Chapter 35: 3.1.2
The next morning arrived with a timid, gray light that did little to dispel the shadows clinging to the corners of the room. Koen was already up, methodically cleaning a disassembled pistol at the kitchen table when Gabriel entered. The silence between them was different—not the easy quiet of companionship, but a dense, unspoken thing filled with the echoes of last night’s confession.
Gabriel watched him for a moment: the intense focus on the brushed steel parts, the deliberate, almost ritualistic wiping of each component. A avoidance tactic. A flight to familiar, physical territory.
“Coffee’s on the hearth,” Koen muttered without looking up.
“Thank you.” Gabriel poured a cup, the rich aroma doing little to settle the resolve forming in his mind. He leaned against the counter, the chipped porcelain warm in his hands. “We need to talk about last night.”
Koen’s hand stilled for a fraction of a second. “Nothing to talk about. I was drunk. Said stupid things.”
“You said true things,” Gabriel corrected, his voice quiet but unwavering. “And they weren’t stupid.”
“Same difference.” Koen snapped the cylinder back into the frame with a definitive click. “Ancient history. Doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me.”
Koen finally looked up, his orange eyes guarded. “Why? So you can feel sorry for me? So you can fix the broken half-demon? I get by just fine, Gabe. Always have.”
“Getting by is not the same as thriving.” Gabriel set his cup down. “And you are not broken. That man, that master, was a small-minded brute who broke a tool meant for a different purpose. He saw a fish and judged it for its inability to climb a tree.”
A bitter smile twisted Koen’s lips. “Nice metaphor. You come up with that just now?”
“I’ve had all night to think about it.” Gabriel pushed off from the counter. “I want to teach you. To read. To write.”
The reaction was instantaneous. Koen flinched back as if struck, his chair legs screeching on the floorboards. All the color drained from his face, leaving his freckles stark against suddenly pale skin. The carefully reassembled pistol clattered onto the table. “No.”
“It wouldn’t be like before. Not even remotely.”
“I said no.” Koen stood, his body coiled tight with a fear that had nothing to do with physical threat. “You don’t get it, Gabriel. You can’t. It’s not… it’s not the learning. It’s the… the room. The slate. The eyes on you. The laughter. It’s like a sickness in my gut just thinking about it.” He ran a trembling hand through his ashen hair. “I can’t go back to that. I won’t.”
Gabriel held his ground, his expression calm but his blue eyes piercing. “There will be no room. No slate. No one’s eyes but mine. And there will be no failure.”
“Everyone fails when they’re learning,” Koen spat, panic making him angry.
“Not with this method.” Gabriel took a step closer, his voice dropping into a lower, more intimate register. “Every time you get something right, I will reward you. Instantly. Undeniably.”
Koen blinked, confusion cutting through the panic. “What? Gold? I don’t need your gold.”
“Not gold.” A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer passed over Gabriel’s form, a hint of the celestial power thrumming beneath his human disguise. “Pleasure.”
Koen stared at him. “You’re gonna… what, pat me on the head?”
“I am an archangel of the Lord, Koen. I am a principalities of communication, a weaver of divine edicts.” Gabriel’s lips quirked into a familiar, smug smile. “I can transmit a sensation, a pure, sharp bolt of euphoria, directly into your nervous system. A jolt of perfect reward. One for every letter you correctly identify. One for every word you sound out. A cascade for a sentence read.”
The concept was so utterly alien, so far removed from the gritty reality of knuckles and slates and laughter, that it short-circuited Koen’s fear. He just gaped. “You can… do that?”
“I am exceptionally versatile.”
“That’s… that’s cheating.”
“It’s incentive,” Gabriel corrected, moving to stand directly before him. “It rewires the association. No dread. No shame. Just you, me, and a direct line from correct comprehension to bliss.” He reached out, slowly, and brushed a stray lock of hair from Koen’s forehead. “The only sound will be your own success.”
Koen’s breath hitched. He searched Gabriel’s face for mockery, for pity, and found only a challenging, arrogant certainty. The old terror was still there, a cold stone in his belly. But layered on top was a spark of something else—a morbid, desperate curiosity. A chance to spite the ghost of Master Gerren with something the man could never have conceived of in his pious, cruel life.
“You’re serious,” Koen whispered.
“Deadly.”
“And if I get it wrong?”
“Then nothing happens. We simply try again. No sticks. No scorn. Just… try again.” Gabriel’s thumb traced the line of Koen’s cheekbone. “Let me build a new road in your mind. One that bypasses that old, poisoned path entirely.”
Koen looked away, his gaze landing on the pistol parts scattered on the table. A tool for solving problems. This was Gabriel’s tool. It was insane. It was deeply, profoundly weird. And it was the first offer of help that didn’t feel like a demand for him to become something else, to fit into a shape that had always been agony.
He swallowed, his throat dry. “One letter. We try one letter.”
Gabriel’s smile was a victory, warm and real. “One letter.” He walked to a cluttered shelf and pulled down a bestiary—the same one from the day before. He flipped it open not to the dense text, but to a vivid, full-page illustration of a snarling, wolf-like creature with obsidian teeth. At the bottom, in large, ornate script, was a single word: ‘Varg’.
He pointed to the first letter. “This,” he said, his voice calm and clear, “is ‘V’. It makes a ‘vuh’ sound. Like in ‘victory’. Or ‘vicious’.”
Koen stared at the sweeping, serifed line. It looked like a dagger, or a cruel smile. His heart thudded against his ribs. He saw the stick. He heard the crow-like laughter. He forced a breath. “V,” he grunted.
Nothing happened.
He frowned, confused. Then he realized. “Vuh. ‘Vuh’ sound.”
A sensation, utterly alien and instantaneous, lanced through him. It wasn’t emotional. It was purely physical, a lightning strike of delight that erupted at the base of his spine and radiated outwards in a wave of shocking, breath-stealing intensity. It was over in a heartbeat, leaving behind a phantom echo of warmth and a gasp caught in his throat.
His orange eyes flew wide, meeting Gabriel’s smug, knowing gaze.
“See?” Gabriel said, his voice soft. “No failure. Only a correct answer.”
Koen exhaled shakily. He looked back at the page, at that arrogant, dagger-like letter. A strange, defiant hunger stirred in him, cutting through the residual fear. He pointed a slightly unsteady finger at the next letter. “That’s… ‘A’. Makes the ‘ah’ sound.”
Another bolt, slightly different, a sharper, brighter zap that made his fingers tingle and his toes curl in his boots. A shaky laugh escaped him. “Hell’s teeth.”
“Language,” Gabriel chided, but his eyes were shining. “Next.”
“R.” The reward this time was a deeper, thrumming pulse that vibrated in his bones. Koen’s shoulders, which had been up around his ears, began to relax. His focus narrowed to the page, to the puzzle, to the promise of that startling, addictive payoff.
He pointed to the last letter. “G. ‘Guh’.”
The final bolt was a slow, spreading warmth that pooled in his gut, a contented hum that resonated through his whole body. He stared at the word. “Varg.” He said it aloud, the sound connecting to the picture of the snarling beast. A key turned in a lock he’d thought rusted shut.
Gabriel watched the realization dawn on Koen’s face—not just the recognition of the word, but the realization that this was possible. That learning could feel like this. Like a secret, shared thrill. Like a game only they knew the rules to.
“Again,” Koen said, his voice rough with something that wasn’t fear.
Gabriel turned the page. A new illustration, a feathered serpent coiled around a tree. The label: ‘Quetzal’.
Koen looked at the first, complex letter. The old anxiety tried to rear up, a whisper of you can’t. He squashed it, his eyes fixed on Gabriel’s waiting face. He took a breath. “Q.”
The room, for the first time in Koen’s memory, held no ghosts. Just the soft rustle of a page, the crackle of the fire, and the quiet, electrifying sound of a long-silent mind beginning to speak its own name.
The ‘Q’ was followed by a soft ‘u’, and Koen growled in mock frustration at the trick before the electric reward lit up his nerves. “That’s cheating, they’re a team,” he laughed, the sound unfamiliar and bright in his own ears. He felt giddy, pointing at each letter with a growing confidence that felt like stealing.
“That’s how it works,” Gabriel replied, his smugness tempered by a genuine delight. “Some letters are partners. Like ‘p’ and ‘h’ making the ‘ffff’ sound, not a ‘puh-huh’.”
They spent an hour like that, moving from the illustrated bestiary to a simple list of common herbs Gabriel conjured on a spare piece of parchment. Each correct sound was met with that startling, pleasurable jolt, each successfully sounded-out word a cascade of warmth that made Koen’s skin flush. He was leaning forward now, elbows on the table, completely absorbed. “C-o-n-t-u-s-i-o-n r-o-o-t,” he sounded out slowly, frowning in concentration. The final, full-word reward was a deep, satisfying hum that settled in his chest. “It’s not just for bruises, you boil it for fever. Old Bertha taught me that.” The connection between the marks on the page and the knowledge in his head was a tangible click, a door swinging open on a room he never knew he could enter.
“See?” Gabriel’s voice was soft, his usual arrogance replaced by a pure, unguarded pride. “You’re not learning anything new. You’re just learning how to translate what you already know.”
Koen looked up, a wide, unselfconscious grin splitting his face. For the first time, the act of deciphering didn’t feel like a test he was doomed to fail. It felt like a hunt, and he was tracking the meaning, cornering it. “This is…” he shook his head, searching for the word. “It’s not what I thought.”
“Less stick, more incentive?” Gabriel offered, a playful glint in his blue eyes.
“Something like that.” Koen’s gaze dropped back to the parchment, his smile softening into something private and awed. He traced a finger over the word ‘Contusion’ he’d just conquered. “I can actually… I see it now. It’s not swimming anymore.”
Gabriel watched him, a profound tenderness tightening his throat. This was the man who faced down hellhounds with a smirk, now looking at a list of herbs with the wonder of a child finding a secret path. “Ready for a sentence?”
A flicker of the old fear passed through Koen’s eyes, but it was immediately chased away by the new, intoxicating sense of capability. He nodded, a determined set to his jaw. “Hit me.”
Gabriel took the parchment back and wrote a single, clear line in his elegant script. He slid it across the table. Koen pulled it closer, his brow furrowing. He took a deep breath, his finger underlining each word as he worked it out.
“The… quick… brown… fox…” He stumbled on the next word, the letters ‘j-u-m-p-s’ tripping him up. He mouthed the sounds, then his eyes widened. “Jumps! The quick brown fox jumps over…” He paused at the last two words, a slow, brilliant smile dawning as he got it. “Over the lazy dog.” He looked up, triumphant. “That’s a weird sentence. Who has a lazy dog?”
The reward this time was not a bolt, but a slow, rolling wave of pleasure that built and crested, leaving him breathless and slightly dazed. He laughed, a full, unreserved sound that filled the room. “Okay, that one was… that was a good one.”
“Every letter of the alphabet,” Gabriel explained, smiling back. “It’s a test sentence.”
“I just read a whole sentence,” Koen said, the wonder returning. He stared at the parchment as if it had physically transformed in his hands. His heart was pounding, not from anxiety, but from a wild, exhilarating pride. He’d done it. He’d actually done it.
“You did,” Gabriel affirmed, his voice warm. “Now try this one.” He wrote another line, this one shorter, and pushed it forward. His expression was carefully neutral, but there was a playful challenge in his eyes.
Koen, flushed with success, grabbed the parchment eagerly. “Alright, let’s see… ‘Y-o-u… a-r-e…’ You are…” His finger moved to the next word. It was longer. ‘S-m-a-r-t’. He sounded it out slowly. “Sss… mmm… arrr… t. Sm-art. Smart.” He pieced it together just as the rewarding pulse hit him, a sweet, sharp zing that made him gasp. “You are smart.”
He read it again, aloud, to hear the words string together. “You are smart.” The meaning washed over him, syncing with the fading euphoria in his veins. The grin returned, even wider. “Damn right I am. I just read that.”
But as the physical sensation receded, the words themselves seeped in. ‘You are smart.’ They echoed in the silent chamber of his mind, and the echo changed. It wasn’t Gabriel’s voice anymore. It was his own, brittle and mocking. You are smart. The grin on his face faltered.
The pleasure had been a bridge, but now it was gone, and he was left alone on the other side with the sentence. ‘You are smart.’ A statement. A factoid written in ink. A lie. Master Gerren’s face, purple with rage, swam before his vision. 'Stubborn hellspawn… your mind is a bucket with no bottom.' The laughter of the children, Elara’s crow-like cackle, tangled with the fading thrill in his nerves.
The parchment in his hand, moments ago a trophy, now felt like evidence. Evidence of a childish game, a celestial parlor trick. It proved nothing. It didn’t change the decades of avoidance, the mountain of unopened letters, the carefully constructed lies. He’d needed divine intervention, a shot of heavenly pleasure straight to the brain, just to decode a simple compliment.
His breath hitched. The warm, brightly-lit room suddenly felt cold and airless. The letters on the page began to writhe again, not like minnows, but like maggots.
“You had to magic me into getting it,” he said, his voice flat and hollow. He dropped the parchment as if it had burned him.
Gabriel’s smile vanished. “Koen—”
“No, I get it now.” Koen stood up so quickly his chair rocked back on two legs. He took a step back from the table, from Gabriel, from the damnable pieces of paper. “This was a trick. A really nice, feel-good trick.” A harsh, self-deprecating laugh scraped out of him. “You had to wire my brain to a pleasure pump just to make a few letters stick. What does that tell you?”
“It tells me you learned seven words in an hour,” Gabriel said, standing slowly, his hands spread in a calming gesture. “It tells me you were thriving.”
“It tells you I’m broken!” Koen’s shout was sudden, raw, cracking the quiet of the room. “It tells you that normal people don’t need… celestial rewards to understand that marks on a page mean things!” He gestured wildly at the bookshelves, at the stacks of correspondence. “They just know. They just look and they know! I needed a… a jolt.” He spat the word, his orange eyes blazing with a hurt that had curdled into rage. “You can’t fix this, Gabriel. You can’t fix me. That master was right. I’m a beast. A beast you taught a party trick.”
The spiral was tightening, dragging him down into a familiar, toxic darkness. He saw it all now with terrible clarity: the pity behind Gabriel’s patience, the absurdity of an archangel wasting his grace on a project so fundamentally flawed. He was a demon-blooded brawler who got by on grit and gunpowder. Pretending otherwise was a joke, and he was the punchline.
Gabriel took a step forward, his usual composure shattered, replaced by a fierce, aching urgency. “Koen, listen to me. That is not—”
“Don’t!” Koen backed away again, nearly stumbling over his own boots. He couldn’t bear the tenderness in Gabriel’s voice, not now. It felt like salt in a wound he’d just realized was mortal. “Just don’t. I can’t… I can’t do this. I can’t be your… your charity case.”
He turned, his vision blurring, and bolted for the door. This time, he didn’t grab his coat. He just wrenched it open and fled into the cold daylight, leaving behind the warm room, the scattered papers, and the shattered beginning of something new. Gabriel stood frozen for only a second, the discarded parchment with ‘You are smart’ lying innocent and damning on the table, before he moved to follow.
He didn’t grab his coat, either. He burst out into the crisp afternoon, the front door slamming shut behind him. The lane was empty. Koen’s trail was easy to follow for an archangel’s senses—a scuff on the cobblestones here, a spiked imprint in the soft mud of the alley there, all radiating a palpable heat of shame and anger.
The path led away from town, into the copse of skeletal winter oaks behind their house. The chaotic prints vanished at the base of an ancient, gnarled tree. Gabriel stopped, his celestial hearing filtering the wind through bare branches, the scratch of squirrels, the distant river. And then, a voice. Muttering.
He looked up.
Koen was perched on a thick limb twenty feet above, the stress having triggered a shift to female, knees drawn to her chest. She was staring blankly at the gray horizon, her face pale and smeared with dirt from her flight. Her lips were moving, the words too low for a human ear to catch. Gabriel’s ears were not human.
“...useless, stupid beast,” she whispered to the empty air, her voice a raw monotone. “Should’ve left you in that damn river. Should’ve let the current take you. Can’t even learn a party trick right without heaven itself wiring you up.”
Gabriel’s chest tightened. He leaned against the rough bark of the trunk, making no sound.
“He pities you,” Koen continued, picking at a thread on her trousers. “Of course he does. Who wouldn’t? Stuck with a mongrel who can’t read a gods-damned ‘Wanted’ poster. All that power, all those pretty words, wasted on you. Should’ve taken the out he gave you. Should’ve walked away when you had the chance.”
A cold wind rattled the branches. Koen shivered, but didn’t seem to feel it. Her orange eyes were dull, fixed on nothing.
“Trade up,” she mumbled, echoing her own drunken words from the night before with a grim finality. “He will. Sooner or later. Just a matter of time. ‘Stupid hellspawn.’ He’s just too polite to say it.”
Gabriel could listen no longer. “I believe the phrase I used was ‘magnificent,’” he called up, his voice calm and clear.
Koen jerked so violently she almost lost her balance. She grabbed the branch, her knuckles white, and stared down at him with wide, startled eyes. The shame on her face was immediate and total. “Go away.”
“No.” Gabriel didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. “Come down. We’re not doing this with you shouting down from your bastion of self-pity.”
“I’m not shouting!” she shouted, proving his point. Her voice cracked. “Just… go back inside, Gabriel. Leave me alone.”
“We tried that. You left.” He began to climb. Not with celestial grace, but with a deliberate, human clumsiness, his boots seeking purchase on the knotted bark. It was a slow, inelegant process.
“What are you doing? You’ll fall!” Panic edged her voice, cutting through the misery. She watched him, horrified.
“Then I’ll heal,” he grunted, hauling himself onto a lower limb. “Or you’ll catch me. One of the two.” He continued his awkward ascent. “Though catching seems more your style.”
He finally reached her branch, straddling it a few feet away. He was breathing slightly harder than usual, a purely performative act. She was staring at him as if he’d grown a second head. The wind whipped between them, cold and carrying the scent of damp earth.
“You’re an idiot,” Koen finally said, her voice hushed.
“So you keep telling me.” Gabriel adjusted his position, making a show of being unsure of his balance. The branch was perfectly solid. “Now. Shall we discuss the fundamental flaw in your logic up here, or would you prefer to continue your self-flagellation in warmer quarters?”
Koen looked away, her shoulders slumping. “There’s no flaw. You saw it. I’m a lost cause.”
“I saw someone who learned seven words in an hour,” Gabriel stated. “I saw someone who connected symbols to knowledge she already possessed. Then I saw someone who, upon realizing her own success, chose to interpret it as failure because the scaffolding I used was unfamiliar.” He leaned forward slightly. “You are using the wrong ruler, Koen. You are measuring a fish by its ability to climb a tree.”
“Stop with the fish!” she snapped, but there was less heat in it. A tear traced a clean line through the grime on her cheek. She wiped it away angrily.
“Why? It’s an apt metaphor.” Gabriel’s voice softened. “Master Gerren had a stick and a slate and a room full of children learning the same way. I have a different set of tools. Is a crossbow inferior to a longbow because it uses a mechanism to draw the string?”
“That’s different.”
“Is it? The bolt still flies true.” He shifted closer along the branch, the old wood creaking beneath him. “The pleasure was a catalyst. A spark. The fire it lit was yours. You built the connections. You sounded out the words. That was you, Koen. Not me. I just cleared the debris.”
She was silent for a long time, watching a lone crow circle in the gray sky. Her breath fogged in the cold air. “It felt like a trick,” she whispered. “Like I was… cheating.”
“By enjoying it?” He let the question hang. “Should learning be a punishment? Is that the only way it counts?” He reached out slowly, his hand hovering near hers on the branch. “He broke more than your knuckles, love. He broke the idea that you could ever feel anything but fear and shame when faced with a page. I am simply… repairing the idea.”
Koen’s fingers were tense, curled into a fist. She didn’t pull away as he gently covered them with his own. Her skin was icy.
“I hated it,” she said, so quiet the wind almost stole the words. “The laughing. The way my hand shook. The smell of that room—dust and ink and fear-sweat.” She finally looked at him, her eyes brimming. “And today, with you… it smelled like coffee. And gun oil. And it just smelled like home. And then I ruined it.”
“You got scared,” Gabriel corrected. “There’s a difference. You are allowed to be scared.” He squeezed her hand. “However, you are not allowed to call yourself a beast in earshot of me, however. I take personal offense. My standards are immaculately high.”
A wet, choked laugh escaped her. She leaned her forehead against the rough tree trunk. “I don’t know if I can do this, Gabe. Not… not for real.”
“We aren’t doing it for real today. We’re done for today.” He nudged her shoulder with his own. “Today, we are sitting in a very cold tree while my behind goes numb. Tomorrow, perhaps we try two sentences. Or perhaps we don’t. There is no schedule. There is only you, and me, and a complete lack of sticks.”
Koen let out a long, shuddering breath. The rigid tension in her back began to ease. She turned her hand under his, lacing their fingers together. Her grip was desperate, almost painful. “What if I keep… freezing up? What if I keep ruining it?”
“Then we thaw. And we un-ruin it.” Gabriel brought their joined hands to his lips and pressed a kiss to her cold knuckles. “We have time, Koen. An embarrassing amount of it, in my case. We have all the time it takes.”
They sat there as the afternoon light began to fail, the silence between them no longer heavy, but shared. The crow landed on a nearby branch, cocked its head at them, and flew off.
“We should go in,” Gabriel said eventually. “I believe I promised you that spiced apple tea.”
Koen nodded slowly. She didn’t let go of his hand as she started the careful climb down, guiding his path with small gestures, her hunter’s instincts taking over. When their feet touched the frozen ground, she didn’t release him. She stood for a moment, forehead pressed against the wool of his shirt, her breath warming the fabric.
“You’re sure?” she mumbled into his chest.
“About the tea? Quite.”
“No. About… all of it.”
Gabriel wrapped his free arm around her, pulling her close against the chill. He rested his cheek on the top of her head. “I have never been more certain of anything in my several millennia of existence.” He felt her nod, a small, weary movement. “Now,” he said, his tone shifting to something lighter, “I require immediate interior heating and a full assessment of the damage to my dignity. I climbed a tree. Voluntarily.”
A genuine, if exhausted, smile touched Koen’s voice. “Looked pretty undignified from up there.”
“I will accept your grudging admiration.” He began steering them back toward the house, their hands still locked together. The lights in the windows glowed a soft gold against the deepening twilight. The discarded bestiary still lay open on the table, the word ‘Varg’ staring back at the empty room, waiting.