw an inkling of hope in Abel's fierce blue eyes, his gaze fixed upon her with an acquiescence in their grave depths: a tacit, tender acknowledgement. Collecting his wits, he produced the only deterrent he could think of in the moment: "I'll ruin the cassock Miss Kate lent me."

"If you do this, I'll take the blame."

Perhaps it was the stark contrast of black robes against pallid flesh, but Esther thought he had lost a bit of color. "... Promise?"

"Cross my heart, Father."

Abel heaved a staggering breath. For a single second, the stillness, the silent understanding, that passed between himself and Miss Esther recorded its passage like the sooty negatives of objects and people scorched onto the facades of bombed-out buildings. They had ceased to interact with the world, trapped in their own little carpaccio of time, two leaves of the past pulled into the present.

"You..." he swallowed. "You may wish to stand back, Miss Esther."

She obliged him immediately, giving him a light pat on the arm as she drifted towards the control console. In the way that one fixed upon a small detail with perfect clarity, the mind concentrating upon it in an attempt to block out everything else, Abel noted the beginning stages of pruny lines around Miss Esther's cheeks and nose. She'd caught the sun in Carthage, her fair complexion so peaked it was a small wonder he could distinguish her lovely little blush at all. The monsters in his marrow had made him stupid, ignorant of the fragility of human bodies, the susceptible flesh, the pain...

"Krusnik 02 Loading. Limitation at eighty percent... acknowledged."

The Father's form flared magnesium white, emitting scything beams of light that caused every hair on Esther's head to stand on end, slicing across her field of vision and forcing her to throw an arm across her eyes. As the bright flashes of lightning died away, Esther found herself gazing mutely at a charcoal-colored cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganized, like an embryo negotiating the space within its amniotic cavity - gastrulation at a speed and on a scale Esther had never seen before.

The wings were as enormous as she remembered, the newly-grown bones two broken pillars erupting from clotted wounds on either side of his spine. They hung tented over Abel's shoulders, their lengths folded demurely along his back. Though the pinions glinted like razorblades, reducing the Father's cassock to ribbons, the few dislodged feathers that brushed Esther's cheek were as soft as astrakhan.

Abel - crimson-eyed, halo-haired, fang-toothed - took a tiny, mincing step towards her, an absurdly contrary movement considering the sheer size of him. His black wings trailed behind him like a banner in defeat. The scent wafted over Esther like heat blown from a fire, a warm, pungent mixture of horse lather and ozone and the soft must of pin-feathers, the epidermal follicles like those of a great raptor who had not yet completed its summer moult, abraded by the harsh demands of eking out a life in the wild, windswept desert.

God almighty, but he was breathtaking. Esther's whole body trembled with the realization, a tumultuous wave of awe that rocked her from head to toe.

"Miss Esther?" he ventured. To her relief, it was Abel's voice she heard; a little rougher, a lot deeper, and impressively toothy, but the omniscient weof certain parasitic passengers was blessedly absent. "Are you all right?"

In lieu of an answer, Esther took a bold step forward. The Father looked as though he would like nothing more than to skitter in the opposite direction, a mangled expression crossing his face and his breath leaving his chest in unsteady surges.

"I won't hurt you."

After a long while, one small hand moved slowly, tentatively, before landing to rest along the length of Abel's primaries. The Father made a tiny, wretched sound, as though keening around a shrapnel wound in his throat. His wings shivered, a sound strangely akin to a gust of wind suffusing a pine forest. Esther immediately went to retract her hand when Abel murmured:

"No... no... I don't mind. I don't mind at all."

"Are you sure?"

"Believe you me, have rarely been surer, Miss Esther."

Her cheeks heated, and she tried to distract herself by tracing the edges of his feathers. Up close, they were huge: each one was almost as long as Esther was tall. His remiges were thick, surprisingly rigid, smooth when stroked along its grain, coarse and unyielding when she attempted to move her hand in the opposite direction. Tilting her head, she noticed the slight marbling in the color - not pitch black as the Carthaginian twilight or the dim Iblis chamber would have her believe, but speckled with silver, pale motes spinning mobiles across his plumage like a dusting of tiny stars in a midnight sky.

"You're not... frightened anymore?" came the tiny, terrified query, so quiet it was almost inaudible.

Esther sighed. "Only in the way everyone is frightened when they realize someone else's well-being is necessary to their own..."

Abel hiccoughed his surprise, and she took a certain absurd satisfaction in being the one to flummox him for once. Chew on that for a few days...

"Can you... I don't know..." She looked rather meaningfully from his arms to his wings and back again, doing precious little to feign subtlety. "It... it sounds rather silly saying it out loud... but can you... can you fly?"

Abel mustered a wan smile. "Yes, I can."

Miss Esther beamed at him, her vivid blue eyes, always so accursedly observant, glittering with excitement. Her awe lent her a soft, lambent glow. Fiercely alive. Utterly stunning. "Really? What's it like?"

"Much like flying on the Iron Maiden, Miss Esther. Windier and louder, mind you, and..." He hesitated: "Lonelier. The sky is very big for one man."

She shifted from foot to foot. "Has anyone ever...?"

By her questions, he suspected they were not long for addressing the elephant in the room. "The Krusnik is not something I am terribly keen on advertising, for joy rides or... or otherwise. And I've never given much thought to accommodating... passengers."

"Oh... why not?"

"You would be too heavy."

Esther scrunched her nose, fascination becoming vexation in an instant. "Charming," she muttered.

Abel felt a laugh creeping up his throat, but clamped down on it, acutely aware of Miss Esther's elbow resting at rib-height. "The lift-induced drag would be too great. It would be very difficult to get off the ground."

She still looked slightly miffed.

"It's aerodynamics, Miss Esther!"

"Aerodynamics? You sound like Sister Kate."

"Who is, incidentally, the only person I might be able to carry."

"She's a hologram!"

"Precisely my point."

"All right, Sir George Cayley," she snapped with mock outrage, "aerodynamics... and I suppose you're going to tell me your lightning is static electricity from your wool socks."

His face sank into the sort of exaggerated despondency a puppy might wear when one stopped throwing it sticks "And what if it is?" he countered, relishing teasing her.

As a sort of peace offering, Abel extended one enormous wing with a soft whuffof passing air, angling his coverts until a gleaming black swathe extended across Miss Esther's shoulders before folding to tuck her close to him. He probably smelled like a barnyard rooster, and though neither one of them reached out for the other, the feathery embrace felt like a soul preparation, a communion of sorts, and somehow far more intimate than it had any right to be.

"You... you really want to try, don't you, Miss Esther?" he asked quietly, head tilting until a single strand of silver fell to tap his cheek.

Esther whirled around, facing away from him, and crossed her arms with a huff. "You just whinged about how lonely flying is," she reasoned, avoiding eye contact by counting the feathers in her peripheries, the whisper-like brush of their undersides against her cheek leaving a fine dusting like talcum powder on her skin. Unable to turn her face farther because his wing was in the way, and unable to turn her body because his body was in the way, Esther tried to affect perfect sensibleness: "Strikes me there's a simple solution here. It's like complaining of the cold and then refusing a winter coat when offered! It's just... illogical, Father Nightroad."

He chuckled, surprising her. Esther never knew what was going to make Abel Nightroad laugh. At the oddest moments, he seemed to find humor in her own lamentable temper, and under normal circumstances it tended to irk her. But at that moment, she found she didn't care a fig for her own spurned pride. The sound he made was rich and deep and utterly alien, full of teeth and saliva and yet resonant with mirth, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestowed its inexhaustible splendor upon its patient witnesses, those who did not fear the risk of going blind.

Had the Krusnik ever laughed before? wondered Esther, curiously humbled at the possibility.

As though wise to her thoughts, the figure at her side shifted ever so slightly, his trembling feathers betraying his slightest movement. Esther turned her head, and before she realized what was happening, Abel planted a tiny, gentle kiss on her cheek, as soft as a magnolia petal.

The blood roared in her ears.

"One day?" breathed Esther; she took in his brilliant red eyes, wide with adoration, and his clawed hand, affectionately covering hers even as his wings draped her in a mantle of midnight, and she suddenly felt dizzy, acutely aware of how tired she was... how close they had come to seeing their world fall apart about the seams. She shuddered, going cold, tiling her head back until she could rest her face in the thicket of downy feathers, so much like a caress. "Father..."

His hand spread, his palm pressed to her palm, and he laced his fingers between hers, one by one, and with the last one, he closed his hand, gripping hers tightly.

"One day, Miss Esther," Abel promised.

A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,

l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.

The quote is from Dante's Il Paradiso, 33.139-45. The title translates to "But my own wings were not enough for this..." - Hoopy