Chapter 7: The Fallen Seraph
764 Words
"I have existed since before your kingdom had a name. Please do not feel obligated to impress me."
— Cassiel
The capital, Veira Proper, was a city that had been built in layers over eight hundred years, each century adding a ring of new construction around the old core until the result was less a city than a geological record of ambition — the newest districts gleaming and wide-streeted, the middle rings worn and comfortable, the inner city old enough that the stone had developed opinions about being walked on. At its center was the Royal Tower, a structure that was aesthetically confused but aerially impressive, and at the Royal Tower's base, on the training ground where the new company would assemble, was where Kairu met Cassiel.
He did not look like what Kairu had expected from the description he'd received second-hand from the gate guards (enormous, white-winged, unsettling, has been standing there for three days and doesn't appear to eat). He was tall, yes, and the wings were real — white, enormous, folded against his back with the contained restraint of something vast trying to take up as little space as possible. But the unsettling part wasn't his size. It was his eyes: copper-bright, completely still, watching everything with the particular quality of attention that only beings with very long memories develop — not just seeing what was there, but overlaying it with every similar thing they had ever seen, comparing, cataloguing.
He looked at Kairu when Kairu crossed the training ground gate and said, immediately and without greeting:
"You're late. By about fifteen years, but I'll allow for the fact that you weren't born yet for most of that."
"What?" Kairu said.
"Never mind. My name is Cassiel. I am—" A pause, the kind that contained several more accurate descriptions being evaluated and rejected in favour of diplomacy. "—retired from my original function. I was directed here by a compulsion I cannot explain and am choosing not to examine too closely. You are the dark-flame mage." Not a question. "I will accompany your company."
"You're joining us?" Kairu said.
"I said I will accompany you. Joining implies paperwork and oaths, and I have enough of those from previous centuries." He turned back to watching the gate with his copper eyes. "I will be useful. I ask only that no one makes me explain my history until I am ready to explain it."
"Is it a long history?"
"Exceedingly." A pause. "There are songs about parts of it. They are mostly inaccurate."
Seraphine was already in the training ground when Kairu arrived with Thorn and Ozymara — already assessing the space, already thinking three steps ahead in the particular way of someone who had grown up in rooms where thinking ahead was survival. She looked at the assembled group — three commoners (two anomalous, one druid), a fallen seraph leaning against the east wall — and then she looked at Kairu.
"You made it," she said.
"You said you weren't telling me to come."
"I wasn't." She turned back to the training ground layout. "I'm glad you did anyway."
She said it with the same voice she used for weather reports and strategic assessments — flat, informational — which meant he almost missed it entirely. He didn't miss it entirely. He filed it somewhere quiet and didn't examine it, because the world was apparently full of divine monsters that knew his bloodline and fallen seraphs with centuries of unspeakable history and a chaos-blade ex-assassin who knew exactly how many of them they needed, and there was no room in that for whatever was happening in the space between him and Seraphine Valdris.
Or so he told himself. Reasonably convincingly. For now.
Seraphic Presence · Cassiel: Passive Aura
Divine · Rank Immeasurable · Effect: Suppresses hostile intent in a 20m radius
The company commander — a tired-looking woman named Marshal Voss who had clearly been handed this assignment as either a great honour or a subtle punishment and wasn't sure which — looked at the assembled group and said:
"Right. So we have two unclassified mages, a druid, a chaos-affinity former criminal, and a—" She looked at Cassiel. Cassiel looked back with absolute equanimity. "—being of unclear origin and presumably significant power. And we're calling this a fighting company."
"We're missing two people," Ozymara said helpfully.
"I'm aware," said Marshal Voss, in the voice of a woman adding items to a list of things she is going to need wine to process later. "They arrive tomorrow."
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