Chapter 90: 14.1.3
The morning ritual etched itself into the fabric of his days, a secret scripture written in pain.
Koen would wake in the absolute dark, his body attuned to a silent alarm Gabriel never heard. He’d slip from the bed, dress in the same simple clothes, and move through the sleeping cottage like a ghost. The forest path became as familiar as the hallway to the kitchen. He knew where the roots snaked across the trail, where the mist gathered thickest in the hollows. His world narrowed to this pilgrimage.
Each visit to the cathedral was a study in agony. He no longer simply lay before the altar. He experimented, like a grim scientist.
One morning, he pressed his bare palm flat against the carved depiction of a saint on a pillar for a full minute. The skin blistered and blackened, the smell of burnt meat filling his nostrils before the regeneration slowly, stubbornly, pushed the necrosis back and knitted pink new flesh.
Another time, he drank from the holy water font. The liquid felt like molten lead pouring down his throat, searing his esophagus, boiling in his stomach until he vomited black bile onto the stones. He lay retching until the internal burning subsided to a dull, constant ache.
The pain was clean. It was honest. It was the only thing that made the numb hollow inside him feel something, even if that something was torture. More than that, it was a logic he could follow: if enough poison enters a system, the system fails. He was just… accelerating the process. Sparing Gabriel the long, confusing decline. Saving him from the burden of a partner who was little more than furniture.
He returned each dawn just as the sky lightened, slipping back into bed moments before Gabriel stirred. The burns always faded. The weakness lingered a little longer each time, a heaviness in his limbs that made climbing the stairs to their bedroom feel like a mountain ascent.
Gabriel noticed the fatigue. Of course he did.
“You’re moving like a sleepwalker,” he remarked one afternoon as Koen stared blankly at a pot of stew Gabriel was magically stirring. “Are you sleep-hunting? Taking bounties in your dreams? Because you’re certainly not taking them in the waking world.”
“Just… not sleeping right,” Koen mumbled, the lie ash in his mouth.
“Then sleep right. It’s not a complex directive. Close eyes. Unplug brain. The fact that I, a being of infinite cosmic responsibility, manage it better than you is frankly embarrassing.” Gabriel ladled stew into a bowl and pushed it across the table. “Eat. You’re getting lean. It doesn’t suit you.”
Koen ate. The food was flavourless, but it was fuel. He needed the fuel for the morning.
The fifth visit was the worst yet. He’d made it to the altar steps before his legs gave out entirely. He’d crawled the last few feet, the stone scalding his hands and knees through his clothes. He’d lain there for what felt like hours, convulsing silently as the holy energy warred with his demonic essence, a civil war fought in the trenches of his nervous system. The sun was fully up, painting the rose window in fiery glory, by the time he could move again. He was late.
He stumbled from the cathedral, his vision swimming with dark spots. He leaned against a buttress, gulping the clean, unsanctified air, waiting for the tremors to subside enough for him to walk. He didn’t see the figure approaching from the pilgrim’s path below until she was almost upon him.
It was Elara.
She was dressed for travel, a pack on her back, a bow across her shoulders. Her flint-coloured eyes widened, taking in the scene: Koen Delano, pale as death, sweat-drenched and shaking, clawing his way out of the Cathedral of Saint Aedra like a man escaping a furnace.
“Koen?” Her voice was sharp with alarm. She glanced from his waxy face to the gaping cathedral doors, then back. Understanding—and horror—dawned in her expression. She knew what he was. Not the specifics, but the broad category. Half-something-not-nice. In their line of work, you learned the signs, and you learned what hurt certain things.
Holy ground. Holy ground hurt creatures of darkness.
And Koen, sweet, dense, lumbering Koen, who once asked her if a basilisk’s gaze would ruin his favourite coat, might not know. He was brilliant in a fight and catastrophically stupid about everything else. The thought clearly flashed through her mind: He doesn’t know.
“Koen, no!” she shouted, breaking into a run. “Get away from there!”
He blinked at her, his orange eyes hazy with residual pain and confusion. He’d been trying to be unseen. This was a complication his battered mind couldn’t process. He took an unsteady step away from the wall, a reflex to her panic.
Elara skidded to a halt in front of him, her hands coming up as if to physically pull him back, but she stopped short of touching him. “What are you doing? Do you have any idea what that place is?”
“It’s… a church,” Koen managed, his voice a ragged whisper.
“It’s a consecrated cathedral! The stones are blessed! The whole damned hill is!” Her words tumbled out, frantic. “How long were you in there? You look like you’ve been boiled.” She peered closer, seeing the way his clothes steamed faintly in the cool air, the red patches on his neck that were slowly, eerily, smoothing themselves away. “Oh, hells. Koen. That stuff kills things like you. Or it should. Why would you even go in? Were you following a mark? Was something hiding in there?”
He just stared at her, his brain desperately trying to cobble together a lie that would fit. A mark. Yes. That was good. “Yeah. A… ghost. Heard a ghost was here.”
Elara’s panic shifted into professional fury. “A ghost? In a cathedral? That’s like hearing a fish is nesting in a tree! Ghosts can’t cross consecrated ground! You’d know that if you ever listened to anything besides the sound of your own guns cocking!” She grabbed his arm, her grip firm. He flinched, the contact jarring against his oversensitive nerves. “Come on. You need to get clear. Now.”
She pulled him, and he stumbled after her, unresisting. His legs were clumsy. She hauled him a hundred yards down the path, into the dense, neutral shade of the pines. Only then did she let go, turning to face him, hands on her hips.
“Alright. Talk. What was the real play? And don’t say ‘ghost’ again or I’ll shove you back in there myself.”
The sanctuary of the trees was a relief. The ringing in his ears was fading. He could think a little clearer. He looked at Elara’s angry, concerned face and felt a profound, weary shame. She thought he was an idiot who’d stumbled into danger out of ignorance. That was better than the truth. He could work with that.
“Saw the light,” he mumbled, looking at his boots. “Early. Thought it was… a lantern. Maybe someone needed help.”
He sold it by leaning heavily against a tree trunk, closing his eyes. It wasn’t hard. The exhaustion was real.
Elara let out a long, frustrated sigh. The anger bled out of her, replaced by a gruff pity. “You absolute moron. You see a pretty light on a holy hill and your first thought is to charge in? What if it had been a cleansing rite? You’d be a puddle of regret.” She shook her head. “You’re lucky I was heading out early for the Wraithwood job. Lucky you’re too stubborn to die from a quick burn. Does Gabriel know you’re this dumb?”
The name sent a fresh lance of guilt through him. “No.”
“Figured. He’d have you wrapped in protective sigils and locked in a cupboard.” She studied him again. The colour was returning to his face, the terrifying pallor receding. “You gonna be okay to get home?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure? You’re still weaving.”
“I’m fine.” He pushed off the tree, forcing himself to stand straight. The performance of normalcy was almost as draining as the holy fire.
Elara didn’t look convinced, but she had a long ride ahead. “Alright. Listen, you rock-headed lunatic. You see big stone buildings with spires, you assume they’re bad for your health. Got it? Stay on the dirt. Stick to forests and taverns and places that don’t actively hate what you are.”
He gave a shallow nod. “Got it. Thanks, Elara.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t make me have to explain to that pretty archangel of yours why I found your melted remains on a church floor. It’d be awkward.” She adjusted her pack, gave him one last, searching look, and then turned, heading down the path towards the main road. “And take a bounty! Do something useful with all that durability!”
He waited until she was gone from sight, the sound of her footsteps swallowed by the forest. Then he sagged.
The encounter left him rattled. Seen. It injected a dangerous variable into his private ritual. He walked home slowly, his mind churning. He’d have to be more careful. He’d have to wait longer, ensure no early-rising hunters or pious farmers were on the path.
Gabriel was at the table when he entered, a spread of luminous scrolls floating in a semi-circle before him. He didn’t look up. “You’re out of bread. And hope, by the looks of it. You’re grey.”
“Ran into Elara,” Koen said, the partial truth feeling like a betrayal. He went to the sink, splashed water on his face. The coolness was a shock. “On the road.”
“Oh? And how is the formidable Mistress Elara? Did she finally convince you that tracking is about more than following the big, bloody footprints?”
“She said to take a bounty.”
“A woman of sense.” Gabriel finally glanced over. His gaze, usually so quick to skim, lingered. It narrowed. “You truly do look terrible. What did you do, try to outrun the sunrise? You’re practically vibrating.”
“Just tired,” Koen said, the mantra wearing thin even to his own ears. He walked towards the stairs, needing the dark, needing to be horizontal.
“Koen.”
The single word, spoken without its usual ironic lilt, stopped him. It was just his name. Clean. Direct.
He turned. Gabriel had dismissed the scrolls. He was just sitting there, his hands flat on the table, his blue eyes fixed on him with an unfamiliar intensity. It wasn’t concern, not exactly. It was the look of an archivist who has found a single line of text that contradicts his entire catalogue.
“Yes?”
Gabriel’s eyes traced the lines of his body, the slight tremble in his hand on the banister, the shadowed hollows under his eyes that not even regeneration could seem to erase. “Elara. On the road. Which road? The north road to the Wraithwood? Or the east road… to the hills?”
The pause was infinitesimal. A crack in the world.
“The east road,” Koen said, his throat tight.
Gabriel said nothing. He just looked at him. The air in the cottage grew still and heavy, charged with all the things not being said. He knew about the cathedral on the hill. Of course he did. He mapped every celestial and infernal pressure point for a hundred miles. It was his job.
A shadow of something raw and terrible flickered behind Gabriel’s perfect composure—not anger, but the cold, swift calculation that precedes a cataclysm. It was gone in an instant, smoothed over by a brittle, practiced nonchalance.
“I see,” Gabriel said softly. He leaned back, the chair creaking. “Well. If you’re going to fraternize with the competition, do try to come back looking less like you’ve lost a wrestling match with a principle of divinity. It’s gauche.”
He summoned his scrolls back, the light from them casting sharp angles on his face. The conversation was over. The door was closed.
But the lock had been picked. Koen stood on the stairs, feeling more seen, more known, in that terrible silent moment than he had when Elara dragged him from the church. Gabriel hadn’t asked the right question. He hadn’t asked why.
He hadn’t needed to. The fact that he’d asked about the road meant he was already constructing the map. And Koen, in his shattered state, had just handed him the final coordinate.
He climbed the rest of the stairs alone, the silence behind him in the kitchen now feeling like a held breath, waiting for the moment it would all come rushing out.
The next morning, he waited an extra hour, until the first birds began their tentative songs, before sliding from the sheets. His muscles screamed in protest, a deep, bone-ached complaint that was becoming his new normal. Gabriel was a still mound under the blankets, turned away. Koen watched the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, then went.
The cathedral was colder that day. He lasted only twenty minutes before the pressure in his skull became a splitting nova, forcing him to retreat. Progress, he thought dully, stumbling back down the hill. His body was learning. It was accepting the poison.
Days stacked upon each other, a blur of pain and pretence.
He functioned in a low, humming fog. He cleaned his guns without loading them. He ate whatever Gabriel put in front of him. Conversations became monosyllabic exchanges held across a widening gulf.
“The ghoul’s been taken,” Gabriel announced one evening, not looking up from a prism of swirling light that contained what looked like a heated debate between smaller, shimmering figures. “By a novice witch with a fire-spell pamphlet. The fee was four silver and a basket of eggs. You’ve been outpaced by poultry-based currency.”
“Huh,” Koen said, staring at the fire.
“’Huh,’ he says.” Gabriel dispersed the prism with an irritated wave. “Are you in there at all? Or is this just a very convincing meat-suit piloted by a particularly gloomy ghost?”
Koen flinched. The words landed too close to the secret plan. “I’m here.”
“A debatable assertion.” Gabriel stood and walked to the window, his back rigid. “You smell like ozone and sorrow. And something else. Something sharp. It clings to you in the mornings.”
A cold knot tightened in Koen’s stomach. “Just the forest air.”
“The forest smells of damp and decay. This is… cleansed. Sterile.” Gabriel’s reflection in the dark glass was unreadable. “It’s the smell of nothingness.”
Koen had no answer. The silence stretched, taut and thin.
Visit seventeen left him vomiting bile into the bushes at the tree line, his body convulsing as it tried to expel the sacred toxicity. Visit twenty-three saw him collapse on the flagstones, his vision tunnelling to a pinprick of light for three full minutes before his stubborn heart thudded back into a rhythm. He started leaving earlier, coming back later, his absences stretching longer as his recovery times slowed.
He was a ghost haunting his own life, fading from the inside out.
Gabriel stopped making comments. He just watched. His eyes, usually so full of glittering commentary, became still pools of observation. He’d note the way Koen’s hand shook lifting a teacup. He’d catalogue the new, fine tremor that was now a constant companion. He’d stare at the impossible, fading burns that sometimes still licked up Koen’s wrists before vanishing like mirages.
He began leaving things. A pot of strong, black coffee on the stove after Koen’s pre-dawn return. A plate of rich, dense nut-bread on the table. A new, brutally sharp hunting knife—perfectly balanced, lethally simple—left on Koen’s chair with no note. It was not care as Koen understood it. It was provisioning. It was Gabriel’s way of shoring up a fortress he saw under silent siege, stockpiling resources against an enemy he couldn’t yet name.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth visit, Koen did not so much rise as his body detached itself from the bed. The room listed. A metallic taste coated his tongue. He dressed with clumsy, numb fingers, nearly fumbling the buttons on his shirt. The walk to the cathedral was a marathon of disjointed steps, the world tilting and swimming around him.
He pushed the great door open. The wave of radiant force that met him felt physical, a wall of heated lead. He didn’t walk in. He fell across the threshold, his knees giving way immediately.
The stone was ice and fire. He crawled. Each movement was a monumental effort, his limbs weighed down by an anchor tied to his soul. The ringing in his ears was a choir of static, drowning out all other sound. His vision was webbed with black, pulsing veins. He made it to the base of the altar steps.
This was it. A strange, lucid calm descended through the agony. His regeneration wasn’t fighting anymore. It was sputtering, a guttered candle out of wax. The holy energy poured into the vacuum it left behind, scouring him clean, hollowing him out. He felt systems go offline. The deep, automatic rhythm of his demonic heart faltered, stuttered.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the vaulted ceiling where the dawn light was beginning to paint the arches in gold. It was beautiful. The pain was beginning to recede, not because he was healing, but because the nerves were dying, the signals failing. A profound warmth spread through his core, a deceptive comfort.
He couldn’t feel his legs. His hands were distant, cold things. The world darkened at the edges, the beautiful gold light shrinking to a single, bright point far above him.
Finally.
After twenty-eight visits, on visit twenty-nine, Koen’s body started to shut down. The constant, grinding struggle ceased. The thoughts that had plagued him—of being a burden, of taking up space, of his own dense inadequacy—unspooled and floated away, weightless. They didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did.
Koen almost felt a sort of relief as he felt the world going dark. It was so quiet. The last thing he was aware of was the taste of his own blood, copper-sharp at the back of his throat, and the distant, fading impression of a hand that felt like cool marble against his burning forehead, a voice shouting something that sounded like his name, but it was all so far away, and the dark was so soft, and it was finally over.
The marble-cool touch was a brand in reverse, a shock of absolute nullity against the holy fire consuming him. It pulled.
Something was tearing, a great rusted hinge in the fabric of the world, and with it came a roar of displaced air that was neither wind nor sound but pure force. The immense, suffocating pressure of the cathedral’s sanctity shredded like parchment, violently parted.
Golden light, but not the gentle, poisoned dawn from the windows. This was a furious, focused glare, the heart of a forge. It was accompanied by a sound Koen’s failing nerves interpreted as the snapping of colossal sails and a voice that bypassed his ears to resonate directly in the marrow of his bones.
“—not here, you unforgivable idiot—“
Hands, now two, gripped him. They did not gentle him. They yanked. His body slid across the flagstones, a puppet with its strings cut, and then he was being lifted, crushed against a chest that felt like carved alabaster. The scent of ozone and burnt sugar, of lightning-struck stone, overwhelmed the incense.
“I have you. Stop trying to die. It’s tacky.”
Gabriel. The voice was a ragged snarl, stripped of all its practiced melody, vibrating with a fury so intense it scorched the words.
Koen tried to form a syllable. His mouth filled with blood again.
“Don’t speak. Don’t you dare.” The command was guttural. The arms around him tightened further, and the world dissolved into a nauseating vortex of speed and blinding light. The cathedral walls, the stained glass, the trees outside—all smeared into streaks of impossible colour. There was a sensation of vertical ascent, a stomach-dropping lurch, and then a concussive thud that shook the cottage to its foundations.
They were in the main room. Gabriel had not used the door. He’d torn a hole in space above the rug, which now smoldered at the edges. He dropped Koen onto the sofa, not gently, the movement frantic. Koen’s head lolled back, his orange eyes open but unseeing, a thin trail of blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.
Gabriel stood over him, his true form momentarily bleeding through the human disguise. He was immense, wings of storm-light and shattered crystal filling the room from wall to wall, their light throwing jagged, panicked shadows. His flawless skin was luminous with inner rage, his blue eyes were solar flares. He looked, for a second, like an avenging deity. Then the image collapsed, receding until it was just Gabriel, 6’3”, trembling with adrenaline, his blonde hair disheveled.
“What did you do?” he whispered, not to Koen, but to the universe. He dropped to his knees, his hands hovering over Koen’s body, unsure where to touch. The burns were visible now, livid and angry, crawling up his neck from his collar, marking his hands. They were not healing.
Gabriel’s magic, usually so precise and effortless, sputtered from his fingertips in erratic bursts. A diagnostic spell, a golden lattice of light, skittered over Koen’s torso and dissolved. A healing sigil, meant to knit mortal flesh, fizzled against the demonic essence that was currently in catastrophic retreat.
“No, no, no, you stubborn creature,” he chanted, the arrogance utterly gone, replaced by a raw, technical desperation. “Your regeneration is offline. You’ve driven it into a stupor. Why would you do that?”
He placed his palms flat on Koen’s chest. His own celestial energy, anathema to demons but infinitely more complex than mere sanctified stone, was a scalpel, not a bludgeon. He could, in theory, jump-start the paralyzed system. In theory.
It was like trying to jump-start a heart with live lightning. Dangerous. Reckless.
He poured a trickle in.
Koen’s body arched off the sofa with a soundless, agonized gasp, his back forming a terrible bow. The smell of scorched fabric filled the air.
Gabriel recoiled, snatching his hands back as if burned. “Fine. The hard way, then. Always the hard way with you.”
He moved with frantic purpose. He vanished into the kitchen and returned with a ceramic bowl of water and a clean cloth. He didn’t trust magic for this. He knelt again, and with a startling, mundane tenderness, he began to wipe the blood from Koen’s mouth, the sweat from his temples. His hands, which commanded galaxies of information, now clumsily undid the buttons of Koen’s shirt to assess the damage beneath.
“You’re a fool,” he said, his voice low and strained as he worked the cloth over the hot, inflamed skin. “A dense, beautiful, infuriating fool. You see a solution in annihilation. You always have.” He dipped the cloth again, the water turning pink. “Did you think I wouldn’t find you? I track diplomatic incidents across dimensional folds. Did you think your silence was a secret? It was a screaming void in the middle of our home.”
Koen shuddered under the touch, a wet, rattling breath escaping him. His eyelids fluttered.
“That’s it,” Gabriel murmured, his tone shifting into something coaxing, almost clinical. “Come back. You don’t get to leave. I haven’t signed the appropriate forms. There’s paperwork, you know. Mountains of it. You’d hate it.”
Another spasm, weaker this time. Koen’s head rolled to the side. His eyes were slits, glowing faintly like banked coals in the dim room.
“G…Gab…?”
The sound was a ruined thing. It shattered the last of Gabriel’s clinical detachment. His composure cracked, and a single, soundless sob wracked his frame. He pressed his forehead against Koen’s shoulder, his fists clenching in the fabric of the sofa.
“Yes. Who else would be foolish enough to storm a cathedral at dawn? You’ve made me terribly dramatic.” He lifted his head, his eyes bright with unshed tears that refused to fall. “What were you thinking? Truly. Explain it to me as if I’m the stupid one.”
Koen’s lips moved. It took seconds for the sound to follow. “Tired… of being… wrong. Of being… slow.”
Gabriel stared. “So your solution was to break the only part of you that ever works properly? Your body? Your spectacular, stubborn, beautiful body?” He laughed, a short, broken sound. “Your mind was always the problem, darling. Not your heart. Not your hands.”
He stood abruptly, pacing two steps away before turning back, a whirlwind of confined energy. “You thought you were a burden. I could smell the depreciation on you. It reeked. You were so busy measuring your worth in bounties and silver and completed knitting projects you missed the entire ledger.”
Koen’s breathing was less ragged now, a slow, deliberate draw. The angry red of the burns was fading from crimson to a dull pink. His regeneration, sparked by that dangerous jolt of celestial power or simply by Gabriel’s furious presence, was groggily re-engaging.
“You are messy,” Gabriel continued, counting off on his fingers, his voice gaining its familiar sharp edge though it still shook. “You track mud. You burn stew. You misunderstand irony. You require constant explanation. You are, by any bureaucratic metric, a net loss.”
He stalked back to the sofa and leaned over, placing his hands on either side of Koen’s head, caging him in. “But this is my desk. This cottage. This life. And you are the only interesting, unsortable, vital piece of correspondence on it. The filing system is built around you, you imbecile. You don’t get to declare yourself a lost cause. That’s my designation to make.”
Koen blinked up at him. A single tear escaped the corner of his eye, tracing a clean path through the grime and dried blood. He didn’t have the words. He never did.
Gabriel saw it. He deflated, all the furious wind leaving his sails. He sat heavily on the edge of the sofa, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a deep, weary horror at how close he’d come to losing this utterly.
“No more cathedrals,” he said, his voice flat. It was not a request. “No more secret poisons. If you wish to cease, you will look me in the eye and you will say it. You will use your words, Koen. The words I know are in there somewhere. You do not get to slip away in the dark without giving me the courtesy of a quarrel.”
He reached out, his thumb wiping away the tear. His touch was infinitely careful. “Do you understand?”
Koen looked at him, at the unvarnished fear and fury and devastating care in those celestial blue eyes. He saw the map Gabriel had built, the one that led him to the cathedral at the exact right, terrible moment. He gave a slow, shallow nod.
“Good.” Gabriel stood again, businesslike, retreating into practicality. “Now, your regeneration is back online but it’s fragile. You’ve poisoned your core. It will take days to recalibrate. You’ll feel like a wrung-out dishcloth. You’ll stay here. You’ll eat what I give you. You will rest.”
He walked to the kitchen, his movements once again precise, controlled. The mundane clatter of a pot, the strike of a match. He was making tea. An ordinary task in the wake of the extraordinary.
Koen lay on the sofa, the soft, familiar fabric against his back, the scent of their home—woodsmoke, old books, Gabriel’s ink—slowly replacing the memory of incense and stone. The hollow ache was still there, a cold space inside him. But it was no longer empty. It was full of a new, terrifying knowledge: he had been seen. Not just his actions, but his intention.
And he had been retrieved.
He turned his head towards the kitchen, watching Gabriel’s rigid back. The silence between them was different now. It wasn’t a gulf. It was a bridge, fragile and newly built, strung across a chasm they had both just looked into.
He had run out of cathedral visits. There was only this room, this shared air, and the exhausting, terrifying work of figuring out what came next. Gabriel placed a steaming mug on the table beside the sofa, his expression unreadable.
“Drink that,” he said. His voice was quiet, final. “We’re not done talking about this. But for now, just rest.”