This Isn't About Reya

Chapter Twenty

Reya had gone to visit Azrael that morning, in the burning gold light of the sunrise. As she made her way outside the city's gates and through the boughs of the trees, she was able to view the landscape in light for the first time - a wondrous, glowing dream, the pines casting deep shadows while the sun that penetrated the boughs showered the carpet of scarlet needles in a spattering of light. Like a painting, an early morning reverie, the colors of the woods displayed for the first time, glimmering like butterfly-wing scales in the dawn. As Reya stepped through the woods with a sense of reverence, her eyes shining as she took in the once-hidden hues, she smiled a smile of quiet joy, and it was something she had not felt in a long while.

She found Azrael in the clearing, where he normally remained. But he was not on the ground or in the low branches, as he usually was; this time, Reya stepped into the snow of the grove and craned her neck to find him perched perfectly atop the peak of one of the tallest trees she'd ever seen, just at the edge of the clearing. 

He was at least a hundred feet up, crouched precariously, it seemed, balancing on the swath of pine boughs that fanned out about a foot below the very top of the tree. His black cloaks billowed around him in the high wind of the tundra, flapping and undulating like the black sails of a ship, or the great shade wings of a raven. His pale, smooth face emerged at the very edge of the cloaks in stark contrast to the black of his clothing, and although Reya could not see what he was looking at, she was rather certain that he was admiring the sunrise.

That, she reminded herself, is something a human would do.

He was learning.

He sat motionless atop the tree for a few more minutes, and Reya was content to simply watch him, his balance, his cloaked form. And then he shifted, and his face turned to look down at Reya.

He smiled lightly, and it sent a tingling wave of electric joy through her body.

"Reya," he said simply, and his electronic voice hummed down into the clearing. He rose from his crouch with ease, coming to stand high above the rest of the forest like a great, shifting, black-clothed monolith. Then, he stepped out, and dropped to the forest floor.

His cloaks billowed out as he landed with a sharp thud on the tips of his toes, and the snow around him blasted outward. Reya let out a screech of laughter and flung her arm up over her face to shield her eyes from the exploding snow drift.

When she lowered her arm, a smile on her lips, Azrael smiled back playfully. 

"You didn't float down that time," Reya observed casually, taking a skip forward to close the distance between them. 

Azrael was still, and he looked down at her, the smile dropping from his lips. "No, I did not. How perceptive of you."

Reya cocked her head at him, concerned. His voice was deadpan and emotionless, cold and unfeeling as dead rock. It was not at all like it had been the past week or so. He had been grasping the inflections of language, and how emotions could be portrayed through variations in voice. Why had he suddenly neglected it all?

Then Azrael's smile came again, brimming to the edges of his face, wider than before. His sharp blue eyes seemed to flash for a moment, and Reya understood that he had used sarcasm.

"Azrael!" she scolded him, a relieved smile of her own dominating her expression. "Did you just make a joke?" She playfully swatted at the edges of his cloak, and he did not pull away. 

"I do not know," Azrael said, flitting quickly sideways in a motion that Reya knew to mean that he was proud of something. "Did I make a joke?"

It was more sarcasm. Reya was beside herself. Her eyes widened, as did her smile, and she let out a quick giggle. "My God, that's incredible! When did you learn to do that?"