Chapter 63: 9.1.3
The numbness that settled in Koen’s chest after the solstice didn’t lift. It spread. It was a quiet, persistent frost that crept into the corners of their days, slowing the machinery of their shared life to a faint, grinding hum.
He stopped correcting Gabriel when he used the wrong pronoun in the mornings. He’d just blink, the momentary confusion passing like a cloud shadow, and answer to whatever was said. He’d always been a little scattered, but now the forgetfulness felt different. Deeper. He’d put the coffee grounds in the wrong canister. He’d stare at the cleaning supplies for a full minute, trying to remember which potion was for polishing silver and which stripped rust. The thoughts were there, but reaching for them was like trying to pick up smoke.
“Lost in the demonic dreamscape again?” Gabriel would ask, not looking up from his correspondence, a mountain of scrolls and celestial memos always at his elbow.
“Just… thinking,” Koen would murmur, pouring the silver polish onto a rusted hinge. The resulting, corrosive mess would take an hour to fix. His hands would work at it, clumsy. Stupid, he’d think. The word had a rhythm now, matching his heartbeat.
One afternoon, Gabriel was deciphering a particularly dense treaty between the Summer and Autumn courts. He’d been at it for hours, the lines between his eyes deepening with concentration. “Koen, love, can you fetch the Lexicon of Temporal Allegories? The one bound in green wyvern hide? I think it’s on the lower shelf.”
Koen was cleaning his revolvers at the great oak table, a methodical task that usually grounded him. He looked up, his orange eyes blank for a second. “The… the what?”
“The green book. By the atlas.” Gabriel’s tone was absent, already returning to the treaty.
Koen stood and went to the towering shelves. He saw atlases, ledgers, books of poetry bound in crimson, in azure, in worn brown. His gaze skittered over them. Green. Green. Something about a lizard. A wyvern. His mind felt like a cluttered drawer he couldn’t sort through.
“Which one?” he asked, his voice thin.
Gabriel sighed, a short, sharp exhale of annoyance. “The green one, Koen. It’s the only green one on that shelf. Left side.”
His eyes found it. A deep, moss-green spine. He pulled it out, the weight unfamiliar in his hands. He carried it over and placed it beside Gabriel’s arm.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said, not looking up. The ‘finally’ was silent but hung in the air between them like the dust motes in the sunbeam.
Koen returned to his seat. He looked down at the disassembled revolver parts laid out on a soft cloth. The cylinder. The ejector rod. For a terrifying second, he couldn’t remember the order of reassembly. His hands, which could perform this task in total darkness, hovered uselessly. His throat tightened. Too slow. Unfocused. Inferior construction.
He took a breath, shoving the fear down. He forced his fingers to move. They remembered, even if his mind stuttered. The solid, metallic click-snick of the pieces locking together was a small, desperate anchor.
The next time a similar request came—“Koen, the quarterly trade ledger from the Eastern Marches, it should be near my desk”—he didn’t even try to search. He just stood there, a hot flush of shame crawling up his neck.
“I don’t see it,” he mumbled.
Gabriel pushed back his chair and stood. He walked to the shelf, plucked a thick, leather-bound ledger from an obvious spot, and handed it to Koen. His look wasn’t angry. It was puzzled. A little disappointed. Like someone watching a reliable tool begin to rust. “It was right here.”
“Right. Sorry.” Koen took the book, his head bowed. “My head’s just… fuzzy today.”
“Perhaps you should get more rest,” Gabriel said, his attention already back on his work. “The infernal metabolism can be taxing.”
It wasn’t just memory. It was a retreat. Gabriel would launch into an explanation of some inter-realm dispute, his words quick and logical, a fascinating tapestry of cause and effect. Koen would listen, or try to. The individual words made sense, but they refused to weave together into meaning. It was like listening to a beautiful, complex song in a language he’d only half-learned.
He’d see Gabriel waiting for a response, those cool blue eyes expectant.
“Wow,” Koen would say, forcing a smile. “That’s… really complicated. Goes right over my head.” He’d tap his temple. “Not enough celestial bandwidth up here, I guess.”
At first, Gabriel would smile indulgently. “It is nuanced. Don’t trouble yourself with it.”
Later, the smile would be thinner. “If you paid attention, you’d follow it.”
Eventually, he stopped sharing those details altogether.
When the next solstice invitation arrived, it was Gabriel who hesitated, the ornate parchment lying unopened on his desk for a full day. Koen watched him look at it, a rare, subtle war playing out on his features. Duty, versus… something else.
Koen picked it up. He broke the seal himself. He read the formal script. He looked at Gabriel. “We should go.”
Gabriel studied him. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to,” Koen said. And in a way, it was true. He wanted to get it over with. He wanted to prove, mostly to himself, that he could do it. That he could be what they all saw anyway.
This time, he presented as masculine. He chose simple, dark clothes. No attempt to blend. He was a smudge of shadow in their gleaming hall.
The party was the same. The ice, the light, the harmonic murmur. The archangels were the same. Their greetings were polished, their eyes assessing.
Michael approached him early, holding two crystal glasses of something that shimmered. He handed one to Koen. “A discussion emerged regarding the strategic fortification of mortal settlements against nether incursions. Your… practical experience might provide a crude baseline.”
Koen took the glass. He sipped. It tasted like rain and candied lemon. He let out a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “Strategic fortification? Mike, you’re talking to the wrong guy. My strategy begins and ends with ‘shoot it until it stops moving.’ I couldn’t plan my way out of a wet paper bag.”
Michael’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Tactics, then. Placement of sentries. Early warning signs.”
“Oh, signs. Yeah. Usually it’s the smell,” Koen said, grinning. He took another drink. “Or stuff’s already on fire. Not much of an early warning system, my nose. Mostly just tells me when I’m too late.” He shrugged, the picture of agreeable ignorance. “Sorry, man. I’m more of a blunt instrument. You need thinkers for that stuff.”
He watched as Michael’s frustration, always coiled tight beneath his stern demeanor, began to simmer. This was new. Before, Koen had been a puzzle—resistant, defiant, a problem to be solved. Now he was a void. A cheerful, agreeing void. There was no purchase for Michael’s criticism, no resistance to sharpen his arguments against.
“A tool is only as effective as the mind that wields it,” Michael tried, his voice low.
“And I’d be a pretty shitty tool in anyone else’s hands,” Koen agreed warmly. “Lucky for everyone I work solo, huh? Only my own disasters to clean up.”
Raphael tried next, his benevolent healer’s aura a palpable warmth. He spoke of a recent plague in a border town, of the imbalances of humors in mortal and infernal biology. Koen listened, nodding.
“...and so the application of blessed silver, while effective for purification, can also cause a cascading necrosis in subjects with a predominant fire-alignment,” Raphael concluded, his tone suggesting a fascinating puzzle had been laid out.
Koen whistled, shaking his head with a look of genuine, dumbfounded admiration. “Necrosis, huh? See, that’s the kind of thing I’d never figure out. I’d just see the beastie go down and call it a win. You guys… you see all the layers. I just see the top one. It’s why I stick to the simple stuff.”
Raphael’s smile remained, but it grew strained, the edges brittle. “Understanding is the first step to mastery.”
“Some bridges are just too far to cross,” Koen said, clapping Raphael on the shoulder like a fellow soldier at a tavern. “My little canoe would sink halfway. You keep building those big, beautiful bridges. I’ll just… wade through the mud.”
He moved through the evening like this. A ghost of amiable incompetence. Uriel tried to engage him on the symbolic poetry of recent astral alignments. Koen laughed, a bright, empty sound. “Symbols? Sorry, Uri. My brain translates all that to ‘pretty lights in the sky.’ I’m a simple creature. Meat and metal, that’s my poetry.”
He saw the flicker in Uriel’s piercing eyes. Not contempt. Not pity. A kind of intellectual aggravation, like a mathematician confronted with a stubbornly incorrect sum.
Gabriel, meanwhile, was in his element. He flowed between his family members, a diplomat at ease. He’d glance at Koen, see him smiling, talking, not causing a scene, and his own posture would radiate a satisfied relief. It was working. His approach was working. Koen was finally adapting.
The meal was served. Koen ate what was put in front of him. He made no requests, no comments. When a cousin made a joke he didn’t understand, he laughed along with everyone else, a beat too late. When asked a direct question about his work, he’d give a short, simplistic answer and then redirect. “Oh, it was just another nest of Gritchlings. Nasty, but dumb. Nothing like the stuff you all deal with.”
He felt himself dissolving into the background, a barely-perceived smudge of agreement. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. Exhausting, but in a numb, heavy way. Like slowly sinking into deep, cold water.
Later, as the night wore on, he found himself on a balcony overlooking the frozen gardens, taking a moment away from the heat of the great hall. The cold air bit through his clothes, a clean, sharp feeling. He leaned on the railing, staring at the geometric patterns of frost on the stone.
He didn’t hear Michael approach. The archangel’s presence was announced by a change in the air pressure, a static charge that made the fine hairs on Koen’s arms rise.
“This performance,” Michael’s voice rumbled behind him, devoid of its usual formal cadence. It was pure, barely contained irritation.
Koen didn’t turn. “Performance?”
“This… act of willing ignorance. It is a new tactic. A more insidious one.”
Koen turned then, leaning his back against the railing. He offered Michael a mild, pleasant smile. “No tactic, Mike. Just knowing my limits.”
“You are not this limited,” Michael snapped, the words cutting through the night air. He took a step closer, his wings a dark, gathered mass behind him. “We have observed your work. The reports are… efficient. Brutal, but strategically sound. You solve problems. You track. You adapt. Yet here, you choose to play the fool.”
“Who’s playing?” Koen said softly. The smile didn’t leave his face. It felt frozen there. “Maybe your reports are wrong. Maybe I just get lucky. Maybe the monsters are just dumber than I am.”
Michael stared at him. The frustration in his eyes was molten, searching for a crack in Koen’s placid surface and finding none. This was worse, to him, than defiance. Defiance had integrity. This was surrender. A corroding of potential he could, despite himself, recognize.
“He sees it too, you know,” Michael said, his voice dropping, compelled by his own aggravation to break an unspoken rule. “Gabriel. He notices the forgetting. The hesitation. He speaks of it in his reports. He calls it ‘infernal fatigue,’ a degeneration of focus. He documents it.”
The words landed like stones in the frozen pond of Koen’s chest. A cold splash. He documents it. He was a subject of study in Gabriel’s correspondence. A noted symptom.
Koen’s smile widened, a reflex of pure, defensive instinct. “Well, there you go. He’s the smart one. If Gabe says it’s happening, it’s happening. Can’t argue with the facts.”
He pushed off the railing, giving Michael a friendly, dismissive nod. “Getting chilly. I should head back in before my infernal brain freezes solid. Wouldn’t want to forget where I left my feet.”
He walked past Michael, back toward the light and the noise, leaving the archangel standing alone in the cold dark, silent fury emanating from him like heat from a forge. Koen kept the smile on his face all the way to Gabriel’s side, where he accepted another glass of nectar he didn’t want and laughed at a joke he didn’t hear.
Later, in their chambers, Gabriel was undressing, his movements fluid and satisfied. “See?” he said, pulling his tunic over his head. “Much smoother. They didn’t know what to make of you. You disarmed them completely.”
Koen sat on the edge of the vast bed, staring at the pattern on the rug. “Yeah.”
“Michael actually seemed… engaged. He was talking to you on the balcony for quite a while.”
“He was just making sure I wasn’t going to steal the silverware,” Koen said, the joke falling from his lips automatically.
Gabriel laughed, coming over to kiss the top of his head. “There’s my sharp tongue.” He tilted Koen’s chin up. “You did well. I’m proud of you.”
The words were meant to be a balm. They felt like ash.
Koen looked into those beloved, confident blue eyes and saw only his own reflection: small, agreed-upon, slowly fading. He thought of the reports. Infernal fatigue. Degeneration of focus. Noticed, documented, filed away.
He forced his lips into a shape that might be a smile. “Thanks,” he whispered.
He lay awake long after Gabriel’s breathing deepened into sleep. He stared at the ornate ceiling, listening to the silent, steady erosion of himself, each agreed-upon insult, each documented failure, another stone worn away by a gentle, inexorable tide. The numbness was complete now. A perfect, hollow peace.
He was exactly what they all believed him to be. The relief in finally admitting it was the coldest thing he had ever felt.
It was a quiet winter inside his own skull, one that persisted through the turning months. The fuzziness in his head wasn’t a foe to fight anymore; it was just the weather. He stopped trying to follow Gabriel’s complex explanations of border taxes or diplomatic snubs. Her mind would just… slide off the words, a stone skipping over the surface of a deep, dark lake.
When she forgot where she’d left her favorite whetstone for the third time in a week, she just laughed, a light, airy sound that felt foreign in her own throat. “Guess my head’s full of cobwebs again!”
Gabriel would glance up from his desk, a flicker of something—annoyance, concern—crossing his features before smoothing into patience. “Check the workbench. It’s probably exactly where you last used it.”
It always was.
She started asking him for help with things she used to do instinctively. “Gabe, which way do I turn this bolt to tighten it? Left is loose, right is tight, right?” She’d hold up a piece of harness leather. “This stitching looks weird, did I do it backward?” Her questions were sincere, her brow furrowed in a genuine, frustrated confusion that was becoming her resting state.
Gabriel would answer with a patient, concise direction, each one a small stone laid on the scale of his worry. This new hesitancy, this constant second-guessing, was a shadow he couldn’t dispel. He watched her stare at a crossroads on a map for a full minute, her finger tracing the lines back and forth as if they were written in a lost language. “Which way to the river ford again?” she’d asked, her voice small. He’d pointed, and she’d smiled with such earnest gratitude it made his chest ache.
“You used to navigate the Wastes blindfolded,” he mentioned once, trying to summon the ghost of her old confidence.
She’d just laughed, a brittle, musical sound. “And look how that turned out! Got lost for three days that one time. You’re the one with the celestial sense of direction. It’s better if I just follow you.”
She began to mirror his preferences in tiny, unsettling ways. He preferred his tea steeped for precisely four minutes. She’d started setting a small sand timer beside the pot, watching it with intense concentration. If he mentioned a book was poorly argued, she’d put it back on the shelf unread. Her own opinions, once so fiercely held on trivial matters like the best way to grease a wagon axle, simply evaporated. “Oh, whatever you think is best,” became her refrain. Her world was slowly constricting to the radius of his judgment.
The tasks she’d once performed with brutal, efficient grace began to show cracks. She returned from a hunt for a rogue river spirit with a deep, weeping gash along her wrist and forearm. “It was quicker than I remembered,” she explained, wincing as she applied a poultice. Her regeneration was slower now, the skin knitting together with a sluggish, painful effort. Her weapons, once maintained with ritualistic care, gathered a faint film of dust. When he ran his finger along a gun barrel, he showed her the gray smudge.
“I’ll get to it,” she promised, but her eyes held a vague panic, as if the process of cleaning had become a complex theorem she’d forgotten.
He found her once in the armory, standing perfectly still before the rack of her weapons. She was just looking at them. Her shoulders were slumped. “Can’t remember,” she whispered to the empty room. He backed away before she saw him, a cold thread of fear weaving through his thoughts.
That fear was a quiet, persistent companion in the months that followed, whispering alongside the rustle of Gabriel’s scrolls and the increasingly hesitant sound of Koen’s footsteps. He watched her navigate their home like a stranger in a familiar land, pausing at doorways as if deciding how to open them.
“Did we pay the ironmonger?” she’d ask on a Tuesday, her orange eyes wide. “I had the coins in my hand, but then I got distracted by a crow outside, and now I can’t remember.”
Gabriel closed his eyes for a second, a practiced calm settling over his features. “I paid him yesterday. You were there. You handed me the ledger.”
“Oh.” Koen’s face went slack with relief, then crumpled into embarrassment. “Right. Of course you did. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” But it wasn’t. She’d never forgotten a transaction before. He watched her wander towards the kitchen, her hand trailing along the wall as if for balance. The fear coiled a little tighter.
When the solstice invitation arrived, Gabriel held it, feeling the weight of the parchment like a verdict. He found Koen in the living room, gently wiping down one of her pistols.
“It’s that time again,” Gabriel said, his voice neutral.
Koen didn’t turn. Her strokes were slow, methodical. “Okay.”
“We can send our regrets. I can cite a pressing diplomatic issue.”
She finally looked at him, her expression soft and unreadable. “But there isn’t one. You’d be lying.” She said it as a simple fact, no judgment. “We should go. It’s important to you. To your family.”
“You are more important.” The words came out, stiff and formal.
A sweet, vacant smile touched her lips. “That’s nice of you to say.” She turned back to the pistol. “I’ll be good. I’ll just stick with you. You’re so good at all that talking. I’ll just… follow your lead.”
The resignation in her tone was absolute. It terrified him.
The night of the solstice, he presented as male, choosing clothes under Gabriel’s approving eye. “The charcoal grey,” Gabriel suggested. “It’s respectful without being ostentatious.”
“Charcoal grey,” Koen echoed, pulling the tunic on. He fumbled with the clasp at the throat, his fingers clumsy. “Can you…?”
Gabriel fastened it for him, his hands lingering for a moment at the base of Koen’s throat, feeling the pulse there. It was steady, but it felt distant, like a signal from a far-off shore.
The estate was a blister of light in the eternal winter. Koen stayed within arm’s reach, his posture relaxed but his eyes taking in little. He was a polite shadow.
When Michael approached, his gaze was like a physical pressure. “Delano. I trust the year has been… educational.”
Koen gave a warm, dopey smile. “Oh, you know. Ups and downs. Mostly I just try to keep up with this one.” He nudged Gabriel with an elbow. “He’s got the brains for both of us.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. “And you are content with that arrangement? To be a passive vessel?”
“Content?” Koen laughed, a light, airy sound. “I’m grateful. Can you imagine me trying to handle any transactions? I’d probably end up paying double or something. Better I stick to the things I’m built for.” He mimed aiming a pistol. “Point and click.”
The frustration on Michael’s face was profound. This wasn’t resistance. It wasn’t even submission. It was erasure. “A weapon that cannot think for itself is a danger to all around it.”
“Good thing I’ve got Gabriel to do the thinking, then,” Koen said, his smile never wavering. He turned his head up to Gabriel. “Right?”
Gabriel’s jaw was tight. “Koen is perfectly capable of independent thought.” The defense sounded hollow, even to him.
“Of course I am,” Koen agreed amiably, as if humoring a child. He patted Gabriel’s arm. “But why would I, when you’re so much better at it? It’s just easier.”
Raphael’s interrogation was gentler, a physician’s probing. He asked after Koen’s regeneration, noting the faint, silvery scar still visible on his wrist from the river spirit. “The healing seems delayed. A sign of systemic fatigue, perhaps. Or a dissonance of the core self.”
Koen just shrugged. “Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe my demon half’s finally getting tired of hauling the mortal half around.” He laughed. “It’s not a big deal. Hurts less than remembering my own mistakes.”
The conversation swirled around him, a river of implications and layered meanings. He stood in the center, a stone, letting it all flow past. He agreed with every subtle critique, laughed at every joke made at his expense, his demeanor one of unshakable, pleasant dimness. He asked Gabriel simple questions about the food, the decor, his voice a low, constant murmur at Gabriel’s side. What’s this spice? Which cousin is that again? Is it always this bright in here?
Each question was a tiny needle. Gabriel answered, his own smile growing more strained. He watched Uriel try and fail to engage Koen in a debate about moral ambiguity, only to be met with cheerful, uncomprehending agreement. “Yeah, shades of grey are tricky! I’m more of a black-and-white guy. Monster bad, people good. Simplifies the paperwork.”
During a lull, Gabriel pulled him aside near a glacial fountain. “Koen,” he said, his voice low. “You don’t have to… play quite so simple. It’s unsettling them.”
Koen looked at him, his orange eyes wide and utterly sincere. The performance, if it had ever been one, was gone. This was just him now. “Play? I’m not playing, Gabe. This is just me. I’m just… being polite. I don’t want to cause another scene.” He glanced over at Michael, who was watching them with a stormy expression. “He gets so mad when I try to talk about stuff. It’s easier this way.”
The cold realization finally pierced through Gabriel’s worry. This wasn’t a tactic. The forgetfulness, the hesitancy, the relentless self-deprecation that had once been a shield—it had all solidified into a genuine belief. The “infernal fatigue” he’d documented wasn’t a physical degeneration. It was a psychic collapse, and he had been cataloging the symptoms while missing the disease.
He had watched the vibrant, stubborn, fiercely independent creature he loved sand himself down to this smooth, agreeable nothing, all to fit into a space Gabriel’s family had carved for him. And he had, in his arrogance, believed it was progress.
“Come on,” Gabriel said, the words rough. He took Koen’s elbow. “We’re leaving.”
“Now? But the gift exchange hasn’t even—”
“Now.” His tone brooked no argument. He didn’t look at his brothers, didn’t offer apologies. He marched them through the glittering halls, his grip firm on Koen’s arm, past the shocked faces and the murmuring cousins, out into the biting, silent cold of the Elysian night.
The flight back was wordless. Koen was quiet in his arms, pliant. When their feet touched the floor of their own darkened sitting room, Gabriel released him. He didn’t summon any light. The moon through the window was enough.
Koen stood there, rubbing his arm where Gabriel had held him. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked, his voice small in the dark. “I was trying to be good.”
The fracture in Gabriel’s chest widened. He crossed the room in two strides, his hands coming up to frame Koen’s face. He searched those familiar, frightened eyes. “Look at me. You are not stupid. You are not slow.”
Koen blinked. A slow smile touched his lips, the kind you give to someone telling a comforting lie. “Okay, Gabe.”
“Don’t ‘okay’ me. You tracked the Seraphim Slayer through three dream realms when every celestial hunter had failed. You negotiated a peace between the granite trolls and the valley sprites when I said it was impossible. You think. You remember.”
“I got lucky,” Koen whispered, the smile straining. “And you helped me with the troll treaty. You gave me the words.”
“I gave you a paragraph of diplomatic niceties! You are the one who sat in that mud with them for two days, sharing their fungus-wine, listening! You understood them when I couldn’t!” He was shouting now, his voice cracking. “The reports were wrong. I was wrong.”
Koen flinched, his eyes glazing over with a sheen of confused tears. He didn’t understand the anger. He just heard the volume. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, his head dropping. “I’ll try harder to remember. I’ll write things down. I won’t ask so many questions.”
Gabriel’s hands fell from his face. The fight left him in a rush, leaving a hollow, aching void. He saw it now, the full, horrifying architecture of what had been built. Every agreed-upon insult, every documented lapse, every patient correction from him had been a brick laid in a wall, and now Koen was trapped on the other side of it, smiling and thanking him for the mortar.
He took a step back, the space between them feeling like a canyon. “Don’t,” he said, the word choked. “Don’t try harder.”
He turned and walked to his desk, the neat piles of scrolls and ledgers stark in the moonlight. He looked at the meticulous records, the careful observations. He placed his palms flat on the polished wood and let his head hang.
Behind him, Koen remained standing in the center of the room, utterly still, a ghost of polite confusion in his own home. Waiting, as he’d learned to do, for a cue he could follow.