divine punishment

Few people visit Iqariel, these days. An angel roosting in the city was a novelty once, an attraction, a cause for pilgrimage. When she trod the streets, crowds lined them, stared, threw armfuls of flower petals before her feet.

Perhaps the way it made her weep eventually dissuaded them, or the simple turn of time, religious fashions deemphasising the mania for her kind as heralds of divinity in favour of more personal contemplation, or less intermediated pleas. Perhaps it's the ever-increasing number of her feathers which come through less than pearly white, doubts manifest.

She sighs wearily at the knock. An archivist or historian, perhaps; some ambitious new church official, whose cap would be feathered if she could be persuaded to attend his inaugural sermon in the city's great catherdral. Someone with something to gain from trudging to the spiralling peak of this overlooking rock spire, with its ancient anchorites' cells cut into rock, from knocking on the door she fashioned with her own hands from wood she cut from a tree she grew from seed, in her long, tired contemplations here.

She opens the door, and gasps.

After knocking, Anaglyptha has taken several steps back, and turned away a little. Tall, broad-shouldered, goat-horned. She smells of burnt sugar, gleams as she moves with the occulted fire of a burned-down log.

"Oh," Iqariel breathes, gripping the door's edge dizzily. "I — it's been a long time. After last time, I thought — you were done with me."

The demon's hands clench, shoulders knotting. Her face screws up, unhappy, in ways Iqariel doesn't quite dare to interpret.

Eventually, she just shakes her head.

Iqariel steps cautiously outside the threshold of her home, as if approching a wild animal that might flee. "May I..." she lingers over what she even wants to ask. "May I embrace you?"

Anaglyptha shakes her head, unhesitating, hunching over an age-old combination of longing and self-loathing. The angel clears her throat.

"Will you come in?" she asks gently.

The quiet close of the door behind them makes the demon flinch, as though it's the closing of a binding circle. Iqariel leans back against the wood, palms flat against it, feeling the grain on the skin of her hands. She breathes deep.

"Say what you want," she says, with a firmness she cannot feel. They both know why the demon is here, why she ever came; but Iqariel needs — she needs — the only way to make the demon talk is to make tearing the words out of herself part of the punishment she wants.

Silently, Anaglyptha pads to the wooden chest in which the angel keeps her few material possessions. Fetches and, hands shaking, arrays for her approval the scratchy bristle of tough rope; candles; blessed silver athame.

Iqariel's hands ache to touch her hair. "With words," she says, and watches the demon twist on the self-inflicted impaling pain of it for long minutes.

The rope holds the demon in a tense arch, and for a timeless while Iqariel gently warms the both of them with just the slow trail of fingernails, until Anaglyptha is slowly, continuously moving, a restless snake of flesh, bonds creaking.

"Iqariel," she half-sobs, eventually, and the angel sighs warmly against her nape.

"There you are," she murmurs, and applies teeth to the crook of the demon's neck.

"That's—" Anaglyptha is quivering, wax-streaked, voice unsteady, but daring a note of defiance. "That's not even sharp."

"Mm," Iqariel agrees, eyes half-closed, slowly drawing the blade across unbreaking skin, leaving no more than a transient red line. It's only when she finishes the swash — a common lay sigil, the weakest of human folk blessings — that the demon bucks and squeaks.

"Ah, ah, ah—"

"You're so beautiful," Iqariel says softly, and tilts weight onto her knee, cushioned atop flesh, pinning the demon still to the floor, and dips the athame against her to begin another glyph.

Iqariel built her three-legged stool herself, a simple round slice of trunk bored with three holes for legs, hewn from straight limbs, to be driven in. The legs have been firmly wedged for countless years; after a moment's contemplation, she strikes with the side of her hand, simply shearing one off.

Anaglyptha whines unhappily at the damage, at the cause, which she inevitably attributes to herself.

Iqariel carefully, methodically uses the removed leg to beat more noise from her, until it's only the wails of mindless sensation.

"Say something good about yourself."

The demon flinches and tries to shake her head. Iqariel leans more firmly on the curve of horn beneath her heel, looks across the expanse of skin spread across the stone floor of her cell.

"When you refuse to see the beauty in yourself, it makes me weep," she says, with cruel sorrow. It's true; a droplet trembles on her lashes.

She catches it on her fingertip, salt and holy; flicks it onto the demon's twitching abs to crackle and smoke and wrench a long, gutteral noise from behind clenched teeth.

"Say something good about yourself," Iqariel says pitilessly.

(Eventually — eventually — Anaglyptha responds to the demand by deliriously slurring, "I love you.")

For a long while, the demon drifts back to herself, wound carefully in blankets and wedged atop the angel's simple cot, tucked beneath Iqariel's chin and soothed by the gentle, steady stroke of her hand.

Her own hand creeps out, finally, to tremblingly touch feathers; marking out with fingertips those newly tarnished, since their last meeting.

"I'm weak," she says, a hoarse whisper. "I can't stop myself from weighing on you."

"Those are not because of you," the angel says gently.

"You're constant," the demon says. "You watch here through the ages, and I corrode you—"

Iqariel gently takes her chin, directs her gaze instead to where her own skin is kissed by drifts of tiny scales; the angel maps, in turn, each one recently edged in gold instead of black.

"It's not strength," she says. "I'm here because it's where you know to find me. And I will always meet you in the middle."

"Don't," Anaglyptha says, and turns her face, into soft skin.

"Ana—"

"Don't, Quarrel."

"I love you, too."

The demon nods infinitesimally. "I know," she mouths, silent but tactile against flesh.