Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Fifteen

Uriel came on the morning of the third day as promised.

Seraphel was waiting for him at the edge of the Greywood. She had made sure Aldric was with Cassian, on genuine work, two families in the north end who needed care, and she had asked him to go before dawn. He had looked at her and understood, and gone without argument, which was its own kind of gift.

Uriel arrived and found her alone.

"You did not go," he said.

"No."

He looked at her with the full, slow attention of a being that had known her for a very long span of time, and she could see him processing what had changed. There was more of it than she had expected; she had not taken stock of herself recently, and whatever was different showed clearly to eyes that had old knowledge of what she had been.

"This is because of the mortal," he said.

"Yes. And because of all of them." She looked at the village. "The girl. The monk. Agnes Thatcher, with her shaking hands. Thomas, who breathes more easily. I cannot unmake what knowing them has made."

Uriel was quiet for a long moment. "The Order will not find that argument compelling."

"No."

"They will argue that attachment corrupts function. That a watcher who has become a participant cannot observe accurately."

"They may be right."

He looked at her, and in his look was something she recognized as the closest thing Uriel had ever come to grief. "Seraphel. I will ask you once, not as the tribunal's emissary. Do you understand what you are choosing?"

"Yes."

"Not the principle of it. The specifics of it. Erasure is not death. It is unmade. You will not go somewhere. You will have never been."

She absorbed that. She had known it, in the abstract. The specifics were harder.

"I understand."

"And you choose this."

"I choose," she stopped. Started more carefully. "I am not choosing erasure. I am choosing what I have become and refusing to undo it to avoid the consequences. That is a different thing."

Uriel was quiet.

"I know it is not a distinction the Order recognizes," she said.

"No," he agreed. "It is not." He looked at the village once more. "I will return. When I do, I will not be asking. I am sorry for that."

"I know you are."

"I genuinely believed you would go. I believed the calculation would be clear."

"It was clear," she said. "That's why I stayed."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he was gone, and she stood at the edge of the Greywood on a winter morning, and the village went on around her, ordinary and extraordinary, and she went back to it.

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