São Miguel, Azores Islands. 1939
The mid-morning sun fractured across the azure waves, casting hard, diamond shards of light across the water. In the cobblestone marketplace below, farmers’ calloused hands exchanged island-grown pineapples for escudos while fishermen hauled glistening mackerel from wooden boats, their skin bronzed from a ritual older than any calendar they knew.
From his perch at the Azores Hotel, Jovias could taste salt on his lips. The ceiling sagged above him, its once-white paint yellowed and flaking like dead skin. The naked bulb swayed in the breeze that filtered through the warped window frame. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades as he leaned against the sill, letting the sea air cool the raised ridges of scar tissue that mapped his torso, each mark a memory of violence stretching back further than any mortal could comprehend.
The radio crackled with static, then clarity: “Germany invades Poland.” The Portuguese announcer’s voice remained professional, but Jovias caught the tremor beneath, fear disguised as objectivity. He closed his eyes, centuries of human warfare flashing behind his lids. How many times had he witnessed this pattern? The radio continued, translating Poland’s desperate broadcast: “German forces crossed the border… bombed several cities…”
Jovias gripped the windowsill until his knuckles whitened. Another war. Another failure of his guardianship. His immortal heart ached with the weight of his oath, even as part of him whispered that perhaps Auriel had been right all along, perhaps humanity was beyond salvation.
The radio crackled with Jozef Matrgorzowski’s declaration, each word like a hammer striking an anvil: “We are all soldiers. We must think of only one thing: to fight until victory!” “We are all soldiers. We must think of only one thing: victory.”
Jovias’s fingers trembled against the radio’s wooden casing. His ears still echoed with the Polish words, layered and insistent, as if spoken by a hundred mouths at once. The British would “stand with Poland.” The French promised swift action. America expressed “grave concern.” Empty words. Hollow promises. His immortal shoulders sagged beneath the weight of the coming slaughter.
Light flooded the room, so brilliant that it cast no shadows. The stifling humidity vanished, replaced by the crisp scent of mountain air and lightning. With his palms pressed against his eyes, Jovias tried to stop the visions.
“Jovias.” Astrid’s voice resonated like distant thunder. Jovias did not flinch; celestial timing was rarely coincidental.
“You must rise and come with me.”
The cool water from the bathroom tap did nothing to wash away the dread pooling in his gut. As he buttoned his shirt, his fingers traced a scar from the Crusades. Would this new war carve fresh wounds into the world? Into him?
“Let’s go,” he commanded, voice harder than he felt. Astrid’s wings unfurled like banners of light, each feather a blade of radiance. The archangel’s smile was terrible in its beauty as he swept Jovias into his embrace and tore through reality, leaving only the scent of ozone and the memory of war behind.
Pico da Vara, São Miguel, Azores Islands
For the briefest instant, Jovias stood suspended outside of time, no air in his lungs, only the sting of ozone and the afterimage of Astrid’s searing luminosity. They dematerialized on a windswept precipice, a thousand meters above the ocean’s open water, battered by the whiplash of sudden chill. Astrid’s light flared, then withdrew into the edges of his silhouette, feathers folding inward until only a faint, stubborn nimbus clung to his golden hair.
Jovias staggered backward, swallowing bile, knuckles white on the basalt. He turned on Astrid, heat burning through his usually measured composure. “Don’t ever.” His voice broke, reforming as a guttural growl. “Don’t you ever do that again. I am not cargo to be thrown through the void.”
A beatific, unrepentant smile curled Astrid’s lip. He skimmed across the wind-polished stone, refusing to let his sandals touch earth. “You are, as always, most welcome, Jovias. Consider it a necessary expediency.” With a languid, almost mocking gesture, Astrid showed a narrow path carved into the laurel-blanketed ridge. “This way.”
Jovias muttered in an ancient tongue but stalked past the archangel, refusing to let Astrid see him steady his breath.
The forest shivered and parted before their footsteps, a cathedral of green vaulting overhead, built from twisting trunks and lacy veils of moss. The air here was richer than wine: loamy, metallic, sharp with the memory of old volcanic burns. Each step bled tension from Jovias’s body and replaced it with a quiet awe; the Creator’s handiwork was always more intoxicating than any angelic intervention. Still, he scanned the undergrowth for threats, his senses honed by centuries of ambushes in far less forgiving lands.
The trail dipped through a tunnel of wild hydrangea, thick with white and blue blossoms. Jovias ducked under a dripping branch and found himself at the edge of Cascata da Ribeira dos Caldeirões. The waterfall thundered from a cleft in the basalt, crashing into a churning pool shrouded in perpetual mist. Sunbeams caught in the spray, seeding rainbows across the gorge.
For the first time in ages, Jovias allowed himself a moment of stillness, absorbing the kinetic peace of falling water. He lingered at the edge, letting the mist bead on his face, cooling the scars that latticed his skin. The sound of the falls, a deep, endless exhale, lulled his mind, dusting away thoughts of human wars and celestial grudge-work. Here, at least, the world moved on a different rhythm: a cycle of erosion and renewal older than any memory he carried.
The reverie fractured as Astrid’s voice, powerful, echoed up the gorge. “We are not alone.” The archangel’s smile gained a sharper edge.
Before Jovias could turn, a shape burst from the shadows with the force of an avalanche.
Kyros, immense, red-haired, and trailing the scent of peat and charred wood, descended the bank at a dead run, arms outstretched. Jovias braced, but Kyros crashed into him like a battering ram, enveloping him in a rib-crushing bear hug. His voice was a howl, primal and unfiltered, “Brother!” It ricocheted off the cliffs and came back twice as loud.
Jovias struggled, trying to wedge his elbows between them, but Kyros only squeezed tighter. He sputtered against the cold, wet hair against his neck. Jovias managed a strangled laugh, which Kyros took as encouragement, swinging him around in a circle before finally planting both in the shallows with a monumental splash.
The birds, startled from their mossy perches, exploded into a cacophony of screeches and wingbeats. Ferns and wild azaleas bowed under the spray, and somewhere upstream, a startled goat screamed and bolted from its hiding place. Jovias surfaced first, hair plastered to his brow, ears ringing with the aftermath of Kyros’s war cry and the waterfall’s applause.
Kyros, grinning like a wolf, loomed over him. “You look like a drowned saint, brother.” He raked his hands through his beard, wrung it out with a flourish, and slapped Jovias on the back so hard that he sent him under again.
Astrid, unruffled,** watched, eyes bright with amusement and a small, silent pride.** “I see you two haven’t changed,” he observed, nostalgia ghosting across his face.
Jovias, breathing hard, wiped water from his eyes. The irritation that had blazed at Astrid now felt thin and far away, dissipated by Kyros’s wild energy and the elemental force of the falls. When he finally spoke, his voice came out softer than he meant it to. “It is good to see you, Kyros. Alive and in one piece. Last I heard, you were in the Himalayas, fighting off frost demons and eating yak butter by the kilogram.”
Kyros’s laughter boomed again, but then he grew serious, lowering his voice. “Few left to fight, Jovias. They’re retreating and regrouping. The world is changing again. I thought you could use a friend.” He glanced up at Astrid, then back to Jovias. “Or perhaps a shield.” His tone carried an unspoken history, the kind only exiles shared.
Jovias met Kyros’s gaze, noting the scars on his brother’s forearms, the new ones overlapping the old. He felt the familiar tug: loyalty, affection, the inescapable burden of kinship. “I can always use a friend. But I don’t need a shield,” he said, meaning it, and then added, “Not unless you count Astrid’s transportation methods. That nearly undid me.”
Kyros’s eyes twinkled with mischief. “You always were the delicate one.” He clapped Jovias on the shoulder and gestured to the far bank, where the ground rose in a gentle slope dotted with chestnut trees. “Come, let’s dry off. Astrid brought food, I hope?”
Astrid produced a satchel from nowhere, its contents steaming and fragrant. “You know me too well.” He set out a repast, fresh bread, figs, honey, and cured meats, on a flat rock, every morsel arranged with heavenly precision.
Jovias shook the water from his hair and shucked his wet overshirt, slinging it over a branch. The three of them gathered around the makeshift table, damp and mud-splattered but restored, in their fashion, to something resembling a family. They ate in companionable silence, broken only by the waterfall’s roar and the snap of crusty bread.
Astrid leaned back on his elbows and observed Jovias with a gaze that was both clinical and kind. “You seem troubled,” he said at last, turning the observation into a verdict rather than a question.
Jovias considered deflecting, but the concern in Astrid’s tone, so rarely given, disarmed him. “Europe is on the cusp again,” he admitted. “The mortals have learned nothing. This war will be worse than the last.”
Kyros nodded, grave. “And the others? Our brothers and sisters?”
Jovias let out a long, slow exhale. “Scattered, as always.” He looked at the horizon, where clouds massed over the Atlantic, gray as gunmetal. “I’m not sure we’ll be enough this time.”
The words hung in the air, leaden with prophecy. For a moment, none of them spoke. Then Kyros shook his head, water droplets flying. “We will be what we have always been: present. That is enough, brother.”
Astrid stood, stretching his wings to their full, dazzling span. “There is another reason for your summons, Jovias. The archangels are convening. Your presence is required.” His tone demanded agreement, and a sober sadness threaded through it, as if he already knew the cost.
Jovias didn’t spring up. He looked at Kyros, who gripped his forearm in the old warrior’s handshake. “If you go, I go,” Kyros declared. “That is the pact.”
Jovias managed a weary smile. “You never could say no to me.”
Kyros grinned, unrepentant. “No, brother. And I never will.”
Together, they ascended the path, Astrid leading, the other two steps behind. The future roared in the distance, as inevitable as the waterfall below. Still, for a few more minutes, Jovias let himself savor the present: the solid weight of Kyros at his side, the echo of laughter in a world on the brink.
At the summit, with the clouds swirling and the wind keening in thin, cutting threads, Jovias turned to Kyros and loosened himself from the other’s ironclad grip. “Brother. I am glad to see you too.” He spoke in hushed tones, with sincerity and command woven together. “But please lower me.”
Kyros released his hold, and Jovias felt the air rush back into his lungs, as if the embrace had both emptied and refilled him. The Viking’s mighty hands hovered, uncertain, then found purchase on Jovias’s shoulders, shaking him for any sign of fracture or fakery, his grin exposing the full wolfishness that had once terrified mortals on a dozen continents. The look they traded was brief but heavy with centuries, wars survived, brothers buried, exile endured.
Jovias wiped droplets from his brow, feeling the cold water trickle down his spine, and turned from Kyros toward the lake’s edge, where the pale shimmer of Angelica’s hair caught the dappled sunlight. She stood apart, arms crossed, a study in defensive grace, as if the long centuries had left her untouched by age but not by wariness. The breeze caught her hair, sending strands floating across her luminous face, and she twined them between her fingers, an old, mortal tic she’d never shaken.
“Jovias.” Her voice was peaceful, a simple note.
He approached, hesitated, then reached out to place a hand on her shoulder, only to be met with an arched look and a practiced sidestep. “Do not touch me; you’re soaked,” she protested, batting away his hand with one of her own while never quite suppressing a smile. But when he persisted, drawing her into an embrace as inevitable as the tides, her resistance melted. For a moment, they held each other in the open, their shadows elongated by the sun’s descent, two exiles stitched back together for a breath of time.
“I missed you, brother,” she whispered. “We have much to discuss.”
Jovias laughed, softening. “And so little time, it seems,” he replied, squeezing her gently before letting go.
Angelica’s eyes sparkled with traces of ancient sunlight. “You always say that, and then you vanish for decades.”
He shrugged, feigning innocence. “I am now a man with many habits.”
She flicked his nose, a gesture both maternal and mocking. “You are a man of disappearances.”
Kyros, ever the audience, hooted from a perch atop a mossy boulder. “You see? He cannot help himself, Angelica. If you chained him to the seabed, he’d find a way to wander.”
From above, Astrid looked on with the glimmering patience of a timekeeper, wings tucked close against his form. If he resented the delays of mortal affection, he did not show it; instead, his eyes followed every gesture, every reunion, cataloguing the unspoken, the unshed.
Angelica tugged Jovias towards the water’s edge, where the spray danced like powdered glass above the slick stones. “You look tired,” she observed, a physician’s concern underlying her words.
“Better than the alternative,” he replied, though he understood the depth behind her observation. Immortality, he knew, did not spare anyone from exhaustion; it only stretched it out.
They fell into a peaceful silence, the kind that needed no narrative, and watched as the water tumbled down the basalt face in a ceaseless arc. On the far side of the pool, Kyros skipped stones across the surface, each throw timed to the rhythm of the falls. Astrid, for his part, busied himself with clearing a patch of ground for their gathering, sweeping away pine needles and arranging stones with the geometric precision of ritual.
Soon, the four of them assembled around Astrid’s impromptu altar. The archangel kneeled with folded hands, waiting for the others. Jovias, Angelica, and Kyros formed a triad opposite him, uneasy but resolute.
Astrid’s gaze landed first on Jovias, then slid to Angelica and Kyros. “You know why I have convened you,” he said, his voice warm yet charged. “The world tilts toward another darkness. The tremors are everywhere.”
Kyros grunts. “Always darkness. Always tremors. Nothing new.”
Astrid shook his head, impatience flickering at the edges of his aura. “Not the same. The veil is thin. Old powers stir where even the Seven cannot reach.”
“You mean Belial,” Angelica said.
Astrid nodded. “He has returned. And he is not alone. Others gather in secret. The signs are in the blood and the soil.”
Jovias crossed his arms. “And Michael? What does he say of this?”
Astrid’s expression tightened. “Michael does not concern himself with the exiled. He sent me as a courtesy. But Belial’s awakening is urgent.”
Kyros spat into the grass. “Michael always sends others. Never comes himself. Coward!”
Angelica shot him a warning look, but Astrid only smiled, a smile edged sharp as a blade.
“You speak of courage from the safety of exile.”
Kyros surged to his feet. “I’ve kneeled before your kind. Never again.”
Jovias steadied him with a hand. “Let him speak.”
Astrid studied Jovias for a moment. “The plan is simple. You must gather the Seven. Belial’s return will draw fallen and damned alike. Violence already rises. You are to be the bulwark.”
“A bulwark with no sanction, no support, no reward,” Angelica muttered.
“You will do what you have always done,” Astrid replies. “What is necessary? Heaven has never rewarded you, anyway. Or will you wait for mortals to save themselves?”
Jovias’s jaw tightened. “We’ll do what must be done. But not for Michael. And not for you.”
Astrid’s eyes narrowed; his beauty turned razor sharp. “You misunderstand. I am not asking. I am warning.”
Kyros grinned. “Then warn. Where do we start?”
Astrid’s wings flared, scattering motes of light. “Barcelona. The city is a nexus. The old basilica still stands. Begin there.”
Jovias nodded. “We go at sunrise.”
Astrid shook his head. “You will go now.”
As he rose, the air trembled. “Time is not on your side. Or mine.”
Angelica stood, dusting off her skirt. “Then we begin together.”
Jovias squeezed her hand. Facing Kyros, he muttered, “Try not to drown anyone this time.”
Kyros chuckled. “No promises.”
They descended the mountain, waterfalls echoing behind them. The path steepened; the forest pressed close, as if resisting their passage. Jovias led. Angelica walked beside him.
Kyros and Astrid followed at a wary distance.
On the valley floor, the stones hummed beneath their feet, as if remembering them.
By the time they reached the waystation, a collapsed stone outbuilding choked with rosemary and fennel, the sky had turned the color of hammered lead.
Inside, the four crowded together. Faded mosaic fragments clung to the walls, ghosts of a celestial story long lost. Jovias traced the broken ridges.
Kyros folded his arms. “So. Belial’s back, and we’re supposed to stop him. Anyone knows how?”
Angelica looked at Astrid. Astrid shook his head. “If I knew, I wouldn’t send you.”
Jovias lingered in a nod. “Then we start by gathering the rest of the Seven. Scattered, yes, but reachable. Belial gathers, so must we.”
“Who first?” Kyros asked.
“Galal,” Jovias said. “He knows the old ways. And he’s dangerous enough to matter.”
Angelica shivered. “Barcelona, then.”
Astrid’s wings flared, ember-bright. “No. This task is yours alone. A guide waits in Cairo.”
“We demand our brethren accompany us,” Jovias snapped. He thought to himself, Why did Michael insist on dividing them? What fear did he hide?
Kyros and Angelica stepped beside him, unyielding.
Astrid’s gaze hardened. “You know your sins. You know the cost of your cowardice. Your complacency nearly destroyed them. Yet the Lord showed mercy, and Michael fulfilled His command.”
Jovias barked a bitter laugh. “How dare he?”
A blinding radiance tore through the sky. The earth convulsed beneath them. Astrid braced; Jovias crashed forward; Kyros dropped to one knee; Angelica staggered, spine arched until she steadied herself.
A figure descended through the blaze, divine wrath given form.
Michael landed, wings razoring the trees. His armor blazed with solar fury. In his gauntleted hand, a broadsword of molten brilliance pointed at Jovias.
“Dare you question the Lord?” The words struck with a physical force. Jovias covered his ears, fighting the impact. The voice boomed once more. “Your defiance is blasphemy!”
Jovias staggered. “I’m not questioning the Lord. I’m questioning you!” Kyros and Angelica stepped beside him, standing in united defiance.
Michael plunged his sword into the earth with a ringing crack. The earth split; the crack moved towards the three. Michael demanded, “And you two, do you echo this?”
Kyros and Angelica didn’t waver.
Jovias’s voice broke open, raw with ages of bitterness. “We obeyed. We pledged loyalty. And still we’re exiled for centuries, scattered across worlds that aren’t ours. How long must we pay for the same sins?”
Michael froze them. “Your failures cast you down. But that ends now. The true war approaches. If you insist, you will reunite, and together you will face Belial.”
Before Jovias could speak, Michael’s wings exploded outward. A shockwave threw them back; light seared their vision. When it faded, Astrid hovered where he had stood.
His voice rolled like distant thunder. “Go to Cairo. See what Belial builds. Stand firm.”
Angelica’s voice quivered. “And the others?”
“The others will meet you three,” Astrid intoned, each word a shard of ice. “But you will meet an ally there. Mortal? Yes. Someone who sees the cracks between worlds better than angels do. She’ll guide you… and remind you of what you’ve lost.”
With that, Astrid’s gray wings swept upward, trailing motes of embers. He lifted off, swallowed by the storm-churned sky, a quieter departure than Michael’s, but somehow heavier, as though he carried the storm with him.
For a long moment, none of them spoke.
Kyros pushed himself upright, chest heaving. “I will meet you in Cairo.” His tone was hollow.
“I have… matters to resolve first.”
He turned away, his footsteps absorbed by the forest’s unnatural hush. A cold dread coiled in his gut, a whisper of something ancient tugging at the edges of his mind. Something he dared not name.
“Kyros!” Jovias called after him, urgency cracking through his composure. “Are you alright?”
Kyros didn’t answer, only lifted one shoulder in a distant shrug before disappearing into the gathering shadows. The forest closed behind him like a mouth.
Angelica stepped closer to Jovias, brushing her lips against his cheek, a rare gesture of tenderness between warriors who had long forgotten softness. “I’ll join you soon, brother,” she whispered, determination trembling in her voice. “And Kyros… he’ll come. He always does. Storms follow him, but they never keep him.”
She slipped after her brother, swallowed by the dense, foreboding forest.
Jovias stood alone beneath the bruised sky, the scent of rain thick in the air. He pondered.
Cairo.**
Belial.
A mortal guide.
And now, this uneasy, forced fracture between his siblings.
He sighed, the weight of leadership pressing into his bones once more. “Then Cairo it is,” he murmured and stepped into the descending storm.