Azrael

Seventeen

Azrael sat in a discreet booth at the back of The Diner, one of the finer eateries in the Eastern Fort. She was dressed in flowing robes of muted black with a veil of finely embroidered lace, which Venus had been all too kind to lend her.

She was meeting her father, after all.

A man she had not talked to for decades.

She felt calmer; more in control of herself, since the restaurants and cafés catered to specific palates, recreating many dishes popular amongst Seraphim before the fall of their home. She could smell earth serpents spitting over an open fire, the metallic tang of their giant tusked carcasses hanging on steel hooks somewhere at the back of the restaurant. They were Seraphim delicacy, processed for their sweet, slightly smoky meat, and their venom, an off-world aphrodisiac that was strong enough to make her relax.

She caught the faint whiff of myrrh in the air, and then she heard his heartbeat as an irregular murmur. It is just one remnant of a spell gone wrong that left him half-blind and scarred. He wore all white robes, with a sash whose vivid blue, brown, black and gold colours Azrael had loved when she was younger.

The four strokes of blue, her father had drilled into her mind, represented the Seraphim's four protecting Sentinels. The intermixed brown strokes represented the world's four corners, while the black and gold signified a balance between the light and dark.

He sat across Azrael and acknowledged her with a slight bow, but did not speak.

"Are you afraid of me, father?" she asked.

"I raised you," he replied softly, looking through the window at the majestic outline of the Red Temple against the night sky.

"That's not what I asked."

"I'm not afraid of you, daughter."

"All the others are," Azrael told him. "They won't let me cast or give me my cards. And I cannot leave. They intend to force me into a trial."

"Sometimes I think you see things in a wholly different perspective from everyone else, Azrael," he said wistfully. His eyes turn back to her own, tracing across her face, and she sees the familiarity in that look.

"What do you believe in, Azrael? What would you die for?"

"Is that what you ask all your followers?"

"It's what I ask all those who have lost their way," her father replied. "Why do you cling to life if there's nothing for you to believe in?"

Azrael did not know what to say.

Her father produced a card from the inside of his robes, one of her own, from the engravings on the back. She tried to feel for its magic but found it empty.

"I remember the day I took you to the Architect's Citadel to get your first item of power," he murmured. "You were just a girl back then, excited and marvelling at everything you saw. When we left, you couldn't stop talking about how you wanted to be an Architect."

"I was a child."

"You had a talent for moulding magic to your purpose. Are you in pain?"

"There is no pain, only a feeling of confinement."

He placed the card on the table and frowned. She heard his heartbeat quicken, and the subtle acceleration of his breath.

"I've been told," he said hesitantly, "and I'm not one to entertain rumour, but rumour has it you have found another soul bond."

Azrael chose her words carefully. "Adira isn't my soul bond. She's human."

"Yet you somehow ended up here, back in Kespen," he told her. "So close to the Eastern Fort that it would be easy to suspect you had become homesick."

Azrael leaned forward. "I was tracking an infected Seraph."

"What a coincidence."

"It's not the Revenants I'm worried about," Azrael said. "It's her."

Her father looks at her again, and his face shifts, as though seeing her in a different light.

"I see fear in your eyes, daughter."

"She's special." Azrael shook her head. "It's hard to explain. I brought her here so Venus could see what she was. And then-"

"And then she summoned a Revenant inside the temple," her father completed. "She is just like you. So you're afraid the High Council wants to do something to her."

"I do," Azrael told him, wringing her hands together. "I assume the only reason why they haven't taken me yet is because they don't know how bad it may get with me."

"So this is why you're still here." Her father seems calm all of a sudden. "Is this what you would die for?"

"I don't know," Azrael confessed.

"I've watched you since you were a child," he told her. "I believe people like you exist to balance the laws that govern our world. Light and dark. Life and death."

He studied her for a long time and then continued.

"God, mortal, angel or demon, we're all variations on the same theme, all of us human in our own way, and at the core of that humanity is the ever-present question: purpose."

He reached out and held her hand. Azrael did not protest.

"What is your purpose, Azrael? Why did you leave your home?"

"I did not want to die by the same plague that was destroying my kind."

"You wanted to be immortal," he told her. "You were afraid of death back then."

"No more."

"No more," her father repeated. "Yet I saw you holding onto that human as her soul flickered so close to burning out. You kept her alive."

"As I said, she's special," Azrael insisted, pulling her hand away from his.

"I think you've found someone who reminds you of the fragility of mortality; of what it means to be small and vulnerable, to treasure every moment as though it were your last. Someone who brings balance to your world. Your purpose."

He stood up and bowed to her, and then left.

Azrael thought about what he had just told her.

She thought about it for a long time, before something jarred her back to reality.

The card on the table.

He'd left it.

For her.

Purpose.