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He smells like no one else you’ve ever met, the gamey-chalk freshness of clean bird, smooth expanses of sulfur- and saffron-tinged orange cream drizzled with streaks of lemon-buttercup blood, steel and oil and the crisp mammal sheen of salt. The elaborate olfactory masterpiece of whatever puckered chaos whorl he crawled, or flew, or slithered out of.
You don’t know where he came from, or how he exists, or why. He was just there, one day, in an abandoned lawnring at the distorted, non-contiguous rim of reality. It wasn’t an active battle zone, just one more disconnected blotch where physics and senses and motives and matter had eroded away; one of those places where the wind bent strangely and the light smelled like it was rotting, crabgrass clicking and cracking and pinching at your scaled boots, cold sucking holes scattered everywhere like the air bubbles in marvelously pungent cheese, or a garment nibbled by flutterbeasts.
(You licked one of the holes directly, once. It tasted like ink, black licorice, empty cave water and iodine and ammonia, and a vile, overwhelming bitterness, and then your tongue went completely numb for ten hours. Every time you tried to talk, Vriska laughed until she cried.)
You were checking how far the incursion had progressed, marching along the old boundaries, and whacked him with your cane, heard him squawk egregiously and fall right off the end of the cement-square pedestrian corridor in a rush of feathers, slipping through air halfway diffused into nothingness, too thin to hold him, but seeping slowly enough that you got a good, deep waft of his scents as he pumped his wings.
“Watch it, Pyrope,” he snapped, in a voice exactly like Dave’s, if it was run through three layers of shitty electronic recording, harsh and atonal. You expected him to continue, as he stopped reflexively flapping and twisted sinuously through the air back onto steadier world, to continue, to playfully accuse you of recklessness in the course of your duties, endangering his gorgeous and irreplaceable self, &c. He didn’t. He just scowled and coiled and hovered, like he wanted to go back to sitting in his spot but didn’t trust you not to skewer him and send him spiraling into the abyss.
(You didn’t think about Vriska. How she cackled and crowed, how the wreck of her eye festered and cracked and seeped venom, how she jumped, raving, strutting, swearing she could see the circle and sail to the other side, and you lost the bright-tart blueberry splash of her in that slick baleful cold of nauseous flickering, shifting colors, her mind like a beacon past the borders of the world, and then a nothing, like when you drop a stone in a well and never hear a splash.)
“…I can’t watch it,” you said when he didn’t elaborate, slowly, the way you could feel your face peeling back from your grin, giving him time to really settle into the cool grave of his error. “Because I‘m blind.”
He groaned. There was a rustle, another minor cloud of that delicate fragrance cocktail as he wrapped his wings in front of his eyes.
“None of that, Mister Tangerine Dream,” you announced, bouncing slightly in place. You whipped your sword overhand, planning to rap the flat on the crown of his head, but instead got a blur and a zesty orange gust and a clang that shook up your arm and made you want to roar and chomp and set things on fire.
“None?” he asked, skeptically, a beat too late. He must have registered the expression on your face after he blocked.
You showed him every single one of your teeth.
“If you’ve got something to say, you maniac crocodile, you should say it. This whole street is gonna dissolve in four and a half minutes.”
“Aha!” You surged at him again, and he parried, parried. Whisked his tail up when you went for a low sweep, which was frankly unsporting. You loved it. You wanted to fillet him. “If the location is unstable, then why were you loitering at a dangerous border?”
You weren’t sure at the time exactly what you were accusing him of, aside from evasion, perjury, and contempt, of course. Collusion with the enemy, possibly, or desertion, sabotage. Scavenging and scaremongering that little scrap of reality.
“I was enjoying the view,” he said flatly, with just a hint of mockery, and you had no idea if he was lying or not.
You had no idea, even though you always know if a witness is lying, especially in response to direct examination. You’re a Seer. But you didn’t know, and you still don’t. You can’t get the slightest bit of a read on him. Whatever he is, he’s got chaos in him, the dripping intangible ichor-stuff that bleeds from the stitches of the wounded Troll Frankenstein’s Monster of reality that’s left. But he isn’t mad. He isn’t lurching and hollow. His blood smells good and clean, banana-custard-sweet, his reflexes with the sword quick and precise. He’s not all real, the obscene, slippery bastard, but he’s stable, like almost nothing else left.
You wanted to know everything. That hasn’t changed either.
Fortunately for you, he was right about the street disintegrating, and the two of you ended up having to book it side by side.
*
It’s good having a partner again, as you meander through the convoluted lattice of safe paths back to what patchwork center is still holding. He denies that he is any such thing, of course, mutters that he’s only tailing you until you lead him back to anyone he actually likes. You cackle oh really when he says tailing, dart a hand out to grab the thin whipcurl end of his. It doesn’t feel anything like you expected – neither scaled nor slimy, reptilian or amphibian, but sleek and smooth, like dolphin skin but more sinuous. The tip curls tight around your hand, practically wrestles you, while he splutters and snaps at you to keep your bony claws to yourself.
You admit to yourself that the tail is really, unfairly, grotesquely, flat-out pornographic. You wrestle with it a little more, until he whacks you away with a snap-out of his wing.
“Where did you even get those, Mister Apricot Surprise?” you wheeze, poking him with your sword enough to establish that you admit no defeat. You’re trying to find a name that fits. He evades you, in this as in other things, glides just slightly out of your grasp.
“I built them myself,” he says, “Out of ear wax and popsicle sticks and lint. You haven’t seen a dude with a cow head trapped in a maze lately, have you? Or a princess with a ball of yarn?”
“We’re all trapped in a maze, Mister Cheddar Chickadee,” you remind him. He doesn’t have anything to say to that.
*
You’re passing through a horizon on the edge of sunrise in between another lawnring and a cave system – so much sweltering orange that you’d almost be afraid of losing him, if he weren’t sticking closer than he usually does, sword ready, close enough that you get a bit of down in your nose when you turn and inhale too deeply and end up sneezing so loudly it echoes off the hidden sun – that you hit your first real skirmish together.
Angels come pouring out of the clouds, scraggly shrieking shroud-wisps, and they smell a little like him, that chalk-calcite of feathers, but not like him at all, ashes and ozone and bone dust, musty like dry brittle death. They’re fast, they’re always so fast, zig-zagging like neither friction nor time has any strong hold on them, but the two of you are faster. He whips around and through them like a whirlwind; you shred anything that gets close to you. He blocks them and herds them, funnels them to you to be sliced into thinner and thinner deadly ribbon-tendrils until they finally just fail to hold together, until there’s nothing left.
You’re gasping when it’s done, bright with triumph and that perfect magnetic synchrony of fighting together, but you hurt all over, an awful familiar sting that you resist understanding, stand furious and confused for a moment, because you haven’t gotten sore from a workout like that in years. But then you register the heat as something so much more overwhelming than exertion flush, unbearable, that you took too long fighting and you must be right in a spotlight of too-close burgeoning sun, you are still too far from the caves, and you are going to die crispy.
You open your mouth for one last insult, something nice and punchy, and get a heavy breath of oranges instead, sudden cool relief, and it’s him, you realize, the hilt of his sword knocking a little against your dorsal muscle convergence where it’s sheathed again in his chest, his wings closed all around you. His hands settle, gingerly, on your hips. None of the real humans have claws, but you realize very suddenly that he does.
“You have to walk,” he says, voice rough and low, a little muffled by his wings, even this close. “I can’t shield you and fly.”
“Oooh,” you say, breathless, “Are you finally letting me navigate, Mister Mango Delight?”
“Just go straight,” he says, then mutters, “Christ.”
You don’t actually want to burn alive, so you do it, brisk even strides so he can keep covering you, until you feel the texture under your boots change from that bouncy curvature of the inbetweens to solid rough-sloped stone.
“Okay,” he says, wings finally pulling back, “We’re in –”
But you’re already turning around, pressing yourself up against him to one side of the protruding hilt, arms wrapping around his neck, tugging him down to hover a little lower so you can bury your face in his delicious, fluffy neck ruff.
He pats you awkwardly on the back.
“You’re gonna be even uglier covered in blisters, Pyrope. Or do you guys shed, like snakes? It’s probably hells of gross either way. Maybe we can find some pools in here.”
His mind is as inscrutable to your Sight as ever, but you figure this is his way of you’re welcome.
*
“Pretty handy, those wings,” you say later, when you are, in fact, scooping cool handfuls of cave water over your face, arms, and neck, in between hissing and chirring in relief. “How’d you get them?”
“Built a cocoon out of my own spit,” he says, “Dissolved into a squishy organ sac and everything, traded in my legs to grow them. It’s too late for you, you’ve wasted all your saliva slobbering on people like the pointiest dog ever.”
You splash him, and he splashes you back - with the tail, you are pretty sure, given the way it sounds when it smacks into the water. You tackle him, drag him right into the water, crowing at the way he thrashes and then goes huffy and flustered when he realizes it would only be about knee-deep, if you weren’t both prone and consequently irregularly soaked up to your shoulders.
His chest shifts against yours; you hear him taking a deep breath, and before he can launch into complaining, you climb on top of him and kiss him hard. He tastes even better than he smells, tropical neon lushness, and you start buzzing in your thorax so hard the water surface fizzes and trembles around you.
“Damn, Pyrope,” he breathes when you pull back to lick your lips, but you kiss him again before he can get off track. He is, regrettably, more difficult to distract than Dave lead you to believe. You don’t know why you’re surprised; he’s always more restrained than Dave, quieter and graver, somehow, even compared to Dave at his mopiest. “You always….get like this…after killing things?”
“You don’t?” you ask him brightly, and then kiss the face he makes. You want to be closer, touching more, and you are getting really tired of the pommel of his sword banging your rumble spheres, but his hand is tight on your wrist before your fingers close.
“…no?” you ask innocuously. Hoping he’ll let you after all. You can hear his breath go shallow.
“I’m gonna need that later,” he points out.
“So noted,” you agree, very solemnly, which isn’t at all promise to be careful with him, except for the ways it is. He doesn’t let go of your wrist but his grip loosens, a little, and you carefully draw the sword out.
“Does it hurt?” you ask, flicking your tongue along the blade, lapping up his lovely sweet-tart lemon meringue blood, savoring the iron tang aftertaste. Prurience, not pity. He already knows you’re nosy.
“Not like it looks. Sore, sometimes.” He shrugs with a wing while you – carefully – put his sword to the side of the pool.
“Now?” You settle back in, splay your hands against his chest, dip a thumb in just along the edge, exult a little when he sucks in a breath sharp enough that you fall forward, a tiny bit. The texture of him is fascinating, a gradient between the smoothness of the tail and the softness of human skin.
He hums instead of answering, which means there’s an answer he doesn’t want to give, but he’s true distracted to think of an amusing and elaborate lie. You scoot a little down his tail – there’s an adjustable endlessness to his lap - and you laugh at that, rock a little for friction, hear your laugh come back to you in crackling echoes as you lean forward and get your nose right in there, nuzzle, lick the thin yellow seam.
He makes a very gratifying choking noise, almost a proper chirp, so you do it again. He clutches at your shoulders and his claws go right through your shirt, five bright pinpricks, and you groan, jerk your hips.
“This is officially a naked party,” he rumbles, scrabbling, trying not to rip and consequently unable to get a decent grip on anything. “You’re in violation of party ordinance, Pyrope, never thought I’d see the day –”
You stick your tongue in the slit and he groans, tail writhing a little underneath you, lifting you up, making waves in the shallow water. You strip your shirt off while he recovers, panting, and throw it sopping in the direction of your own sword and gear.
"Is it sore," you ask as sweetly as you can, licking your lips and sliding a claw gingerly inside, "When it's empty?"
"You," he growls, "are evil." He pulls you up, claws digging into your sides, just sliding you along his ridiculous massive bulge of a tail, kisses you again. Your finger goes all the way in, and he's hot inside, slick in a way that makes you think of soap bubbles more than blood, no layers of skin or muscle, no upper ventral bone plate even though you know it should be just there on a human. He isn't human. There's just the substance of him, close and wet to mimic a body, a wound, but solid and smooth, real and not-real, like nothing you can name. You curl your finger and he croons into your mouth, keens, shrieks, wings splashing behind him. You do it again, and again, while he drags welts into your back and you devour his mouth. You don't stop until a particular hard thrash of his tail actually dislodges you, sends you tumbling snout over heels back into the water.
He whines at the loss, flips over onto his stomach and propels himself forward like a snake or an eel, leverages himself over you and pushes you down, kisses you as the water closes over your face, and you can't smell anything, can't hear anything but your own bloodpusher, can't taste anything but him. You fight not to gasp, kiss him madly, bite his lips, the taste of him mingling with the delicate mineral crispness of the water. Everything goes orange and dizzy, shimmery-strange, coolness on your skin and a burning heat building in your chest.
You lose it a little, forget not to breathe, and then you're choking and coughing, yanking hard on his hair, and he hauls you back up as you hack and wheeze.
"Shit - shit, I'm sorry-"
You heave a good handful of water right onto his hair, and laugh hoarsely when he sputters.
"Good thought, next time ten seconds less," you croak imperiously, and you know he will get it exactly right. You get to your feet - hand still tight in his hair - and add, "Get my pants off. There was an ordinance, I believe...?"
You can't be totally sure, since they're already soaked through with water, but you are pretty sure they're a lost cause anyway; he gets his claws hooked in the sides and shreds them; you purr in in relief as your bulge uncoils, all at once, practically slurping.
He leans in and licks you, the scaly texture of his palms cupping your hips, and you squirm and refuse to get distracted. "Lean back," you tell him, "On your hands," even though you'll miss the dry-rough texture of his taloned hands, one more delightful peculiarity you hadn't realized he came with. He obliges and you straddle him, not where his hips ought to be, but farther up, so that his face is level with your rumble spheres and your bulge can wriggle a little into his perpetually-slick sword sheath.
"Oh god, he mutters, pressing his face into your chest, and you rock forward, twist your fingers in his hair. "Come on," he whines, "Come on come on come on," and a thick coil of his tail curves back up to push against your glutes, shoving you a little farther forward, farther in. You trill, high and loud, press hard with your hips, let your bulge twist and wriggle deeper. You're gasping on every breath, rolling and straining, and you can feel the vibrations of his moans where he's sucking a toothy bruise onto the side of one of your spheres. You jerk and whine, fluid from your nook dripping down your legs onto his belly, your bulge sluicing more and more material into his hole.
"...how did you get your wings?" you ask breathlessly, so casually, jerking his head back so he can answer, whimpering when he takes a deep breath and you can feel something compress around you as his chest expands, an impossibly tight clutch.
"Well you see, Pyrope," he says in a voice made entirely of strain and ragged want, leaning in to nip sharply at your spheres like it's poorly-edited punctuation, "When a super cool boy and a ghostly snakebird abomination love each other very much -"
"Would you put your ridiculously humongous bulge in me at all, just a little, will you ever get on with it," you snarl, because if he's going to fuck with you it really ought to be literally, just now, but he laughs warm against your skin where it's gone a little clammy and chilly with evaporation, and you can feel that around your bulge too.
"Yeah," he says, and does it, twisting the tip back between your legs, and it goes easy at first, squelching right in, curling just so - and you realize he's copying your bulge, flicking and undulating and pressing deeper, and deeper, hitting your seedflap and doubling back, he's so stupidly massive, he could fill you up ten times over, not even the most hulking highblood would even come close, you're still barely taking the tip of him, and yet soon you feel so wonderfully stretched you could scream. "Yeah, that's exactly what, a good solid abomi-dicking, only they got married in a church first, because what - what would the neighbors -"
You move, just little rocking motions, mostly only shifting your weight, because you can't do any more, the more he wriggles in, and you think his tail must be thicker than your bony wrist where it's entering you now, but it changes how you press in him and how he presses in you and both of you shudder hard, lose track of anything except the rough low sounds you're both making, the amazing pressure, the raw soft strength of being inside each other.
When it's over, you flop back in the water for just long enough to get clean, brisk and efficient, then scurry out, scraping off extra water before it beads and chills. He stays in longer, periodic loud splashes as he contorts himself in various ways.
"Dude," he says, while you're wringing out your hair. "I think some of your jizz is coming out my back."
You laugh until you can't breathe, skitter away from the edge when he tries to splash you again for it. You have never been so proud.
*
Rose gave you a map. She couldn’t say how long it would take you to traverse the route, but she did promise you’d get back. Nights and days don’t mean anything, anymore – they’ve become geographic, seismic, meteorological. Most of the world-fragments that have crashed together aren't inhabited. Most of them are empty rock, with disconcerting striations or hissing pools or mats of sucking, unfamiliar flora. It's impossible to tell how much they've been warped from what they were, except for the parts that used to be Alternia or Earth or Skaia. There's evidence of people trying to live in some of them - sopor slicks oozing from slouching card-house shanties, shriveled grubtech husks, biowires gone wild in furious crackling tangles; square grids hacked intransigently into ice or dust or stone; firepits and bullet casings and tent peg holes - but not a lot of places that weren't eventually given up on.
Even the ones that might have supported life, under other circumstances – the angels have taken chunks out of the land and the sky, and everything warps, twists and bleeds slowly away, like grubsauce washed off dishes and circling a drain, like living on an event horizon.
Sometimes there are stragglers, and you can trade them news and directions for a sack of salted pumpkin seeds or some grub meal; more often they’re as mad and broken as the places they’ve gone feral in. The ones who aren’t smart enough (or stupid enough) to keep running while everything falls apart around them.
By silent agreement, you each put down your own. Sometimes it’s almost easy – frothing daywalkers who come shambling right at you, or trolls so wizened with hunger under their last dark molts that they resemble drones or carapacians, crouched and mumbling and barely moving. You strike off their heads quick or pierce them neatly through the heart, and hope that Aradia, wherever she is, can take better care of their ghosts than anyone is managing for the living.
Sometimes it’s – different. In a planetary slice dominated by a mild, mushroom-grey sky and delicately crevassed lavender glaciers, you discover a sleek, elegant blueblood twice your height with a half dozen docile mind-controlled and amputated lowbloods in a basement abattoir. He takes fresh chunks of them to use as bait for what megafauna roam from one fragmentary landscape to the next, and sustains himself on a limb or two when prey is scarce.
You don’t have the horsepower for a proper drawing and quartering – the only possible legal sentence, you rapidly determine – but you slice him open and stake him out on the ice, which will have to do. The inhabitants of his cellar can’t stop screaming as soon as his control slips; you finish them fast.
He loots the place for you, doesn’t touch you or even try to speak until the path has turned and you’re in brackish marshlands populated by very short, yellowish woody bushes, like little dwarf cypresses, scattered around silvery acidic pools that denature all the blood but that your boots, valiantly, do not succumb to.
In a forest of black foliage and coppery-green trunks that smell like pea soup, massive roots outlining broad shallow terraces of slowly-descending travertines, he wraps all of you up in his tail and takes you hard in the soft, loamy, licorice-tinged leaf litter, arms crushed to your sides, the slender distal end of his tail curling and releasing and tightening again on your throat, until you can’t think about anything except the way your blood feels carbonated, fizzy and ready to burst. He swallows down your bulge and gets two claws in your nook, too rigid and too shallow, a terrible roughshod tease that’s even worse because you can’t writhe or buck or fuck his face. He just holds you, tight tight tight, draws it out until the sensation is completely overwhelming, and then awhile longer. It takes him four changes of scenery to get all the teal out of his neck feathers.
You flip a coin for some unruly carapacians, clearly thieves, given the human technology they’ve cobbled together, but they seem to be sort of functioning among themselves even though they won’t speak to either of you except in menacing clicks. He wins, and you both leave them be.
*
You sleep in whatever stable shelter you find. At first you don’t know if he sleeps at all. He always gives you a little space, hunches somewhere on the periphery of wherever you make camp, mantles and broods while you put sopor wraps on your arms and face and pass out. (It’s not as effective as submerging, but it gets you a few solid hours of dreamlessness, and it packs up efficiently in the morning.) He’s awake when you get up again.
You tell him once that you hope he’s not waiting for you to take a turn keeping watch, ha ha ha.
He says he’s not waiting for anything, and you still can’t tell if he’s lying.
You tug on the feathers of his neck ruff and pull him in for a kiss, bossy and slow. You wonder if you could taste the lie in his mouth, what it might taste like – sour like cheap wine or darkly bitter or something more subtle, the comfortable starchy resignation of reheated pod noodles. But he’s just oranges, like always, tart and sunny and sweet.
You suck luminous little canary-custard bruises into his throat – the squawkblister protrusion exactly at the same angle as Dave’s, but it makes different noises, real squawks and shrill screeches when you scrape your claws along his scalp just right – and down the tight curves of his arms. He lays you down, wings fanning faintly overhead, gets an avian talon-hand on your bulge. It’s actually sort of excruciating, and you’re going to be stupidly sore after, but you peak so hard you bite your own tongue.
You find out that he does sleep, wake up later to find him coiled and roosted around you. You run a hand over the wing tucked over you, preen out a few misaligned feathers. He sigh-croons.
“I am serious as a broken clock, Mister Carrot Soufflé. What are you? How did –” But he just kisses you, lazy evening kisses even though you don’t think there’s any moonrise here to go by, just the dim golden curve of rings through the perpetually dusky sky and the meandering schools of luminous pink jellyfish floating by in the air, and you let it wait a little longer.
*
“Eventually you are going to tell me,” you point out, as you trek single-file along a tightly coiled mountain ridge. You go in a roughly helical path as it loop-de-loops along, even though stepping to either side would somehow send you careening down a vertical cliff face no mater what point you’re on in the loop.
“Maybe I already told you, Miss Needleteeth,” he says, rumbling breath and the occasional wingbeat for balance the only hints of him behind you, with no footfalls to listen to. “Maybe I’ll tell you next time, but you’ll never be sure.” Which is an invitation if you’ve ever heard one.
“That’s Needleteeth, Esquire, to you,” you say. It’s a human title but Rose taught it to you, and you like it. “And the court demands to know, Mister Turmeric Masala, how exactly you come to standing before it, or rather floating behind it, as presumably the view of the court is better that way.”
You wiggle a bit. You won't fall, but if you did he'd catch you.
“Aw, don’t you know? Every time a bell rings, a monstrous doppelganger gets his wings.”
That seems highly unlikely, given that you’ve never seen anyone else like him. But then, you can’t remember the last time you heard a real bell, either, so it’s impossible to prove.
*
On a hadean landscape that makes him twitch and coil tighter in the air, cherry-barbecue lava rivulets and obsidian glass rolling and crunching underfoot, picking a careful path over the cool solid areas below fat drab yellow clouds like overcooked egg yolks, lumpy and poorly scrambled, you find a corrupted human, identifiable despite the muddy gray by the total lack of horns. Not just mad but an open channel for dissolution, deep soot-black tendrils wisping off it like smoke and the white-hot acrid taste of ozone hanging in the air, the same combination as when Rose was tainted, when you almost lost her, only much stronger.
There’s an awful pockmarked granularity to breathing when it gets close. You have no idea if it was a boy or a girl, and you think even with clear sight, he probably isn’t sure either. It’s small, though.
He floats over a glowing lava brook to the – remnant of a person, seems not even slightly afraid. Not that you’re sure what fear would look like on him. The creature flails, dark tentacles vanishing strips out of the landscape. The noise it makes is unbearable, a shrieking twisting wail and the grinding of continents back when planets were whole, and it makes your ears actually bleed. White fire like lightning bursts and recedes, layering a faint sense of almond dust on the already scorched scent of everything.
As well as you can tell by wary sniffing, he doesn’t even flinch. He just goes to it, wraps it up in arms and wings, a soft rambling patter that you can’t quite make out but sounds more like Dave than he ever does. Something - ripples, twists, tears. You think something flickers. Contortion, rather than distortion, a different and uncomfortable shape, you think, without destruction, although you’ve got no evidence for that impression. Maybe it is destruction, so absolute that not even hollow places and broken-off edges remain to testify, and in place of what was unmade, what was nevered rather than merely no mored, there’s a small clatter of bones. His wings settle behind him again, and there’s no sign of the poor, addled, leaking emissary.
He glides back to you, sword still in his chest, and says nothing at all. You force yourself not to gape, reach forward, need to touch him, need to be certain he is still with you after what happened, still as real as he ever was. He lets you, still and silent, maybe numb.
You trace a welt where a giant fanged rabbit got ahold of his arm, a deep gash scabbed-over in mottled aging-banana yellow. But there’s no hint of thinness or static-y distortion or purple-black abyssal taint. None at all, not one feather bent or its citrusy shine dimmed.
“How did you do that?” you ask, hushed, almost a whisper. “It was way too far gone – how are you fine?” It chokes a little coming out. You hate that you’re upset, you hate that you’re scared, because it didn’t hurt him at all but you don’t understand why, and you can’t trust it. You scowl and let your throat go tight but you don’t let him see you cry. He tries to turn away but you get a hand on his wrist, dig your claws right into the old cut, harsh and demanding.
“How did you get your wings, Orange Marmalade? This isn’t a game anymore, I need to know.”
He hisses, yanks his arm back, and you smell burnt banana as drops of blood flick onto the molten rock nearby.
“Didn’t you ever read Troll Nietzsche?” he snarls back, and you realize too late that this was the worst possible time to push. “He who fights angels should look to it that he himself does not become a motherfucking angel.” His wings snap out, like a burst of springtime, and then he launches himself into the sky.
*
You keep following the map. You don’t know how this journey of yours is supposed to do anything to appreciably stop the angels – the ones you’ve killed on the way are a pittance, and you know it – but Rose said it was important, and you’re almost at the end. Sometimes you think you catch a whiff of him, like maybe he’s flying overhead, but you can’t be sure.