Will You Fly with Me?

I’ve heard rumors of his prowess in battle, but the reality is breathtaking.

With a quick grin, he spins around with his black sword and lunges at the shadow demons teeming around us, their indistinct figures screeching, thrashing, horned, scaly, spiked.

He leaps over their crumbling bodies, their spraying blood spattering his boots.

For an ephemeral, ethereal moment, he hovers against the slate-gray sky, his shriveled red and black wings suspended in sharp relief.

There is no time, though, for admiring my enemy’s skill.

I follow on his heels, my own sword slashing into foes he missed. My blade slices demon after demon, squelching into their leather-like skin. The tough flesh splits beneath my steel’s edge and gushes gobs of black-green blood. As I wrench out my sword, gouts of hot liquid land on my forearms, the blood still pulsing with the sins the demons ate.

Think of this, I fortify myself. Blood vessels splitting, evil perishing. Don’t get caught.

If only—

No. There had been no other choice.

No way out but one.

This one.

They say enemy of your enemy is your friend, but him?

The way he licked his lips while sealing our bargain; the way his gaze slunk over my body as if he were already tasting knowledge of it that I don’t yet have.

He may be an ally, but never a friend. We may fight this battle side by side, but we wage the war from opposite trenches.

He is of the Crimson Tainted, those of withered wings in black and crimson, those who intimately grasp an acquaintance with the world and revel in its desires and ambitions. They tempt the Untouched, those of us with immaculate white wings, who live mostly walled up in our alabaster garden, veiled from the tales of those who live mortal lives, away from those whose hearts have a beat, whose pulses pound with fear, whose minds ripen with the obscure and arcane ways of hope.

We Untouched know nothing of hope, or lusts, or of the dreams that mortals spin in goodness and sin.

We are ageless, emotionless, asexual, unbiased, pristinely impartial, with none of our own feelings or wishes to pollute our judgment.

We are the judges of matters mortal and divine, the unswayed justices who measure the scales and sustain the balance, sent into the world only when evil festers beyond its allowed proportion and supersedes everything pleasant.

A world ruled by evil is no worthy world at all. Misery is not the purpose of life. Although I have never experienced them, we are instilled from birth and cradle that healing, art, beauty, stories, music, song, and the feelings that thread through them all: love, passion, yearning, understanding, compassion, belonging—all these aspects comprise a favorable existence… for humans, at least, and, one can presume, for the Crimson Tainted, too.

They were once like us, the Crimson Tainted, but they allowed themselves to fall beneath the gamut of human feelings, the cravings of human desire and hope for fulfillment; they know how laughter feels; I have heard it across our alabaster wall.

They step onto the continuum of human emotion to experience it all, and the instant they do, their wings waste away and blacken at the root.

Fallen.

But where the Crimson Tainted relish the pleasures, shadow demons are Crimson Tainted who fall prey to perversity. They stray, lost, in the darker shades of morality. They are madness embodied, evil incarnate, what every man fears and every wicked thing craves.

Like hardened joints, they cling to avarice, depravity, ignorance, wrath, rage, hatred, carnage, atrocity. They thrive on the infliction of savagery and the elevation of their ego to the lavish agony of others.

They are proponents of slavery, genocide, war.

Their wings wither completely like a detritus of leaves, into barbed spikes that ridge their curved spines. Animalistic—no, bestial. Unlike humans, who can hide evil behind an expressive mask, our kind turn inside out, and the shadow demons’ corrupted souls become visible. Their skin blackens and roughens into snake scales like char, colored in with a dozen tints of shadow.

My sword sinks into more of them, more flesh, and they do not scream so much as—I cannot describe it, but it is as though their dying shrieks escape with all the substance remaining in them, and they shrivel.

Perhaps, when they chose to nourish hatred and fear, their souls shrank instead of expanding (as souls do with love and understanding), and thereby, with their final cry, they collapse into meatless skin.

I yank out my blade and slash again, again, my slaughter methodical, cool—and again.

I feel no fear, sadness, no regret; those things foreign to me, insubstantial concepts that I cannot fathom… yet.

No, I tell myself. Don’t think of the bargain.

It’s for Lorelei.

Grimly, I fight onward, dimly aware that my ally—my foe—has cleared a path that would otherwise be impossible to pass.

I keep my mind carefully full of violence and empty of my imminent fate.

This is for her.

She must escape.

My sister, perfection; she was made after I disappointed the order.

I know not what I did, for it was taken from me; I know only that I rebelled.

How unlike me! I have always upheld the good, and yet… I did something. I am no longer used for judgment, untrustworthy as I am.

My failure was a tragedy. Our numbers wane. We are so few now.

Where do the others vanish?

I must not question; it was another sign of disobedience. I had to grovel for them even to allow me to escort Lorelei as protector on this mission. She was to judge a city insurgency, one rising against us and questioning our justice, the hierarchy, our very place as this world’s unbiased rulers.

But the shadow demons had swarmed us in numbers beyond my capacity to fend off.

How had they known we would be here?

I’d almost failed. If he hadn’t appeared—

But he had.

Had he known?

Certainly he’d known escape would be unachievable without him.

And so our bargain had been struck.

I hardly know what motivation lurks behind his so-called generosity; I only know that with his help, I will save Lorelei, our future high ruler (in my place, for she has not disappointed them).

I hear her behind me, her tread soft, her breath silent, her eyes vacant. Her lips are untouched by smile or anxiety. No shadow of doubt nor conflict ever marred her flawless brow. Sometimes I wonder…

It doesn’t matter. I fight on, no remorse clouding my mind, no fear slowing my hands… yet.

Suddenly, the horde is gone. It is like it was there one moment; the next, gone (though I guess that’s the way of war).

The last slain shadow demon is withering at the Crimson Tainted’s booted foot.

We are free. The slaughtered bodies—or rather, soulless skins—of shadow demons blanket the dirt and pebbles around us, their meatless skins resembling discarded leathers, their flattened arms like wrinkled and grayish-pink sleeves waiting someone to put them on.

I shiver.

The shadowy chains binding my wings with shadow-demon power disintegrate.

Lorelei’s, too. Her gaze tilts upward, and as if pulled by a string, she takes flight.

Her immaculate white wings outstretch, dazzlingly white against the darkening heavens. Beautiful. Exquisite.

Without a backward glance, she soars away from me.

If her flight is awkward, as always, I do not let myself think it, as I should never think such thoughts: thoughts about the way she moves, faintly, jerkily (more like a badly controlled puppet, or a grown toddler who has never properly learned to walk); how her eyes never focus, how her voice is wooden.

She is just a truer Untouched than I have ever been, unburdened by devotion.

There is no reason for her to look back.

Unthinkingly, I move to take wing behind her, and as I do, I glimpse my wings, feathery white and spreading into magnificent—

But the Crimson Tainted seizes my wrist, his touch a jolt inside me like a gasp, or a dash of cold water, and he hauls me back down to the gory battlefield.

“Our bargain,” he rasps, his voice like the huskiness of a thousand sins committed after dusk, and he lowers his mouth to mine.

This is only the beginning.

*

After it is all over, I weep.

I am not sorrowful, as I expected, but dazed. Overwhelmed. Overpowered by emotions I cannot control.

He had swept me along with him in a maelstrom of desire, my body falling helplessly into some sort of flood made up of an inrush of touch, an outrush of emotion, and a seizing of my body in an augmenting physical reaction that became too much for my mind.

I am alive and terrified, sated and horrified. Too many sensations at once make me dizzy.

Lying on his side and propped up on his elbow, facing me on the cloak he had barely spread before he lowered us upon it, he drops a curving kiss upon my shoulder. “I knew it would be exquisite between us.”

I should feel… hatred toward him for what he has done.

Even though it is ugly, I should feel sullied.

But it is more like he has awakened my sleeping soul. Inside, I am like someone blinking away slumber. It’s like feeling sunbeams upon my skin for the first time—no, like being aware of them as I never have before. The heated prickle of tiny hairs, the sneaking, pervasive warmth, the trail of his fingertips along the curvature of my shoulder.

Something vivid is opening its eyes in me. He has awoken me… and destroyed your wings, I tell myself.

Melancholically, I glance back at them. Misshapen now, they have curled in on themselves like scorched roots, although their color…

Mine have not blackened like his. Midnight blue near my spine, they gradually blend into a brilliant scarlet at the edges.

Like blazing sunset fading to eternal night. A last vestige of beauty before dark descends.

They are lovely in a despicable way.

I should feel regret at their loss, but the truth is that I wasn’t even aware the moment they shrank and withered…

I can guess when it happened, though: the very moment I’d forgotten about them.

The moment that ecstasy had engulfed me and blocked out everything else but every shred of my being pressing wildly into his, as he was pulling mine, as the tremors had begun—that was when my beautiful wings shriveled… in the equally beautiful crash of ecstasy.

I do not know what to do with this surplus of feeling.

His fingers graze my shoulders, that small touch like a spark igniting a flame, and my senses surge again to tingling life. His breathy caress brushes the skin of my neck, and I quiver within. Restless desire stirs in the places where I welcomed invasion.

I want it again even as part of me wants to hide.

He lowers his head, his expression as concealed as the kiss that he is pressing against my heart. “Regrets?”

“Lorelei is safe.” My voice thickens with tears and an emotion so raw and new that I have no way to name it. “That’s all that matters.”

“Is it.” It’s not a question. He chuckles lazily. “She doesn’t exist, love.”

I stiffen.

“You, though…” His long, slender fingers grip my chin and draw my head to his for a deep, luxurious kiss. Passion wells up within me. Beautiful in its treacherous way, undeniable in its treacherous loveliness, drawing me once more into the disturbing turmoil of sensation, arousal, and making me helpless, powerless, insatiable. Things I’ve never felt before.

Things I have no defense against.

He is something I have no defense against—and don’t want to defend against.

“You and I existed together,” he says softly. “Once.”

I blink. “What?”

Being so new to emotion, I cannot say whether pity or anger flares in his eyes as he continues. “Didn’t you ever wonder what they took out of your mind? You and I—we grew up together, were raised together, parentless, and we discovered that both your parents and mine had been slain because we were born, not made, which filled us with natural souls. Souls that were forcibly put to sleep.”

What can I say?

I am convinced by the fraughtness in his tone, by the words that have echoed unspoken for years in my heart, that I have always been different from the rest.

“The Untouched,” he murmurs, “are not unbiased as you were taught, but cold. Lorelei is a vessel made without a soul, controlled by what made her and all the others, controlled by an entity gone rogue around our birth.” His fingers pry gently into my skin, keeping at bay some underlying pain even as he wishes me to feel it. “It kept you with it, and grief made me fall.”

I strive to put together the residual pieces. “That’s why you bargained for mine today.” Because of our past. But my future? Heavily, I trail my fingertips along my shrunken wings, a loss never to be regained.

A radiant grin gilds his lips with a glow of wickedness. “You can still fly with them, you know.”

At my look, he laughs, and he kisses me with that laughter, and I almost can’t bear the unexpected lightness in me. It’s like my very soul has learned to smile. He frames my face with his hands, and the closeness, again, is nearly too much to bear.

“There are many secrets they do not know about us,” he assures me. “Now that we have you, the last they held among them with a soul, our war on them may begin in earnest. Will you fly with me?”