On the first day of winter, an angel’s heart fell beating from a clear sky. Mother Wyna lofted it before us in the abbey’s courtyard and announced the world had begun its end.
The abbey’s populace, drawn from all corners of Agaan, elbowed around Mother Wyna. Their faces broke in shock or grief or were set with grim acceptance. We of the copy-room and stable and kitchen milled uncertainly behind our elder sisters and brothers. Even at the end of times, mothers and clerics and adepts take precedence over mere under-copiers. I heard only fragments of Wyna’s pronouncement.
Mother Wyna held the heart aloft once more. Scuffing feet and whispered questions alike fell silent. Unable to get close, I caught only a glimpse.
“The war in heaven has begun,” she proclaimed. “The very last war. Ready for a siege.”
I imagined what knights felt when the drums sounded and the advance began: a certainty in my marrow that few, if any, of us would live to share the tale. Whatever courage a knight might find in that conviction eluded me.
Elder Balo sent us scribes out with some of the cooks to collect wood while the sun still shone. His legs were frail but his hands and eyes were agile yet—hands and eyes that darted and trembled even as his voice gave no sign. “By Yon’s grace we will have the strength to protect this gift,” he rasped to me. He clutched me by the wrist and searched me all over with his eyes, as if memorizing one last picture of me to carry with him. He had taught me my letters, all those decades before, and taken me into the copy-room when I was yet a child. I nodded and turned away so he would not remember me in tears—tears for me or for him, I could not say.
“Do you remember, Lacar, the loose stone where you would hide your doll?” He said this as I left the scriptorium. It made me pause and look back at him, tears be damned. His eyes swam with fearful lucidity, as if he saw visions. “Please, Yon, may Lacar remember the stone!” It was the last I would hear him say in this life.
We were a ragged little troop as we fanned out into the wooded hills beyond the abbey’s fields. Leadership should, perhaps, have devolved upon me, as the eldest, but after hearing my uncertain and distracted orders, one of the cooks, a young woman named Ashon who had come from the mountain country, took over with an efficiency I recognized as her own antidote to fear.
“Lacar, take the big axe. Break down the bigger deadwood.” She pointed me up the hill, and so I went. The short winter afternoon hastened our work. I remember the rich smell of resin from the wood I cut, the earthy scent of mushrooms, the scrapes and pricks of thorns.
When betrayal came, it marched in splendor. Ashon’s sharp whistle stopped our work. One by one we crept to a ledge of stone where we watched the setting sun gleam on the pikes and helmets and white robes of the Princess’s riders. Their horses danced so lightly that they raised scarcely a breath of dust along the road to the abbey’s gate. Their banners, which bore the sign of the kingdom which funded our abbey, hung flat and listless.
Even from here I could recognize the figure of Mother Wyna, flanked by her mightiest adepts, stepping out to check their advance before the gate. One of the other under-copiers clutched my arm and wept into my shoulder. I don’t think I understood what I was seeing until the Princess, the sun’s last rays aglitter on her helm, rode forward and speared Mother Wyna through the belly.
“Shit shit shit,” Ashon chanted. “Shh!” She waved her hand to still our sudden cries. For a moment it seemed she would order us to charge down and flank the Princess and her riders. It was there in the set of her eyes, the way her hand raised as if to command despite herself. I like to imagine I would have followed her into battle then and there—though what I did in later days disabuses me of this belief. As it happened, Ashon sank back, took stock of us—a handful of scared and grieving cooks and scribes, armed only with axes and Yon’s grace—and checked her impulse.
“We can’t fight them,” she whispered. “We must warn the other abbeys.” She remained on lookout with Gabel, one of the stablehands, and sent us to hide in a cleft in the boulders on the other side of the hill. There we huddled as night fell, weeping and cursing as silently as we could. Three scribes and one cook slipped away, heading deeper into the hills, away from the abbey. I trembled and could not rebuke them.
Far away I could hear the clash of arms and the cries of the dying, the crash of breaking doors and the sudden eager breath of flames. After the first moments, I found I could not weep. The two remaining scribes, Jiannah and Stock, huddled against me for warmth and comfort, but I felt neither. Again and again I saw Mother Wyna speared and falling, her spirit fled starward, her work undone. I saw the adepts, trained warriors, knocked down by the riders’ horses and speared when they tried to stand. I saw the shine of the Princess’s armor, the stainless white of her cloak. Perhaps it would be poetic to claim I felt a fire of vengeance, or that a divine light shone to guide my next steps. The truth is, I could barely feel anything.
* * *
Gabel, a quick youth with their hair tied back and a kitchen knife in their belt, shook my foot. As if from a distant star, I heard my name. I blinked up at them and saw that everyone else was filing out of our shelter, that only Gabel and Jiannah were crouched over me in concern. “All right, Master Lacar?” Gabel whispered.
I moved to get up and found, to my surprise, that I still clutched the heavy axe, a cold weight against my chest. It still carried the aroma of resin, as if our shelter had been sanctified with incense.
However the war might rage in the heavens, the air below was still and cold. A late moon climbed, sparing light enough for Ashon to guide us back to her sentry rock. There, she crouched and whispered her orders. “Those monsters left an hour back.” Whatever venom she tasted at the mention of them did not enter her crisp tone. “We’ve kept watch. I don’t think anyone else escaped.” Gabel hugged an older cook who let out a choked wail. “Shh. Shh. We must keep quiet. We need to get what supplies we can. Food. Water. Arms.” Ashon looked to us three surviving scribes. “Don’t try to save books or relics. Grab warm clothes for a journey. With luck, not everything has burned.”
She stood, clutching a small axe, and looked each of us in the eye. “Once we have supplies, Gabel and I are going to warn the abbey at Inba. I worked there for a time. I—I would spare them this fate, if I may. I won’t ask anyone to come with me. It’s three days’ journey over the hills, into the mountains. Riders of the kingdom might be looking for us. They might well beat us there. We all need food, but once we have it, you can take your share and go where you will.”
I fell in at the end of the line as it straggled down the woodcutters’ paths. My hold on the axe was the only anchor I had to this world. Its handle was simple and well-made, a core of iron sleeved by narra wood, a song of praise engraved along its length.
YOU who hid the fire in the tree
Share your light that we all may see
My fingers found the letters as we skulked into the fields. Our path was lit by the blazes the riders had set in our home. With luck, Ashon had said—not by Yon’s grace, not by Yon’s light. I had never been blessed with the zeal or clarity of Yon’s true clerics. Words were my lot, and I had been content with them. I looked to the head of the line, where Ashon moved with assurance, master of her own fear and grief, meeting the end of the world with purpose and a plan. A humble cook, now the leader, however briefly, however little was left, of our abbey.
I could not imagine following her to Inba. I couldn’t imagine doing more than lying down in my bed (if anything were left of it) and waiting for the end.
* * *
My room, like all the others, had been ransacked. My blanket had been ripped, my bedroll hacked apart, my small chest broken open and scattered across the floor. Even the leaves of my devotional books had been gutted and spilled in a corner. I sat there for a time, holding a sheet of my letters, until Gabel, guarding a candle’s light with their hand, gently encouraged me to get packing. “For Elder Balo’s sake,” they said, and hurried on.
It seemed to me that Elder Balo, on whichever star he now dwelled, might be beyond any concern for whether I gathered up what was left of my blanket or not. But the mention of him stirred a morbid desire to discover whatever remnants I might find of him. I had some vague notion that if I could just cry, my soul might find peace and drift free of this doomed world.
So it was that I found myself in the cramped hallway behind the copy-room, where Balo’s simple cell waited beyond the initiates’ dormitory. I recalled what Balo had said about my doll, a little rag thing I kept clutched to my chest after my grandmother had despaired of keeping me fed and remanded me to the good mothers at the abbey. When I had grown older and become an initiate, I was told I needed to discard the silly thing. It was meant kindly, but I resisted.
Chickie. That was the doll’s name. And I had hidden it—
Here. A loose flagstone on the dormitory floor, one so well-fitted that one would never know it was loose unless one spent long nights tracing fingers along the edges of every stone.
I set down the axe and knelt. My fingers found the grooves that allowed one to pull up the slate. I felt it then—ba bum, ba bum, slipping into my own pulse, heating my chilled fingers such that I nearly dropped the stone. Carefully, as silently as if I were a child once again pulling Chickie up for comfort, I lifted the flagstone and found a plain box, its lid gently pulsing with the heart within.
I was not warmed in the golden light of Yon. The stars did not open their ways to me and guide me on the path I was to follow. I opened the lid and saw a lump of meat the size of my fist glistening in the light of my candle, its walls smooth and throbbing a steady rhythm, clean of blood but—yes—warm to the touch.
So it was that I, Under-Scribe Lacar of Mewal Abbey, became the keeper of the Heart of the Angel Rabakq.
* * *
Angels had been there when the first stars were shaped; their form was the raw matter of creation, holy and unpredictable.
For a piece of one to fall on us here below meant the cosmos itself was crumbling, its foundations shattered in war between the titanic unknowns who had shaped the world we knew.
I’m not sure why I did what I did. Luck, Ashon might have said, had it worked out differently for her. I don’t think I consciously knew what holding the angel’s heart would do to me. What it could have done, in someone else’s hands. Until now, writing this final account, I hadn’t made the connection between Balo’s admonition about my childhood hiding place and the whisper of prophecy that surrounded angels, their power of probabilities, the current (and currency) of creation. Balo had known, somehow—had known at least a little bit.
On an animal level, no doubt, I understood the power I held. The power that the princess had ridden out to find. The power, maybe, to survive the cataclysm awaiting us from the fall of the heavens.
I snapped the box closed and wrapped a remnant of my blanket around it before I pushed it into my satchel. I believe I was dizzy for a time, disoriented, calling Elder Balo’s name and weeping, casting fistfuls of broken and burned books from the fireplace. So I am told Gabel found me. They pulled me out of the fireplace and held me fiercely, shushing and murmuring in my ear, rocking me until I came back to something like myself, their face wet with our tears.
I clung to them—not yet grateful to be alive, but grateful I had been quieted.
Gabel pulled me to my feet and handed me the axe again, which I had left who knows where in the scriptorium wing. “There wasn’t much food left,” they whispered, but slipped some jars of rice and a couple millet cakes into my satchel, where I could feel them thumping gently against my hip with each beat of the angel’s heart.
I nodded to them, and said nothing of what I had found.
* * *
Jiannah urged me to accompany her northward—she had family down by Gil Miqu, where her mother’s sister had a small farm hidden away in a valley rich with sorghum and goats and reliable water. “Let us find a quiet place to pray for Agaan,” she whispered to me.
When I hoisted my satchel to my shoulder, the angel’s heartbeat overlaid my own. It was like the feeling when your heart falters, atop that sickly precipice where you aren’t sure if it will find its own rhythm again, but it happened with each beat. I felt out of breath, my sweat sticky like candlewax on my temples.
“I will go to Inba,” I said. My own heart lurched as if in surprise.
Jiannah, dear soul, stared up at me in the candle’s waning light. Her eyes, ever kind, brimmed with a mixture of dismay and determination. “Then I will go with you, Master Lacar.”
Ashon touched my shoulder. Perhaps she felt the strength of the angel’s heart and mistook it for something I possessed. She gave me a nod, but her eyes showed she wasn’t convinced. “We’ll be making speed over rough hills. We can’t wait for any who fall behind.”
“I’ll take care of them,” Jiannah said.
Ashon kissed Jiannah’s forehead, and touched my shoulder again. “We’ll make what distance we can tonight.”
I remember little of that first march in the darkness. There were loose rocks and thorny brush and sharp whispers of warning. Gabel lingered at difficult spots to show us the way, then bounded ahead to keep pace with Ashon, wielding a staff like a third leg on the rocks. I stumbled, picked myself up, shambled on. Gravel punctured my soft scholar’s shoes. The angel’s heartbeat overwhelmed me. My own hammered in my chest, building and building until it roared in my ears and pushed the breath from my lungs. Jiannah was always at my side, holding my hand on level ground, whispering encouragement behind me when our path took us up crevices between boulders. Even when I could no longer hear her over the angel’s pulse, I was aware of her, her careful touches, her gentle guidance.
Once that night Gabel checked me with a hand upon my arm, and mouthed words to me, though I did not understand them. Later I learned the others had heard the distant roll of hoofbeats and had hunkered in a ravine until the last whisper of them had passed. I had gone on obliviously before Gabel halted me. I heard none of it.
We made camp up in the hills not long before dawn. I could not sleep.
The angel’s heart beat steadily at my side. It was less overwhelming than it had been on our march, but I missed that sense of suffocation now, as my own thoughts found room to swell once more.
This was foolishness.
I would never survive the march to Inba.
I knew I was slowing the party. Despite her words in the abbey, Ashon had clearly checked her pace for my sake. I heard her whispering with Jiannah, with Gabel, as they rolled themselves into their blankets. Plans. They would be right to leave me behind. Warning the abbey at Inba was paramount. They couldn’t race the Princess’s soldiers to Inba while I slowed their steps. What the Princess sought lay in my satchel; my very presence was a danger to my companions.
I hunched and shivered beneath the thin remnants of my blanket, inched closer to my satchel. I wrapped my arm around it and felt the angel’s heart against mine, felt the two almost—almost—beat in time.
* * *
For a time I dozed. I dreamed of fire and spears, and the teeth of leopards. I dreamed of cities falling into the hungry earth. I sat in the scriptorium while books and Elder Balo alike were gutted and hollowed out around me, sifting down into ash and ghosts. Flames pulsed with an inexorable rhythm.
* * *
I awoke to screams and the smell of burning.
I clutched the satchel to my chest and, for a long moment, couldn’t make sense of what I saw. Baboons, a good two dozen of them, shrieked and raced through our camp. Gabel swung a flaming stick at any that ran close. Ashon and Jiannah braced back to back, striking with axe and staff, knocking baboons back only for more to surge at their feet. Slavering fangs gleamed and snapped. Jiannah screamed.
Three baboons broke off and howled in my direction. In the eddying light of the flames I saw tiny beings, kijim my grandmother used to call them, riding the baboons, spurring them on toward me. The little folk wore masks like silver coins, bore spears as thin and sharp as porcupine quills. Before I could make up my mind that this was real and not just a fragment of dream, they were upon me, stabbing toward my eyes, my nostrils. A baboon lunged its jaws toward my hand.
The angel’s heart thumped against my chest. I don’t know if I spoke aloud or only in my own secret heart. I prayed with a certainty I had never possessed. I prayed with anger, with the very blood within me.
You cannot have it.
The little folk halted, chests heaving below their silver masks. All around the camp, the baboons were checked, wincing back as if stung. Gabel leapt upon a boulder.
It is not a prize for you. You cannot have it.
The little folk hissed at a range beyond my hearing. The baboons yawned their ghastly fangs and howled deep in their chests. Ashon, somewhere off to my side, smacked her axe’s blade into the skull of one baboon and kicked its body away.
Leave. You will never bother us again.
Their shrieks almost split me open with pain. But the angel’s heart—my heart—beat too strong for them to push their way against it. With each pulse I shoved at them, beat at them with my commands. Ashon swung and cleaved another baboon through its spine. At that the troop broke and fled into the darkness beyond our camp.
* * *
Gabel had been wounded in their hands and face, Ashon had taken a bite on her shoulder, but everyone was still fit to walk. Ashon had us marching before first light, though she paused often to listen and smell for any return of the baboons.
“The Mother said this was the beginning of the end,” Jiannah murmured while checking under Gabel’s bandages at first light. “Animals running amok. The abbey burned.” She bent her head into Gabel’s chest and sobbed for a little while. Gabel patted her as best they could with their injured hand. Ashon crouched beside them and hugged Jiannah to her side.
In the darkness and chaos of the attack, no one had noticed what I had done. Once the baboons had scattered Jiannah ran to check on me and had been overjoyed to find me, safe but dazed, still wrapped in my blanket where I had bedded down. No one yet suspected what it was I carried.
The day passed in fitful cloud and sun. The wind was confused, now from the south, then wheeling around from the north. A tang of sharpness, almost of metal, tainted my tongue when the wind blew strong. Once a flurry of snow found us atop a ridge. We marched on, wary now of beasts as well as of any human pursuit. Jiannah walked beside me, and huddled with me when I needed to rest.
“Once Inba has been warned, I’m continuing on to Gil Miqu. I’ve decided it.” Jiannah was silent for a while, shivering beneath our mingled blankets. “If this is the end, I want to be with my Aunty. She lives out there all alone in her valley with her two wives. I want to comfort them if I can, pray for them that they might be spared the worst.” She sighed, put her head on my shoulder. I didn’t understand how she didn’t feel the heart in my lap. “I would feel better if I knew you had somewhere to go. Please, Lacar, come with me after Inba.”
I blinked as if coming up from a doze. I had only half-listened to her. The angel’s heart didn’t roar through my ears as it had before, but I wanted to hear little else that day.
* * *
That night I saw the first flickers in heaven. Streams of painful indigo whispered between the stars, lightning without cloud or thunder. The ground beneath me felt hollow, an eggshell stretched and exhausted with its burden. Once it shook and I felt like I would crack through and fall, fall, helplessly fall beyond the reach of any starlight. I clutched the heart to me and murmured prayers, old catechisms and new words that burned their way through my teeth and left me as frail and uncertain as the shell of the world below.
* * *
The angel appeared the next dawn.
Rabakq wore the form of a naked woman, or a naked man, or rather something neither, their skin warm and gleaming beneath the yellow sky. They walked with head bowed to watch their steps, hands clasped as if meditating in a garden.
I knew before the others—I felt the angel’s presence as a quickening in my heart and a pressure behind my eyes. I lugged my satchel and stood boldly atop a boulder and watched the angel from on high, their footsteps bearing them this way and that across the grassland below, seemingly aimless, yet each turn took them closer to me, closer to their heart.
Rabakq was beautiful.
Even now I can’t transcribe the heat and splendor I glimpsed in those first moments. The angel’s skin caught the rising light and spun it the way a rainbow is woven from the first breath of a monsoon rain. Every shade of human skin glimmered from that play of light and shadow, from the loveliest deep tones of the Onnin in their glittering cities to the gentlest rose blush of the Almelaaq from the fiords of the remotest south, warmed throughout with gold. In the shifting light, they grew breasts and lost them; their belly waxed replete then grew slender. Their shadow stretched ahead of them on the yellow winter grass, now sharp like a heron, now rounded like a hippopotamus. Their hair rose in a perfect mass of curls, a halo that caught the rising sun and burned like the core of the firstborn star, like the fire kindled in the secret heart of the tree.
My heart wavered, as if hanging in the air before a plummet.
Rabakq had come for their heart. I couldn’t let them have it. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
A sharp whistle behind me, and Ashon’s urgent whisper: “Lacar, get down.”
I tore my gaze away from Rabakq with an effort, and yet there they were, standing in the midst of our camp as if they had just strolled in at first light. Now Rabakq wore simple white robes, hitched at the waist with plain cord, and seemed an ordinary being, their halo of hair hidden beneath a yellow scarf. Now and again, however, my eyes still caught glimmers of their angelic form, wisps of light and gold wherever they moved.
“Peace,” Rabakq said. Their voice was musical, somewhere in the middle register, neither feminine nor masculine. They held up their hands as Ashon spun to face them, her short axe raised. Gabel and Jiannah scrambled to toss aside their blankets and reach for such arms as we had to hand.
No doubt Ashon saw their robes before anything else. “Are you with the Princess?”
Rabakq tilted their head like an ibis eyeing a fish in the shallows. “I am a stranger in these lands. I serve none here.”
Gabel readied themselves some distance behind the angel. Jiannah gestured for me in growing unease. Ashon tightened her grip on the axe. “State your name.”
“I am Starlight,” Rabakq said. Only then did it occur to me to question how I knew their true name.
Ashon flicked her glance to me. “Lacar, get down here. Please.”
Rabakq turned their eyes upon me. Oh, such a honeyed brown they were, catching the first rays of the sun that spilled upon our hilltop. My legs felt weak. I found myself slouching down the boulder’s face, halfway falling rather than putting one step deliberately ahead of the last. Gravity bore me close to the angel, and I felt the heat of them, a shortness in my breath, and the chill within the blaze.
Did they know what I had in my satchel? Did they know—me? How could they not?
“Keep away from them,” Ashon commanded. My feet, having taken me this far, refused to pull me away. Instead I sat near the angel’s feet, cross-legged like an apprentice scribe learning their first letters. The earth rolled beneath us, the angel and I, and I saw nothing else.
Rabakq smiled down at me, but it was a mechanical smile, the smile of a clockwork shepherd in a wind-up pantomime. A performance without feeling.
Seeing that I wouldn’t move, Ashon crept forward step by step, clearly meaning to position herself between us. “Where do you come from, Starlight?”
Rabakq seemed almost startled. “The stars. Where do you come from?”
Ashon tensed. Another step, inching closer. “We are peaceful folk, but these are times of treachery. Don’t play with your words.”
Rabakq motioned with their hand, then frowned, clearly puzzled. I felt a hot pulse inside my own heart, an energy that burned through my nerves and veins and made my toes clench. I tasted acid in the bottom of my throat.
“I—” The angel looked at Ashon, then down at me. No, I commanded. Not yet. Their eyes grazed my satchel and kept moving, instead finding Jiannah where she crept behind to get close to me.
“I’m—sorry.” Rabakq pressed the hand to their temple and winced. My heart lurched in sympathy. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am.” They glanced up at Ashon, now just a few steps from striking range. “I’m sure that doesn’t satisfy you, but I cannot lie, so that must be the truth of it.”
Ashon paused her advance. “We have no arts to heal you, if healing you need.”
Rabakq passed their hand—a hand of long skillful fingers, nails polished with golden lacquer—from temple to cheek, from cheek to chest, and lingered there, as if searching the front of their robe for something.
Inba, I murmured in my heart.
“You go to Inba.” The angel’s voice was calm but commanding, a glint of steel flashed then sheathed again. Ashon stared at them, mouth working, but no words came out. “There are healers at Inba. Guide me there.”
I got to my feet, expecting aches, expecting weariness, expecting my bones to fold into soft ash. Instead I brimmed with vigor, burned with it, a star igniting in a cradle I shaped for it inside my chest. I touched Ashon’s axe and lowered it with my fingertips, bit by bit. Her eyes flicked from the angel’s to mine, distrustful. She breathed hard.
“We go to Inba,” I murmured.
* * *
Rabakq strode at the head of our little band, magnificent in the morning sun. Wisps of cloud scudded high on a northern wind, promising chill and storm to come, yet no shadow seemed to fall on the angel. I was content to watch them from behind, ignoring Ashon’s suspicious glances and Jiannah’s occasional attempts to catch my arm when I stumbled.
Once, Rabakq kept walking ahead while we mortals paused to fill our water-skins at a rocky spring, bits of fern and cane still green around the water.
“Inba’s no secret,” Gabel said, perhaps continuing a long discussion with Ashon. “The Princess knows the road there. She’d have no need for a spy.”
Ashon glanced at me. I ignored her while my water-skin gurgled and grew fat from the spring.
“I don’t trust this,” Ashon said. I heard a shushing note in her voice, something that said they’d continue this discussion later. Away from my ears. For the first time I caught Ashon glancing questioningly at my satchel, which I had shifted away from her almost without realizing it.
How did they not see Rabakq for what they were?
From the spring Ashon directed us to climb again. Clouds finally overwhelmed the sun. The wind bit through the blanket I had thrown around my shoulders, and flattened the grass that rose up to the next ridgeline. The exertions of the morning finally caught up with me, dragging down my steps. I used the haft of my long axe to help me inch up the hill. Far away I saw Rabakq pause, their robes fanned like flames in the wind.
Jiannah caught my arm when my knees nearly failed. I let her support me, climbing slowly together. When my breath had settled, she said, “Ashon suspects you.”
I dug the butt of my axe into the dirt, pushing on. I never took my eyes off the angel.
“She doesn’t know what’s going on. She knows something isn’t right, but she doesn’t know what. But—but I do.”
I stopped and twisted my satchel away from her. Her eyes met mine. She took a step back.
“You have it,” she whispered. “You found it. In the—in the wreckage. The end of everything.”
I looked up at the angel. For a moment they looked down and our eyes met, our hearts now bound. My pulse raced—our pulses, locked in step. Not yet, but soon. Rabakq looked away, and my heart quieted. “No. Not of everything.”
* * *
Rabakq did not sleep as mortals do. I cradled their heart to me and watched them from atop a boulder while the rest of our little party dreamed uneasily around us, exactly where I had made them sleep. The angel lay flat on their back, eyes open to the wind and the flurries that stung my cheeks. The light in their eyes was banked, like the stars swallowed up in the clouds above us.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, its nails gleaming gold even in the darkness. I knew without turning which voice I would hear. “Which of you has it?”
“Not yet,” I repeated, but the hand squeezed harder, impatient.
“I will see you before you realize it,” the angel said.
Their heart beat with mine. I spun with it, swooned with it. I whispered, “Just a little longer. Please.”
“Tell me now. Who are you?”
My throat worked, swallowing against the urge to pour forth everything, every morsel I had tasted, every word I had ever absorbed.
Instead a new voice interrupted me, a purr like a leopard’s, a murmur like a flash flood in its inexorable approach. “We could find out for you, beloved.” I felt a new hand on my other shoulder. Cold stole from it, a delicate breath around my throat, a caress along my chin. I tried to move, to scream, and found I could not. The night itself seemed to snuffle at my neck, stealing my warmth away. “This one seems small enough. Ah, yes—they’ve seen our instrument before. She rides in their mind. Shall we tell you, then?”
Rabakq’s hand was limp on my shoulder. The cold filled the air around us, hardened within my lungs, swelled out to the farthest stars. A tear froze on my cheek.
“I no longer know you,” Rabakq said slowly.
“Ah,” said the voice, and within that sound I felt a gleam of teeth, a brightness of understanding. The second hand vanished, though the cold lingered, the cold and the suffocating pressure on our hearts.
After a time, the angel whispered, “Please. Who are you?”
My own heart beat sickly and fast, my breath too shallow for speech. I touched my face and found more tears melting down my jaw.
I tried to reach down. I did. I tried to undo the heart from its home on my chest, but my fingers were numb, clumsy. They would not obey.
I love you.
I expected warmth, or thunder, but the angel said, “Then you would return my heart to me.” Their hand was gone. The sky shivered with uneasy cloud. Rabakq slept on, eyes open, seeing nothing.
* * *
The sun was slow to rise. Perhaps it would be the last sunrise, the last glimpse of sun given to our dying land. It trembled in a thousand pinpoints of dew around me in the long grass, round and weighted, snared in cobwebs. I pressed with my doubled strength against the earth’s grip. Perhaps with a nudge I could right the order of the cosmos, buy our doomed world a moment more of peace beneath the struggles of heaven. Instead the dew shivered into the air, an inversion of rain, an upended galaxy that blanched into snow and fell, ashlike, in circles around me.
I turned, and saw Ashon rising from her own tangled dreams, her mouth working without sound, her eyes wide without sight.
Please, I whispered to the stars. Even now I’m unsure what I desired of them.
I do know that something else heard.
The leopard slipped into our camp without a sound, but each footfall shook the earth in some distant land. Boulders and sea-cliffs broke and groaned and woke great waves, yet here, its paws scarcely stirred the grass. Its fangs bared in a smile as it recognized me where I sat.
“We see you, lovely child,” it purred, a lazy rumble that cracked glaciers and splintered the most ancient trees. Step by sinuous step, it slinked toward me. “Shall we mark you for them to see?” Its eyes glowed indigo. Its breath shriveled the grass around me, rimed the hairs on my hands, smothered the pulse in my throat.
I clutched at the angel’s heart. At my heart. The leopard saw, and smiled wider. “I can’t touch that, beloved, but I can touch you.” The leopard leapt through my chest and was gone, the cold of its passage clotting me from the inside, cutting me apart with the rime of my own blood. Half a galaxy of stars splintered and my chest gaped around them, their myriad courses extinguished within me.
I clutched at the heart.
My fingers burned, bled. My flesh disintegrated. My bones ignited from within.
YOU who hid the fire in the tree
Share your light that we all may see.
But it wasn’t to Yon that I prayed.
I clutched at the heart.
And slowly, like the memory of those who have gone before pulling the stars back into a familiar course, I felt Rabakq’s touch, hesitant, burning with a terrible light yet almost shy. It felt within me, within what had once been my chest, snaring the strings and ribbons that had been my heart.
It is not a prize for you, my voice repeated, but it spoke above me and beneath me. It spoke from beneath a loose flagstone in the scriptorium. I scraped up the slate from its niche and ash sifted down onto my hair. I looked down at myself seated in the hiding place, wrapped in the fur of Chickie, my face a coin of silver. I picked myself up and felt my body pulsing in my hand, warm to the touch, my chest a wreckage of ribs and buttresses and broken starlight.
“It is not a prize for you,” I said, and I heard it again from above me. I looked up to see the angel lifting the flagstone from my hiding place. The abbey burned around us.
“You are marked,” the angel said. Their voice was the drop of a quill on a still afternoon in the scriptorium. “I need only to look, and take what’s mine.”
“I won’t live without it.”
“You have no more stars to guide you,” the angel agreed, hands dimmed in my blood, fettered in what was left of my heart. “Why linger?”
“Just a little longer,” I whispered.
The angel considered what lay within their hands. Their eyes had watched gravity fashion the firstborn stars with this same patience.
My heart beat. I felt it in my chest, a heavy rise and plunge, then another. I saw my own surprise mirrored in the depths of the angel’s eyes.
“Your world will last only a little longer,” the angel said. Oh, they were beautiful.
“Please.”
The angel’s eyes met mine. I was known, inside and out, the roots and ruin of me. A name hovered on the angel’s tongue, but they refused to voice it.
Instead they pressed what was left of my heart against their chest. It was swallowed within their ribs, wisp and rag.
Rabakq knelt before me in the frozen grass, brilliant eyes suddenly shy, smile suddenly demure. An immaculate fingertip traced some childhood scar down my chin. My heart worked within them, and their heart burned within me. I wouldn’t last long clothing their radiance, but what else would await me? What need had I for more?
Gently, Rabakq brushed their lips against mine.
* * *
Ashon’s eyes blinked back into sight and found us there at the edge of camp. I held Rabakq’s hand in my lap and faced her without fear.
She rose to her feet, shaking the daze out of her head, took an uncertain step. Behind her, Jiannah and Gabel stirred and groaned back to life.
Ashon knelt before us, pressed her hand to my chest. I knew what she felt there. “You used it,” she said, struggling to frame the bounds of an unwelcome miracle. “You had it and you used it. Against us. You snuffed us like candles.”
“I did.” I bowed my head. If this was my end, I was content.
Ashon glanced between us, me and the angel. Rabakq watched her with the same patience they had given the first stars, the same patience they had given me. I wondered if Ashon had retained any capacity for awe after the abbey had burned, or if she could only face the end of the world with fatal pragmatism, one obstacle and one miracle alike at a time until nothing more would come.
“Do it again and I’ll split your head.” She patted the little axe tucked in her belt. Then she extended her hand to me and pulled me to my feet. The angel rose beside me, taller now, melting the frost around us, though the wind blew cold. “Come. We won’t stop until Inba.”
* * *
The exhausted sun was swallowed in a smoke of cloud that breathed from the ground as we climbed the feet of the mountains. That afternoon it rained fishes and frogs upon us. Ashon pushed on up the muddy cobbled track until the animal rain became an animal hail, fishes and frogs iced rigid in some heavenly cataclysm. Jiannah cried out as a rock-heavy fish split her scalp. Then even Ashon admitted we needed to take shelter, which we found beneath a boulder the size of a house perched on the lip of the trail.
Rabakq worked what magic they could on Jiannah’s head, staunching the blood and easing her cries. The angel gave a sad smile when they could accomplish little else.
I rested my head on their shoulder, and they held me while fish and frogs cracked like a mudslide above us.
“I won’t be fully myself with my heart in your keeping,” they murmured into my hair. “I remember some things—more than I did. I remember more from your life. You hold some of my magic inside you, still.”
Ashon glowered at me but said nothing.
“Will—will the world be saved?” Jiannah asked. “If Lacar returns your heart to you?”
Rabakq adjusted the drape of their yellow headscarf. “The world is not mine to save. The war is not mine to end. I was merely the first to fall.” They pet my hair.
A frog bounced and landed in my lap. I held it for a little while, a broken thing fallen from such heights, until the heat of my hands threatened to thaw it. I set it aside then, lest I awaken it to its own end.
When the hail abated and blew itself into snow, Ashon roused us to our feet once more. I set the handle of my axe in Rabakq’s hand. In their eyes I knew understanding.
* * *
Would it have ended differently had I surrendered the angel’s heart that night, before the leopard came?
* * *
Inba began as a scatter of hermit caves high atop pillars of stone in the heart of the mountains. In the time of a forgotten war, it found renown as a citadel, a city of refuge. Heroic queens had hoarded their people in safety while the fields and valleys smoked and bristled with spears, then they led their nations forth to rebuild Agaan in the quiet that followed. The fortress, its walls pulled down in the heady air of peace, became a center of scholarship and worship, a place where books were written and the paths of stars were charted.
I clung to Rabakq’s arm with both of mine, following the path Ashon and Gabel had kicked into the snow. Rabakq used my axe to steady us on the path. In the swirling gusts, I saw only round hives of stone, tiny windows dark and silent. No trace of fire, no trace of life. Perhaps the healers and scholars had known no peace would come after this war, and had hoarded themselves elsewhere, to look out for their own in the days that remained.
“They’re gone,” Jiannah said, and slumped to her knees, her strength and hope spent.
Ashon shushed her and stole forward, then froze. Twin lines had been cut through the snow ahead of her. Rabakq pulled me forward until both of us could see: horse tracks, freshly made.
“The Princess. Shit.”
Gabel pulled Jiannah to her feet and the two of them stumbled through the snow toward the nearest stone hive. Ashon ran with them. The three of them muscled the door open. Perhaps Rabakq carried me inside; I have no memory of it. I slumped against the fireplace while broken tables and chairs were piled against the door. Ashon whispered orders. Rabakq stood serene at my side. The stone walls had been scrawled over with curses and spells in a dozen alphabets. I blinked and the words vanished.
The angel’s heart moved within me. “The leopard is here,” I said, but only Rabakq seemed to hear.
Hoofbeats rumbled outside. Ashon and the others crouched behind their makeshift barricade, breathing hard. Jiannah cried silently, but faced the door with resolve. Gabel stood poised with their knife and their staff. Ashon was their focus, their foundation, axe ready in hand. If I could carry one memory of them with me to the farther stars, it would be that moment of readiness at the door, each prepared to defend the others to the last against anything that might come through.
Deep within me, I felt the moment crest, then break. I clung to the angel’s hand.
The earth shuddered beneath us.
Deep within its secret heart, something vital had crumbled.
The wave of its breaking swelled and burst through the mountain, throwing me into the angel’s arms, snapping the stones and crumpling the walls around us. We reached out with our joined hearts and kept the walls from crushing our companions, but then the Princess, resplendent in white atop her horse, her face once painted in royal gold but now dusty and tear-streaked, leapt through the cloud of broken stone. She speared Gabel through the back. I screamed and flung my pain and fear at her, but she swept it aside with her shield and bent her head back and howled a leopard’s scream of triumph. Her horse huffed smoke. Her eyes shined indigo when they leveled with mine.
“Kill them,” she commanded, jerking her spear from Gabel’s body and pointing at me. Tears flowed freely, but she bared her teeth in predatory anticipation. A dozen men in white leapt and scrambled through the fallen walls, swords drawn, moving in twin waves toward us.
Rabakq spun their robes and launched a whirlwind around us, picking up the soldiers and tossing them back. In the confusion Ashon dodged around the horse’s hooves, shoving Jiannah into my arms just in time to knock a spear-thrust away with her axe.
“Find the tunnels,” she said. She grimaced as the horse danced back and the Princess freed her spear for another thrust. I held Jiannah in one arm and willed shelter, deflection, defiance around us. The Princess shook her head, briefly dazed, then wheeled her horse around once more.
“Go! I told Jiannah the way. Keep her safe. Pray for us.” Ashon glanced at the angel, who gathered their robe about them once more, before she launched toward the Princess, axe bloodied, screaming to keep the enemy’s attention.
I looked at the angel, and they nodded to me. Jiannah flung tears from her eyes and pointed behind the fireplace. We scuttled together through the ruins, over the groaning soldiers. Jiannah plucked one of their swords free, and wailed aloud when we heard the crunch of hooves into flesh, and we ran into the snow and didn’t look back.
* * *
I write this now in the depths of the mountain.
A secret Inba kept even from queens: a warren of caves and tunnels worked into the rock. When sentries spotted the first approach of the Princess and her riders, the abbey’s Mother ordered her children to disperse belowground. The scholars split their books between them so that some learning, at least, might survive a little longer. Many rooms and tunnels collapsed when the earth shook and many sisters and brothers died in the dark. Luck, perhaps, led us to a cavern that withstood the break.
I write now in candlelight. All around us, reflected in pools and shining stone, hundreds of candles have been lit for one final work of praise. Constellations flicker and gutter and swell to fresh life in every corner of the cave.
Jiannah still weeps, but she strides here and there in the cave, tending the wounded who have been pulled from ruined tunnels, sword at her side, adamant that the angel accompany her. I sit at a table, a last fortress piled with books, in the company of fellow-scribes, and write while my strength endures. The angel’s heart is strong within me. My own heart, I know, won’t last much longer.
I trace my fingers down the haft of the axe. I have carried it here through hill and mountain, all the way from Mewal where I had been raised. I have carried it since that last day when Elder Balo sent me out to chop wood for our abbey’s survival. My heart thumps—my hearts. I hope Rabakq understands the sincerity of my offer. It isn’t their world to save, but perhaps, perhaps—
I think of our companions—their courage, their compassion, their constancy. I wonder if fresh stars will grace our heavens after this war, or if Yon, designs satisfied, will find new toys, new lights in a new cosmos.
Forgive an under-scribe this moment of doubt, here at the end of things.
Perhaps Yon has wearied of us here on the earth. Perhaps the farther stars were never made to sign our paths. Perhaps the radiance we make, the fragile, fallible, familiar light we craft at hearth and in our hearts, is what we were meant to follow. With such stars to guide us—
The earth shakes around us, and voices cry out. The candles shudder. I feel the leopard approaching.
The angel stands before me. Their beauty catches the candlelight, magnifies it, softens it.
Jiannah presses her hand to my shoulder, weeping steady tears, and kisses my forehead. “I will pray,” she says. She embraces me.
It is time.
I have been the keeper of the Heart of the Angel Rabakq. I am content.
Rick Hollon (they/them or fey/fem) is a queer, genderfluid writer, photographer, and parent living in the Appalachian Piedmont. Feir stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Crow & Cross Keys, and of course Prismatica. They collect old pulp magazines and much older rocks. Their website is mimulus.weebly.com.