Soon

My time with my apprentice was fast approaching, yet I lingered, not from duty, but from memory. Angels are granted eternity, and still I circle back to this place again and again. I only wish the land were more forgiving. The stones, as always, remember me with vivid candor, and I, fool that I am, give them audience. Their retort shifts my attention from fond nostalgia to something sharper. In my silence, they insist on admiration, on being the focus of attention. They seem determined to recruit me into “rock care.” Honestly, I’ve often been tempted to grind the larger stones into pebbles, just to learn whether the smaller ones are any less opinionated.

Still, I return to this place, where an altar lies dormant, half-buried by earth, storms, and bombs, left asunder. Not for answers, but for the silence between them. It is not explanation I seek here, only quiet. The impulse to ask why rises, as it always does, but I set it aside. That is how angels endure. We work. We obey. And occasionally, we are granted time to rest. A recent concession, perhaps meant to keep more of us from straying beyond the circle we pretend not to see.

My good friend Salina often says that all an angel needs is peace and quiet, the kind the stones themselves refuse to allow me. Salina says it simply, without claim or ceremony, and I accept it without hesitation. But what am I without my deeds? Peace and quiet without achieving the goal of my creator seems disconcerting.

Jehovah, as you might suspect, keeps a perfect account: a flawless ledger of deeds and words, unblinking and unwavering. Essence responds differently. Not by tally, but by presence itself. Not merely decisions or outcomes, nor the sum of predispositions shaped by flesh and circumstance. It attends to the quiet heat beneath a pot, coals glowing in silence, simmering meaning the gods, in all their clamor, often overlook.

We Celestials like to pretend that sentiment lies beneath us. Yet one memory clings to me: Bubbe. The grandmother of my charge, the mortal who ruled her cramped kitchen as if it were the axis on which the universe spun. She wielded her wooden spoon like a scepter, and heaven help the casserole, or child, that dared to simmer out of line. Her voice was prayer, complaint, and lullaby, each syllable thick as broth, salted with love. She spoke not like a culinary historian, but like a warrior invoking flavor with command, as if fear itself could season the future.

Her footsteps are gone, but her rhythm lingers in steaming bowls and in gestures passed down like a favored seasoning. Bubbe shaped time with soup, song, and care. Even her stories were seasoning, sharp on the tongue, still stirring the broth of those who came after. Bubbe always knew the right measure.

From the outside, life here seems unchanged: chimney smoke curling, kettles boiling at dawn, prayers rising into the mist like steam from a broth that never leaves the fire. But look closer. The spirits of Mondansk are never still. Every act in the physical world, whether mending, kneeling, or stirring, becomes a quiet form of defiance, a thread of resistance woven into the fabric of the ordinary. Ethereal forms gather around a pot simmering with scraps and herbs, never elegant, but always rich with possibility.

The spirits of nature move with pride, defying any mortal who would oppose them. Trees, plants, and the sea, when cleared or corralled, return, often stronger. The spirits of the dead remain indifferent, while the magical ones act without rhyme or reason, their auras shifting like waves with every passing mood. Some are wantonly destructive, manifestations of past lives or the caldrens that torment the spirits. And still, the dust, the discarded debris of the universe, drifts through the sunlight, refusing acknowledgment or burial. Bubbe measured all of it in her proportions.

These spirits reside in our stories and rebuke us like stubborn spices in soup, some settling quietly to the bottom, others rising unbidden, sharp on the tongue no matter how the cook intended the broth. They inspire tales mortals would rather bury, stubborn in their ways, refusing to be governed by measure.

A figure slips through Rosocova’s quiet lanes, half-shadow, half-story, all legend. For once, the legends are mostly true. Children whisper them with wide eyes, unaware of their accuracy. She serves under my command now: a warrior tested in both bone and heart.

Violence forged her strength, but her gentleness, and her instinct for understanding what moves a mind, are just as true. As with all under my care, her thoughts are open to me. But consent, I still honor. A world without it crumbles faster than bryndza sprinkled over potato dumplings. That principle alone brings me here today. I am evaluating her effectiveness to train others.

Her crimson-and-emerald duster trails over black leather, its folds creased by the mountain wind. Her steps carry no sound, only intention. In a single breath, she scales the clock tower and slips into its shadow. Her eyes gleam, sharp and searching. I have seen them in battle, narrowing when mercy wavers.

To the shepherd below, she was a black-winged phantom. To the child in the attic, a woman woven of wind. To the spirits curled in the beams, something older, unnamed, yet familiar.

From her perch, Lakita surveys the village. Her feathers shimmer as she takes the eagle’s form. Her breath slows. Her focus sharpens. She senses the domovyk in the rafters; I feel it as well, curled in the grain of the timber. Near the top of the stair lies a recess, once a shrine, now only a hollow where forgotten secrets gather dust.

She lingers, as if listening to a memory that never finished telling itself. A crow slices through the silence. The wind shifts, carrying hints of cinnamon bark and old linen, the same scent that once clung to her grandmother’s kitchen. Lakita closes her eyes and whispers, “Bubbe.”

I have kept that memory for her: Bubbe’s hands, cracked and steady, smoothing honey into a chipped bowl of milk. The air, thick with fennel and beeswax, wrapped the room like a spell disguised as supper. Bubbe, gray and stooped, asked for little: respect, warm bread. But her milk and honey meant protection, a promise folded into sweetness.

In the hush between breath and recognition, the grand bird, vast, sun-forged, sovereign of the air, folded its wings not in descent, but in something like surrender. Light tore through its form, each feather flaring with Essence, scattering into color.

Green streamed first: the hue of renewal.

Red followed, a pulse of will.

Blue came last, unfurling like memory returning home.

Within that cascade, the body bent, reshaped, and remembered a form it had once known.

When the brilliance faded, Lakita stood before me. Human again. Dragon boots gleaming with brilliant teeth, her eyes still carrying sky. Her gown clung like mist to flame, sheer folds rippling with the ghost of flight, her hair trailing wind. I felt the echo of wings in the fabric’s sway.

And though the air had calmed, every current in creation still remembered her passage.

She moved without haste.

Placed a heel of rye into a bowl.

Drizzled honey along the spoon’s edge.

Lit a stub of beeswax.

Her eyes darkened with resolve. Her voice rose into a singsong learned at Bubbe’s knee:

“Domu, tayere, guter shayner:

Bend the boards, sweep the air.

In this house, no foot shall falter,

No grief shall cling to chair or stair…”

She finishes with care, blows out the candle with a kiss, and turns three times sunwise. Bubbe’s way. “So the little one doesn’t get dizzy,” she murmurs, almost smiling.

Child’s logic. Grandmother’s spell. A thread that once held the world in place.

Inheritances are rarely clean. Some pass by blood. Some by memory. All pass through trembling hands.

Even those made of honey and warm milk leave marks that do not fade.

Silence settles over the tower. I note it, as I do everything. Smoke from the candle rises, swirling into a crosscurrent she has not noticed. Her body stills—not in pain, but in something else. Passage. Opening. A shift. A hush, then—a flutter. An owl’s wings.

Such changes always announce themselves in scent: cinnamon, sage, salt, smoke. Unless the shapeshifter has learned to mask it, as Lakita has mastered, oh so well. The signal stirs when a soul brushes against what it once was, or dares to become what it might yet be. It is time, then, to descend from my vantage and meet her at the tower.

The folds of her coat lifted, caught by a gentle breeze, as if a breath were rising from the very stones beneath her feet. Lakita slipped between presence and absence, between aetheris and watcher. Controllers, those like her, often straddle the space between carbon and the astral plane, the in-betweens. I traced her arc as she carved through the pale morning sky, silent, certain, a bridge between waking and whatever waits beyond the Veil.

At that moment, Camille’s voice came as a whisper, quiet yet insistent. One of the angels assigned to me had passed along reports of unusual occurrences, the sort that belonged more to myth than any earthly ledger. And yet, unbelievably, they had found their way into the police blotter. What struck me as most peculiar was not just the content of the reports, but the fact they seemed to point directly to my student, though they never named her. They spoke only of her disguises.

Three mortals had witnessed something, and their accounts were no less surreal for it. A farmer swore he had seen an owl blink at him with human eyes, his voice thick with disbelief as he recounted the moment. A baker’s wife dreamt of a feather left delicately on her windowsill, as if some unseen hand had placed it there for her to find. A shepherd, crossing himself twice with muttered prayers, claimed to have seen a spirit pass through the air, silent, swift, unmistakable.

The most curious report came from a boy, years away from earning his detective shield, yet already practicing authority. He claimed to have seen a woman cloaked in smoke through a pane of glass. His blinking contraption, the kind mortals trust to guard their homes, captured nothing but a smear of red and gold. Machines, after all, rarely keep pace with miracles.

This is the nature of Lakita’s passage: real, but elusive. Seen, but never held. I laughed when a child pointed skyward and cried, “Look, Bubbe’s bird!” only to forget why she had said it. The old man beside her simply nodded and finished his prayer: Some things look like birds, but they are not. Amen.

Meanwhile, Essence stirred the air with whispers: ancient, curling like ivy, alive and insistent. My instincts read the pulse of her thoughts: white embers, smoldering quietly, waiting for the breath of something more. Not yet a flame, but a promise, flickering just beneath the surface.

She never shouts. Her presence fills emptiness the way broth fills a bowl: silent, unnoticed, but inevitable. You do not hear her. You feel her. Sometimes, you taste her: subtle, yes, but undeniable, a warmth that seeps into your ribs before your mind can even name the flavor. She settles into the cracks Chaos leaves behind, filling the void like molten gold poured into the jagged fractures of broken stone.

Her whispers have bent the will of kings and steadied the hearts of gods, never loud, but always certain. Never mistaken. When Essence withdraws, Chaos prowls, eager to fill the space she leaves behind, ravenous for the void. Some call her wind. Others call her will. But I have learned not to argue with either. She is both and neither: an enigma that moves where the world does not understand.

This time, Essence had chosen the young woman before my mentee. Her name, Aisha, was spoken by Essence with the finality of a decision long made, without pause or hesitation. Whatever attunement others carried, Aisha did not wear it openly. It was buried beneath layers, like a seed hidden beneath the earth, waiting to be discovered.

Without Lakita’s knowledge, I reached out, attempting to speak into Aisha’s mind, hoping to offer quiet guidance. But the whisper faltered, met with resistance, as if her very soul were a shield. My words would not take root. The moment stretched, the silence between us thickening.

“Guard your balance, not your pride,” I tried again, but it was as though my voice had fallen into a void, heard, but not listened to. And in that moment, I knew: Aisha was no simple subject for guidance. She would need her own space to bend and grow, or break, as the winds of Essence and Chaos would determine.

Lakita’s presence lingered in the space between us, unspoken, yet palpable. She looked toward me, though I remained hidden in the shadows. I could see her shake her head, a soft laugh escaping her lips, like a private joke meant only for herself. Her gaze shifted, crossing the veil between us with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to look. It should have been impossible, but the connection was undeniable. She felt me there, even if she could not see me, and she did not seem bothered in the least. Her indifference stirred something in me. Was it a challenge, or simply the quiet defiance of someone already beyond my reach?

Before I could settle on an answer, Aisha’s voice cut through the moment like a blade, sharp and unyielding: “And if the balance errs?” The words hung in the air, unexpected and raw, a ripple that disturbed the stillness I had come to rely on. For a moment, my certainty faltered. Arrogance? Perhaps. But there was something else in her question: a subtle, insistent hunger, a desire to push against the boundaries of what she was being taught. It reminded me of the early days, before I had learned to silence the doubt that flickered in the corners of my mind. Back then, I had not yet realized that questioning the balance could be dangerous, that challenging the path would come at a cost.

Aisha’s strength seemed to flicker like a flame caught in a gust of wind, erratic and wavering. But it was her resistance that truly held my attention. She did not see the way her will had hardened into armor, nor the way it shielded her from the quiet wisdom that might allow her to grow. I could feel the tension in her, so similar to my own once. The instinct to control, to maintain a perfect balance, even when it was not yet time. But was she ready to dismantle those walls, or would she cling to them, believing they could protect her? The question gnawed at me, deepening the discomfort I already felt.

Stillness. It was what I needed her to find before the storm of her will could tear her apart. Without it, her energy would slip away like steam from an uncovered pot, wasted, diminishing her strength with every unguarded thought.

And yet, Essence had chosen her. And Essence does not err. I had to remind myself of this. Lakita must trust that Aisha has been chosen, even if her path is uncertain. But as I felt the presence of Essence recede, I understood that what would come next belonged to Lakita alone. Her trial, her choices, would shape the moment. It was out of my hands.

By then, Rosocova had shaken off sleep. Morning stretched, golden and cool, across its stones. From her tower, Lakita watched Aisha move through the damp streets, her red skirt tugged by the breeze. Heads turned, some admiring, some wary, most retreating back into silence.

Through spirit-sight, Lakita brushed the edges of the girl’s intent. Beneath her composure, pride stirred, a thrill at being seen. Vanity, soft but persistent, warming like sunlight through glass.

Essence had chosen her, yes. But Lakita’s doubt sharpened. Something in Aisha’s stride rang off-key, like a melody missing its anchor, as if the whole town were holding its breath, waiting.

Admiration glinted, sharp as a blade. Behind it, suspicion coiled: quiet, patient, venomous.

A man walked beside Aisha, the one who had arranged her release. Polite, composed, aching to be seen.

Lakita exhaled, slow and deliberate. The wind shifted.

Then, Essence spoke, not in volume, but in gravity.

Soon.

I hovered just beyond the threshold, embarrassed by my thoughts, mildly amused by the memory: Brahma once mocked me beneath the Tree of Knowledge, muttering to Jehovah:

“Tel is like dusk: too light to hide, too dark for beauty. Older than instruction, and stinking of that stillness even dogs avoid.”

The kindness of the gods lies in their absence: the gods rarely visit, fickle creatures, often rude. Everything is about them. They have learned to let me work. Essence is different. She too comes rarely, but when she arrives, it is always quiet, and only after something has already begun to move.

Humans: erratic, brilliant forms of carbon. Ungrounded, yes, but with agendas, reasons for reason. And I envy them.

They get beginnings. They get endings. They even get tombstones.

If I had one, it would read: TELEL CAME. Not to interfere.

I would be laughing under the ground, watching to see how many lines Lakita would cross out in her attempt to prove her cleverness.

High above the square, Lakita watched with narrowed eyes, sensing Essence in every breath of wind. Her utterances are subtle. Not in sentences, but in currents: a tug at the heart, a tightening in the ribs when paths diverge. Today, that tug rattled even Lakita’s ironclad calm.

Lakita still lights the candle with care, turns three times sunwise, just as Bubbe taught, and murmurs the old words. It’s more muscle memory than catechism now, reverent in a way only the oldest habits can be. I don’t watch for weakness. Even so, Lakita doesn’t falter. But for caution, I nitpick. She’s grown wary of me. Caution isn’t her nature; she moves like certainty in flesh. When she measures her words, I listen.

Essence went one way, Lakita, the other. I paused with disbelief. My feelings pointed toward my investigator. They were unsubstantiated.

It started small: a phrase burnished too smoothly, a protective pattern folded like a secret note into her intent. A question shaped in her cadence: dry as ash, barbed with irony, mischievous with menace. Ikart leaves fingerprints, ones you can’t scrub off. I know. I’ve tried.

My investigator is maddeningly bright: unbearably right most days, insufferable on others. Loving him would be simple. Disliking him, simpler. But truth is rarely simple. Lakita loves him like a familiar thorn; his cynicism shapes doubts she’d otherwise swallow. She calls him “uncle” when defiance needs a disguise. He feeds her answers; I offer silence, questions folded like gifts no one’s sure they want to open. Both appeal. Both wound.

She obeys, burns with purpose. But lately, when I speak of the Council, she listens like a cook tasting half-finished broth, debating whether it needs more time or something harder to name. She chooses what to swallow, what to spit. I note it. Balance, I have learned, is rarely built on trust alone.

She hasn’t crossed that edge yet. But the wind is shifting. If her loyalty bends toward fire instead of form, I won’t chain her. I’ll trust that the training holds and that Ikart’s whispers haven’t smothered what we planted. I mark the moments. My craft is not interference, but witness: to remember, and, when necessary, to hope quietly from the margins.

She’s not lost, but the winds around her new candidate stir. Lakita studies the potential student, Aisha: the tilt of her head, the set of her shoulders, the flicker in her eyes. There’s a spark, the kind Essence named long before Lakita learned to question. She’s seen it in Lakita, too. Promise, mirrored.

But promise is not mastery. A spark alone won’t temper a blade. The girl clings to her story, her will, as if it could carry her beyond flesh and fear. Some are born with spiritual agility braided into them, lightning threaded through bone. Others are remade: flesh rewoven with enchanted gold, shaped by a recipe whispered by Brahma and Sodo. I’ve seen both take shape. Neither comes easy.

So we wait, watching the pot. Testing the broth with a cautious spoon, letting it simmer, stirring gently to see what the heat reveals.

I once had a student named Amy. Young by your standards, maybe twenty, and clever in the way knives are clever: always aware of the soft spots. She asked the kind of questions that stuck in the air long after the conversation ended.

One afternoon, as I shelved a volume unopened since the Fall, she stopped me.

“Why,” she asked, “does no one ever choose demons to help? Aren’t demons just angels who, on average, get more done? Even if we’re ‘angel-first,’ couldn’t we request help from demons too? Might get better results. You know, challenge the angels of our better nature.”

I paused, hand on the cracked leather spine. “You’re right,” I said. “And dangerously perceptive.” I didn’t add that Jehovah would frown at both of us for this conversation.

Ikart, my irrepressible second, just laughed. “Demons don’t get invited to the party,” he said. “But they bring the best wine and save your soul while you’re passed out. Still, no one asks for them by name. Names are politics. Allegiance is the game. Jehovah pointed and labeled, and the rest of us played along. A demon who saves you? You’ll call him an angel. Helps you sleep better.”

Amy squinted. “So… evil is just a matter of branding?”

Ikart shrugged, fighting a grin. “Evil’s just bad press, some days.”

“Not quite,” I said. “There are powers far above me, unshakable in their certainty about right and wrong. They make the decisions. The rest of us… adjust. Even dissenters kneel eventually.”

Ikart added, “Sometimes just a wrist.” He wiggled his fingers.

Amy looked down at her hands, flexing them like they’d been accused of something.

“Ignore him,” I said.

She looked up at me, eyes wide and searching. I wanted to tell her about the demon who wept over a soul dragged from the Pit, or about the wings I scorched for a law I never understood. But some truths come slow. Some burn too hot.

Ikart leaned in, still savoring the moment. “Amy, truth has angles. Morality’s just a costume others picked out for you. We do the work.”

Amy’s brow furrowed. “Are you ever serious?”

Ikart tilted his head, then smiled like a child who’d just stolen a cookie and gotten away with it.

She shook her head and followed me into the deeper shelves. Her silence trailed behind her, not like a grand thought, but like a frayed ribbon someone forgot to tie. Amy never asked questions for power. She asked because she couldn’t settle for an easy answer.

In that, she reminded me of someone else.

Aisha and Lakita share a common trait: impatience. They treat control as a virtue, not a temptation. Patience is my gift, not theirs.

Lakita has always stepped forward, plucking the fruit before it even knew it was ripe. I warned her not to harvest spirit before it ripened. She heard me, but like many who move with urgency, she disagreed. To her, action is clarity; waiting tastes too much like surrender.

Sometimes, she was right. Other times, she lifted the lid too soon and spoiled what the heat might have healed in time.

Now, she watches Aisha, raw, stumbling, yet carrying a thin, bright thread.

Lakita feels the pull to intervene, to force the unfolding. But across the wind, another presence settles into the corner of her spirit: me. I haven’t come to stop her, not yet. I’ve seen what Aisha carries.

Doubt stirs in Lakita’s chest. Essence has never been wrong, not in the long arc I’ve learned to read. Her certainty hums like a clear note cutting through a crowded room. Still, Lakita wonders: can Aisha loosen her self-made walls long enough to hear the deeper rhythm?

Lakita doesn’t fear Essence. She fears herself: her judgment, her quick hands. The world’s opinions carry little weight; it’s her own measure that matters most. She inhales, lets the air settle, and watches Aisha pass through their gaze, unbowed. Resolve begins to harden, tempered like steel beneath a smith’s hammer.

Then, as the wind shifts, Essence whispers a single word, both gift and warning: “Soon.”