Chapter 87: 14.1.2
Rain again. It sheeted against the cottage windows, a grey murmur that had lasted three days. Koen watched a single drop trace a winding path down the glass. He’d been watching it for maybe ten minutes, his coffee cold on the table beside him. His body was still, a statue in the worn armchair, but inside was a formless, heavy sludge where his thoughts used to be.
The knitting basket was a dark lump under the chair opposite. He hadn’t touched it. He hadn’t touched his guns, either. They sat in their cases, clean and silent. The troll’s ear silver had been spent on mundane supplies—flour, salt, gunpowder—the transaction conducted with a series of grunts that made the shopkeeper eye him warily.
Gabriel was a constant, graceful storm of activity in the stagnant air. He wrote, he summoned, he bantered with messengers who popped into existence with soft thups of displaced air. He tried, in his way, to draw Koen out.
“Look at this,” he’d said yesterday, waving a luminous scroll. “A formal complaint from a river nymph about the troll carcass fouling her stretch. Your handiwork, darling. You’ve sparked an inter-species incident.”
Koen had just nodded. “Sorry.”
Gabriel had blinked, the expected flare of defensive pride absent. “Well. Don’t be. It’s mildly entertaining. Point is, you made waves.” He’d said it like it was a compliment. Koen had heard only the confirmation that he’d messed up, again, in a way that created more paperwork.
The rain tapered to a drizzle around midday. A pale, watery light strained through the clouds. Koen stood, his joints feeling stiff. He needed to move. The walls were pressing in, the air thick with the scent of Gabriel’s perfumed ink and his own unspent energy.
“Going to town,” he muttered, pulling on his duster. The leather felt unfamiliar, like someone else’s skin.
Gabriel glanced up from a sphere of hovering celestial script. “Why? We don’t need anything.”
“Just am,” Koen said. He didn’t have a better reason.
“Suit yourself. Try not to stand in the middle of the square looking lost. It unsettles the locals.” Gabriel’s quill was already moving again, dismissing him.
The mud of the lane sucked at his boots. The walk to the town of Oakhaven was two miles. He used to cover it quickly, his stride eating the ground. Today, his feet dragged. The forest around him was a washed-out green, dripping and too loud. He kept his head down, his hood up, a shadow moving through the grey light.
The town gate, a mossy arch of old stone, appeared. The sounds changed—the clang of a smithy, the squawk of chickens, the murmur of voices. Smells of baking bread and wet manure and humanity. It usually energized him. Today, it was just noise.
He made his way to the square. The bounty board was a massive, scarred slab of oak by the magistrate’s hall, papered with curling parchment and grim sketches. A small knot of people was always there: hunters, mercenaries, the desperately ambitious. It was a social hub as much as a job board.
Koen stopped at the edge of the crowd. He didn’t push forward. He just stood, his hands in his pockets, his orange eyes scanning the notices without really seeing them. A were-boar in the eastern wood. A ghost-lights phenomenon scaring travellers on the north road. A thief with a distinctive scar. Words and pictures blurred into a meaningless tapestry of other people’s problems.
He became aware of the silence first. Then the glances.
The loose circle of hunters and hangers-on had noticed him. He was a regular, but he was usually… different. He’d barge in, maybe shoulder someone aside with a muttered “‘scuse me,” squint at a poster, grunt, tear it down, and be off. A force of nature. Simple. Predictable.
This was not that.
A woman named Elara, a tracker with sinewy arms and eyes the colour of flint, nudged her partner. They both looked over. Koen was just standing there, statue-still, rainwater dripping from the hem of his duster into a small puddle at his feet. His face was blank, the freckles stark against skin that seemed drained of its usual warm tan. His ashen hair, usually a messy shock, was plastered dark and limp from the drizzle.
“Delano?” called a broad man named Borin, who specialized in ogre problems. “You look like you’ve seen your own ghost. Everything alright?”
Koen’s head turned slowly, as if the movement required great effort. His eyes met Borin’s but didn’t seem to focus. “Yeah.”
His voice was a flat stone dropped into the quiet. It convinced no one.
Elara approached, her steps careful on the wet cobbles. “You’re soaked through. Miss the were-boar notice? It’s right there. Good pay. Nasty temperament, though.”
Koen’s gaze drifted to the poster she indicated. He looked at it for a long moment. “Seen it,” he said.
“Gonna take it?”
He shrugged. The motion was loose, hopeless. “Maybe.”
The hunters exchanged looks. This was the man who’d once argued passionately that the best way to clear a rat-goblin nest was with three pounds of black powder and a “really strong throwing arm.” This hollowed-out shell was wrong.
“You sick or something?” Borin asked, his bluntness softened by genuine concern. “Got the demon ague? I heard that makes you mopey.”
“Not sick,” Koen said. He realized they were all looking at him, waiting for the old Koen to emerge—brash, clumsy, alive. He couldn’t find him. The energy to pretend, to perform the version of himself they expected, was a mountain he couldn’t climb. He was just so tired.
“Just tired,” he echoed his own thought aloud, the words barely a breath. “From a hunt.”
“Which one?” Elara pressed gently. “The river troll? Heard you got it. That was days ago.”
Koen didn’t answer. He just looked back at the board, his expression utterly vacant. A drop of water traced a path from his hairline down his temple, like the tear he hadn’t shed in days. He didn’t wipe it away.
The concern in the air sharpened. This wasn’t just fatigue. This was something sitting in his bones. Borin shifted his weight, uncomfortable with the profound silence emanating from the normally straightforward hunter. “You, uh… you need a drink? The Hanged Man’s got a new stout. Thick as mud.”
“No.”
“Right.” Borin rubbed his neck. “Well. You stand out here much longer, you’ll start growing moss. Sure you’re fine?”
“I’m fine.” The phrase was automatic, dead. It hung in the damp air, a blatant lie nobody challenged.
Elara studied him for another moment, then nodded, though her frown remained. “Alright, Koen. Take it easy, then.”
They slowly turned back to the board, the conversation restarting in hushed, speculative tones. The space around Koen remained clear, as if his silent despair had a physical radius. He was aware of their sidelong glances, the whispered words. He should be embarrassed. He should feel exposed. He felt nothing. The whispers were just another kind of rain.
After another five minutes of standing motionless, he turned and walked away from the board. He hadn’t taken a notice. He hadn’t spoken to anyone else. He simply left the way he came, a dark figure receding into the grey afternoon.
The walk back was longer. The drizzle turned back into a steady rain. He was thoroughly soaked by the time the cottage chimney came into view, a thin stream of smoke struggling against the wet sky. He paused at the garden gate, his hand on the cold, wet wood.
Through the window, he could see Gabriel. He was not working. He was standing by the bookshelf, one wing partially manifested—a vast, opalescent sweep of feather and light—as he used a delicate brush to clean between the primary feathers. His face was intent, focused on the task. A picture of serene, self-contained perfection.
Koen watched. The rain needled his neck. A shiver, purely physical, ran through him.
He didn’t go inside. He walked around to the back of the cottage, to the lean-to shelter that housed firewood and tools. It was dark and dry-ish, smelling of raw timber and old rust. He sat down on a rough-cut log, his back against the stacked wood.
He pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms around them, and rested his forehead on his forearms. The wool of his trousers was scratchy against his skin. His wet clothes clung to him, a cold second skin. He didn’t move to start a fire. He didn’t go in for dry clothes.
He just sat in the half-dark, listening to the rain drum on the roof of the lean-to, a steady, isolating rhythm. Inside, Gabriel would be warm. He would be clean. He would, eventually, wonder where Koen was, and maybe call for him. And Koen would have to answer. He would have to go in, and drip on the floor, and be a mess. And Gabriel would sigh, and make a comment about tracking in mud and damp, and tell him to get changed before he caught a chill—as if he ever could.
For now, in the cold and the dark and the damp, he was just Koen. A creature of rain and shadows. No expectations to fail. No jokes to not understand. No self to disappoint.
He closed his eyes. The sound of the rain was the only thing that felt real.
The sound of the rain was the only thing that felt real. It was a clean noise, without meaning, and he let it fill the hollow spaces in his head until the back door creaked open.
Light from the cottage sliced across the muddy yard, stopping just short of his boots.
“There you are.” Gabriel’s voice, tinged with amused exasperation, cut through the rain’s rhythm. “Are you attempting to cultivate mushrooms on your person? Come inside. You’re shivering.”
Koen hadn’t noticed the shivering. He looked up slowly. Gabriel stood framed in the doorway, backlit, his form a silhouette of effortless grace. He’d put his wings away.
“Was thinking,” Koen said, his voice rough from disuse.
“A dangerous pastime.” Gabriel leaned against the doorframe. “The results are rarely worth the damp. In, now. You’re letting all the heat out.”
The command was gentle, but it was a command. Koen pushed himself up, his muscles stiff and cold. He moved past Gabriel into the golden warmth of the kitchen, a trail of water and mud marking his path on the floorboards. He stood there, dripping.
Gabriel clicked his tongue, a soft tsk of domestic annoyance. He summoned a clean, dry towel from the air with a flick of his wrist. It hit Koen in the chest. “At least attempt basic self-preservation. Even your demonic constitution can’t enjoy sitting in a cold puddle.”
Koen caught the towel. The fabric was soft, warm from whatever magic had conjured it. He rubbed at his hair, the motion mechanical. “Sorry.”
“For being a creature of profound damp? It’s in your nature.” Gabriel was already turning away, waving a hand. The puddle on the floor shimmered and vanished, along with the clods of mud. “There. Now, change your clothes before you mildew. I won’t have the cottage smelling like a wet dog.”
Koen went upstairs. The mundane task of peeling off soaked wool and denim felt enormous. He pulled on dry trousers and a shirt, the fabric feeling alien against his skin. When he came back down, a bowl of stew was steaming on the table. It wasn’t the burnt one from before. This was new, rich with herbs.
“Eat,” Gabriel said, not looking up from a ledger that glowed with faint golden lines. “You need the fuel. You’ve been listless.”
Koen sat. He ate. The stew was perfect, and it tasted like nothing. He was aware of Gabriel’s periodic glances over the ledger’s edge, those blue eyes cataloging his silence.
Days bled together after that. The rain stopped, but a heavier grey settled inside Koen. Getting out of bed began to require a negotiation with his own limbs. The morning sun, which used to rouse him for early hunts, now felt like an accusation.
He started waking later. First, just past dawn. Then, when the sun was high. Then, until the light slanted through the window at a steep afternoon angle.
One such afternoon, he was still in bed, staring at a crack in the ceiling plaster that looked like a crooked river on a map. Downstairs, he heard the familiar thup of a celestial messenger arriving, followed by the crisp, professional cadence of Gabriel’s work voice. It was a rolling, confident sound. It filled the house.
Koen’s body felt anchored to the mattress, a leaden weight. The thought of swinging his legs over the side, of standing, of walking down the stairs and into that sound, was overwhelming. He pulled the quilt higher. The wool smelled faintly of gunpowder and them.
Footsteps on the stairs. Light, assured.
Gabriel appeared in the bedroom doorway, impeccably dressed. He surveyed the scene: the lump under the blankets, the ashen hair just visible on the pillow. His eyebrows rose.
“Still? It’s half past two.” He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “I know you’re not nocturnal. Are you staging a protest? If it’s about the stew remark from three days ago, I take it back. Your culinary skills are… robust.”
“Not protesting,” Koen murmured into the pillow.
“Then what? Are you ill?” Gabriel came closer, sitting on the edge of the mattress. He pressed a cool, perfect hand to Koen’s forehead. “No fever. You don’t look in pain. Your regeneration would be flashing like a lighthouse if you were injured.” He sounded genuinely puzzled, a mechanic confronted with a broken engine that showed no outward sign of damage.
“Just tired,” Koen said, the old, useless shield.
“You sleep twelve hours and are ‘just tired.’” Gabriel’s hand moved from his forehead to brush the hair from his eyes, a gesture that was almost tender. “You’re not hunting. You’re not tinkering with those guns. You’re not even attempting to maim that poor yarn anymore. You’re just… here. Taking up space.”
The words were observational, not malicious. They landed with the weight of truth.
Taking up space.
“I know,” Koen whispered.
Gabriel sighed, a long exhalation of frustration. “This is beyond my purview. I handle missives, not moods.” He stood up, his warmth leaving the bedside. “There’s a ghoul haunting the old cemetery on the hill. Nuisance-level. It’d take you an hour. The silver would be mediocre, but it’s something. Get up. Do the one thing you’re actually good at.”
He said it like a prescription. Like a solution. He left, his footsteps descending the stairs.
Koen lay there. The one thing you’re actually good at. He replayed it. It was probably meant to be motivating. A compliment, in Gabriel’s backhanded way.
He didn’t move. The ghoul could wait. The silver didn’t matter. He heard Gabriel leave the cottage a while later, the door closing with a firm, final click. The silence that followed was immense.
He looked around their room. His boots by the door, dusty. His gun belt slung over the chair. The empty knitting basket in the corner. His presence was a series of objects, a clutter in Gabriel’s orderly world. If those objects were gone, would the space feel emptier, or just cleaner?
He thought of the hunters at the board. Their concern had been real, but brief. They had their own lives, their own bounties. Elara and Borin would shrug, say “Delano’s gone quiet again,” and move on. They might miss the simple efficiency of his work, if they thought of it at all.
He thought of Gabriel. Would there be a moment of relief? No more mud tracked in. No more explaining simple concepts. No more tempering his wit for a listener who couldn’t keep up. The celestial correspondence would continue uninterrupted. The cottage would be quiet, orderly, serene.
A perfect, silent archive.
Koen’s eyes stayed open, fixed on the plaster river. The thought unspooled, cold and clear. If he simply stopped—if he wasn’t here tomorrow, or the next day—what would change? Really change?
Would anyone mourn the absence of a dense, impulsive half-demon who was good with a gun and little else?
The afternoon light deepened, casting long, distorted shadows across the floor. He didn’t move to light a candle. He waited in the gathering dark for the sound of the door, for the return of light and life that he felt increasingly separate from, a spectator to his own home.
The room grew cold. He pulled the quilt tighter, a shiver finally running through him that had nothing to do with the temperature.
He pulled the quilt tighter, a shiver finally running through him that had nothing to do with the temperature. The thought, once formed, refused to leave. It curled in the base of his skull, a cold, sleeping creature. What would change?
He heard Gabriel return as the last blue light faded from the window. There was the clatter of a dish, the rustle of parchment, the soft hum of a celestial tune. Normal sounds. Life, moving smoothly around the still, heavy lump he had become in their bed.
He didn’t come up.
Koen waited. The darkness became absolute. His orange eyes adjusted, painting the room in shades of grey. He watched the door, a darker rectangle in the wall. It stayed shut. No footsteps climbed the stairs to check. The hum faded, followed by the click of a study door closing downstairs. Solitude, confirmed.
A strange, detached calm settled over him.
He moved just before the world did. His eyes opened into the pre-dark, that hour where the night is at its deepest and coldest, the absolute nadir before any hint of dawn. The cottage was a tomb of silence. Gabriel’s breathing, barely perceptible from the study downstairs, was as regular as a metronome.
Koen slid from the bed. The floorboards were icy under his bare feet. He dressed in the dark: simple trousers, a worn tunic, his boots. He didn’t take his duster. He didn’t take a gun. The absence of the familiar weight on his hip felt like shedding a limb, a necessary amputation.
He ghosted down the stairs, past the closed study door, and out the front entrance. The hinges, usually vocal, made no sound under his careful hand. The outside air was a slap of frigid moisture, tasting of dew and decaying leaves. He walked, not toward town, but east, where the land rose into a jagged spine of hills.
He had no plan. His feet carried him. The forest here was older, the trees gnarled and thick with moss. His path was instinctual, a pull against his very blood. After an hour of steady climbing, the trees thinned. The sky began its first, imperceptible lightening from black to ink-blue.
The cathedral appeared through the pines. It wasn’t grand by celestial standards—a mortal construction of local grey stone, squat and sturdy, dedicated to some forgotten saint. Its windows were dark. But Koen could feel it. A pressure. A low, humming vibration in his teeth, in the marrow of his bones. It felt like standing too close to a bonfire, if the bonfire was made of distilled sunlight and judgment.
Radiant energy. Sanctified ground. The only thing that could bypass his demonic regeneration, that could scar him, burn him, make his flesh remember what true pain was.
He stopped at the tree line, his breath pluming. His ears were pinned flat to his skull. Every instinct screamed to turn back, to flee into the comforting, neutral dark of the woods. The pull was visceral, a biological terror.
He took a step forward. Then another. He crossed from the soft loam of the forest onto the flagstone path leading to the great oak doors. The sensation intensified. It was a ringing in his ears now, a static filling his head. His skin began to crawl, a prickling, itching heat that started at his fingertips and washed inward.
He climbed the broad, shallow steps. Each one was harder. His muscles felt weak, watery. By the time he reached the massive doors, a fine tremor was working through his hands. He leaned a shoulder against the cool, carved wood. It was unlocked. Mortals were trusting, or stupid.
He pushed.
The interior was vast, dark, and cold. Banks of unlit candles. The smell of old wax, stone dust, and something else—ozone and incense, the faint, clinging perfume of spent prayer. The pressure swelled, a physical weight on his chest. He could see the altar at the far end, a pale smudge in the gloom.
He took one step inside.
His boot heel on the stone floor sounded like a gunshot in the silence. Agony, sharp and clean, lanced up his leg. It was not the blunt trauma of a wound. This was a corrosive, searing sensation, as if his blood had been replaced with acid. He gasped, the sound ragged in the holy quiet.
He forced another step. And another. His vision swam. The arches of the ceiling seemed to pulse with a faint, golden light he knew was only in his head, a hallucination born of poisoning. He reached the first row of pews. His hand gripped the polished wood. The contact was like clutching a branding iron. He hissed, jerking back, his palm smoking faintly in the cold air.
He didn’t stop.
He stumbled forward, past the pews, until he stood in the open space before the altar. His knees gave out. He didn’t try to catch himself. The impact with the stone floor jolted through him, a secondary pain beneath the overwhelming, sanctified burn that was now everywhere. It was in his lungs, each breath scraping. It was behind his eyes, a migraine of pure light. It felt like his skeleton was trying to vibrate out of his skin.
He curled on his side, forehead pressed to the unforgiving stone. The cold of it was a minor relief against the feverish torment baking him from the inside. This was it. The only thing that could hurt him. Really hurt him.
He lay there, shaking, as the stained-glass windows began to glow with the first true rays of dawn. Colors fractured across the floor—crimson, sapphire, gold—each beam a laser cutting through the dust motes and him. The pain crested, a wave so intense his thoughts dissolved into white noise. His body jerked, a useless spasm against the stone.
Then, a miracle. Or its opposite.
His regeneration, thwarted and confused by the holy energy, did not heal. But it fought. A deep, stubborn ember in his demonic core flared, a survival instinct older than the stones he lay on. It pushed back, just enough. The corrosive tide receded from fatal levels to a level of merely excruciating torture. He wouldn’t die here today. Not from this exposure.
The realization filtered through the pain, bitterly clear. It would take more. One visit wouldn’t do it. He’d have to come back. And back. And back. He’d have to soak in this poison until his stubborn body forgot how to fight it.
He waited, panting, until he could unclench his jaw. He waited until the tremors subsided from convulsions to shivers. Slowly, feeling a thousand years old, he pushed himself up. His limbs were heavy, leaden with a fatigue that was soul-deep. New, livid red burns mottled his hands and cheek where they had pressed the floor. They throbbed with a clean, honest pain.
He turned his back on the glowing altar and walked out. The sunlight in the courtyard felt pale and weak, but it was a relief. The forest air was a balm. The walk home was a blur of agony and numbness. He slipped back into the cottage as the town clock struck seven. The main room was empty, the study door still shut.
He climbed the stairs, shed his clothes, and slid back into bed. The burns on his skin faded as he watched, the angry red fading to pink, then to nothing but a memory of sensation within minutes. The internal ache remained, a hollow, scraped-out feeling.
Downstairs, a door opened. He heard the whistle of a kettle. Gabriel was starting his day.
“You’re up early,” Gabriel called up, voice cheerful with morning energy. “A miracle. Or did you just never sleep?”
Koen closed his eyes. He could still smell the incense. He could still feel the ghost of that holy fire in his veins. “Slept fine,” he called back, his own voice rough but passably normal.
He heard the light tread on the stairs. Gabriel appeared in the doorway, already dressed, his blonde hair perfectly in place. He held two steaming mugs. His sharp blue eyes scanned Koen, taking in his position in the bed, the apparent normalcy.
“You look like hell warmed over,” Gabriel said, placing a mug on the bedside table. “But I suppose that’s your default aesthetic. Here. Coffee. Don’t waste it.”
He left, his attention already sliding to the day’s tasks. Koen listened to him go.
He looked at the coffee. He lifted a hand. It was steady. It was unmarked. There was no physical proof of where he had been, what he had done. The failure was private. The plan was now a secret, nestled beside the hollow in his chest.
He would go again tomorrow. Before dawn.