Wings To The World

16.

'Kindness is blind.'

The quiet is deafening. We trudge on, the path lined with bushes dwindling until we're walking along on nothing but a dirt path. My feet ache, with no shoes to protect it from small stones, and my back shoots with pain every time I move my shoulders.

Haphaes stops for a moment. "Sorry, just, uh-" She turns away from me to move her hoodie around. "Do you have any first aid?"

I shake my head. "No, it's all with Saraiel. Wherever she is."

Haphaes sighs. "Alright, Let's keep going then," She nods towards the path's future. It is covered by the mist hanging around us. "Your hair looks weird, by the way. Did you do something?"

I pull my hair from the bun I had pushed it into earlier today. The scrunchie settles on my wrist and down floats my hair, which settles on the side of my face in a restless way.

The curls are wild and unmaintained, going everywhere they please. I sigh, looking through them, until- there are two golden streaks in my hair. That wasn't there before.

Haphaes nods to me. "Those," She says. Then, with a chuckle: "did you stop to get your hair done before coming?"

I blink and push away any semblance of what I was going to say, putting my

Hair back in a bun. I haven't washed it recently, I should do that. That's something that might calm me down after this.

"Sorry," I say. "About- well, we didn't know where you were and we tried to get Feraphale to help-"

"It's alright," Haphaes says. "I wasn't there for too long. Most of it was the dark."

She shudders, though we remain standing together. "We should keep going?" She asks, motioning to up ahead.

"Oh, right," I say. "We should."

It hits me then, how homely Haphaes feels. Something about the quiet is defeating and comforting. The border of the world around us seems like a storm, muted and ready to overthrow us at any point.

But the silence I have had with her before is not like that. Haphaes is comforting and soft, well-spoken and considerate. When she opens her mouth, she does so to speak something well-thought-out.

She speaks like that, too. In silences and movement. She speaks with her gestures and with her watching. She speaks with her opening up and her willingness to listen.

And that's beautiful, I smile. It's beautiful because it's her, and it's not someone else.

The spark beneath my lower rib makes itself known, flaring out until it feels like a hug around me. It washes away the pain through where my wings might be and comforts the space around me. There's a buzz in the back of my mind, too, that smells like flowers and gold. It's a distant spark, but it's warm and there.

Haphaes trudges on beside me, with growing difficulty. We keep going, her eyes on the horizon and mine on the movement of our feet.

The ground is grey, but a lighter shade than the walls. And the mist we enter into is also that same grey, but it's darker than the path. The path is the colour of a cloud before a storm.

The path opens up from a wide hallway as Haphaes and I keep going. She slows a little, and I slow to keep next to her. The room itself is an eerie shade of blue, coloured with mist around the edges.

As I keep going, the mist clears up and I can see further. An angel with blonde hair sits in front of a figure, chains on her wings and her hands.

Haphaes moves in front of me. "That's Isael," She says, shifting as if she might reach for Isael. "We have to help."

I nod. "Let's wait for that figure to pass."