Fallen Angel's Harem in the Abyss

"A cloister," he said, his smile tired, distant, his silver-gray eyes shimmering.

"A little open walk behind the choir halls. The marble was warmer there. The wind made the bells hum if you stood very still. I used to."

Sylvara tilted her head, her crimson leaves rustling. "Stand still?"

"Listen," he said, drawing a curve where a bell hung. "The bells were too clean inside. Out here, everything rings… with edges. There, it was… hollow and perfect. Lonely, but not cruel."

"You miss it," she said, not a question, her amber eyes steady.

"Some parts," he admitted, his voice soft. "The parts that felt like listening."

A small bulb opened on her wrist, as if to hear him better. "And the names?" she asked, nodding to the scratches along the arch.

Azareel's hand paused, his silver eyes distant.

"People," he said. "Small ones. Old ones. A woman who brought bread, always too hard. A man who sang badly, thought no one noticed. A… boy who asked if falling hurt." His smile was rueful, impossibly gentle.

"I told him I didn't know. Now I do."

Silence gathered around the words the way dew gathers along leaf edges—quiet, inevitable.

Azareel's hand paused over the leaf-woven seat Sylvara had shaped for them, the arch he'd drawn holding its breath, a thin curve of memory suspended in a den that did not believe in curves for beauty's sake.

The deeper Abyss pressed close as ever—no dawn, no dusk, only that heavy, mineral night—but the little garden glowed with a berry-soft warmth, as if it wanted to be the part of the world that listened.

Sylvara watched his hand, her amber eyes patient as years spent waiting for rain that never came, her root-like toes slipping deeper into the stone's fractures, her pale gold skin threaded with glowing sap veins, her crimson vine-like hair swaying faintly.

Above, a thread of pale fungus dimmed and brightened on a slow pulse, as if trying to match a heartbeat it had never heard.

"Hard bread," she murmured, tasting the phrase like a fruit she wasn't sure was ripe, her voice a melodic whisper that carried the weight of lost groves. "She brought it to you because it was the thing she could give."

"Yes," Azareel said, his silver-gray eyes, flecked with rain-blue, distant with memory, his torn white tunic catching the faint glow of the fungus. "It was always more crust than bread. But she held it like a gift that might save us both."

"And the boy who asked about falling," Sylvara said softly, her crimson leaves rustling, her amber eyes steady with empathy. "Was he afraid for you?"

"I think he wanted to know if the world ends all at once, or little by little," Azareel answered, his voice gentle, carrying the quiet ache of truth. "How to be brave, if it hurts."

"The world ends slowly," Sylvara said, her voice too soft, her amber eyes shimmering with a private pain. "And then all at once. The mouth remembers this."

A flicker crossed her face; she corrected herself with a faint smile, her petals trembling. "I remember this."

She lifted one palm, a slender vine rising like a vein, hovering over his drawing, tracing the arch a finger's breadth above the chalk, trembling once as seeds swelled and stilled, unsure of the darkness's permission.

"You draw places that held you," she said, her voice a melodic hum, her crimson leaves curling faintly. "Not people. Not faces, not hands. The benches, the bells, the arch. The bowl of air that pretended to be water."

Azareel looked up at her in quiet surprise, his silver eyes sparkling.

"You noticed," he said, his voice soft, touched by her perception.

"I am a garden, Azareel," she replied, a ghost of humor curving her mouth, her amber eyes glinting. "I notice where people sit. Where they hide. Where they leave the parts of themselves they cannot carry."

Across the den, Zathra—absolutely not listening—rearranged a precarious tower of skulls with the over-serious concentration of a child daring gravity to blink first, her sun-kissed skin marked by faint scale patterns, her white-blonde hair messy and streaked, her torn shorts and oversized hunting jacket shifting as she moved.

A bleached jawbone clicked, swayed, settled, her small reptilian tail flicking with satisfaction before she caught herself and scowled at nothing, her red-orange eyes darting away to hide her interest.

Azareel traced a second, smaller arch within the first, his chalky shale moving with care.

"When things were loud, I used to stand under it and pretend the sound was just wind," he said, his voice soft, carrying the weight of a distant memory.

Sylvara's smile bent at the edges, her amber eyes softening with a quiet ache.

"Did the wind believe you?" she asked, her crimson leaves rustling faintly.

"Sometimes," he said, his silver eyes distant. "Sometimes I did."

A long vine looped his wrist—polite, asking instead of taking, its touch warm and grounding.

He let it, as he always did, the contact sparking a faint glow under Sylvara's bark, sap warming like sunlight through leaves.

"You feel warm," Azareel said, simple as naming a color, his voice gentle, never calling her beautiful or dangerous, only gentle, as when her thorns had once sought to drain him, and he'd hummed, her leaves blooming out of season in confusion.

"I wasn't always in the dark," she said, her voice thin as parchment pulled too far, trembling with the weight of memory.

"There was a line where the wild kissed the divine. We grew along it—my sisters and I. The sun came through there differently. It didn't ask us to worship it, and it didn't break us for forgetting to." Her smile went soft, then crooked, her amber eyes glistening.

"Mortals found it. They brought knives and prayers and hunger with no shame. I begged them to eat fruit, to leave the trunks, to lay down for shade and not for altars." Her voice cracked faintly.

"They thanked me. Then they carved names into bark that bled."

The bulbs along her arms tightened into little fists, her crimson leaves trembling like eyelids.

Azareel did not call the mortals monsters or her vengeance pure, did not turn her story into a lesson.

He listened with his face, open and sheltering, his silver eyes steady, a quiet haven in the Abyss's hunger.

"When I devoured them," she said, plain and unsparing, her voice raw, "I thought I was choosing life. My roots broke the earth and the earth chose the Abyss for me." Her vines drifted, trembling like fragile memories.

"Down here, everything is a mouth or a memory. Often both."

Azareel's fingers—freed of chalk dust by habit—closed gently over the vine at his wrist, warming where hunger turned away for a breath.

"You grew anyway," he said, his silver eyes unwavering, his voice a quiet anchor.

"I kept blooming," she said, a small laugh escaping, cracked like glass but truer for it. "It's not the same."

"No," he said, his voice gentle but resolute. "But you keep making places to sit."

"It is easier to devour what comes to sit," she said, honest to the bone, her amber eyes flickering with a private ache.

Then, softer.

"And harder. The mouth remembers… the grove." She shook her head, rueful. "I talk about them like they are roots still touching mine. They are not. I know this. And sometimes I don't."

Azareel did not lower his eyes.

"I tend your roots when you lie still," he said, confessing a small, sweet crime, his voice soft. "Not to wake you. To keep you."

"I know," she said, fragile and proud, her amber eyes shimmering.

The garden responded—leaves lifting as if something under the stone remembered how to breathe.

In the corner where rock met scaled hide, lantern-moths—glassy, sparking—trembled from a crack, sketching slow circles in the stale air, their light dotting Azareel's hair like borrowed constellations.

He looked, for a blink, like a statue of a boy forgotten but found, divine yet soft in the Abyss's dark.

Sylvara watched the light move across his face, jealous need wilting her vines, tightening, then loosening, ashamed of asking.

He rescued her shame without naming it.

"You were right," he said, turning his hand to cup hers where bark smoothed to skin, his touch warm and grounding. "You notice where people hide."

She felt something ease in her chest—no dramatic breaking, nothing neat. A knot relaxing by a finger-width.

Enough to let in a sliver of good air.

"Nyxsha hunts alone because pride makes a bowl that can't be filled," Sylvara said after a time, not as judgment but as weather, her voice a melodic whisper, her amber eyes soft as she watched Azareel's chalk pause over the leaf-woven seat.

"Virelya follows because empty things echo. Zathra stacks bones into towers so they don't feel like graves." Her eyes lowered to their hands, her crimson vine-like hair rustling faintly, her pale gold skin threaded with glowing sap veins.

"I make chairs and call them traps."