Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“Here and there over two centuries.” Aodhan pulled one off the pile. “It was almost a compulsion for the first century. Then it became a way to try to understand my own scars.” He placed the canvas on the ground, face up.
Agony seared Illium.
It was a self-portrait of Aodhan as he’d been when they’d found him, his body emaciated, his face hollow, his eyes devoid of the light that was Illium’s Adi. And his wings…Illium wanted to fold over in anguish, only stayed upright because Aodhan was looking at the painting with an expression of interest but no pain.
Almost as if he was examining someone else’s work.
“I never saw you do these,” Illium whispered.
“I never did them when you were near.” Aodhan spread his wing over Illium’s in a sweep of heavy warmth. “It was my secret thing for a long time, a kind of inner flagellation to punish myself for having been so naïve.”
Illium struggled not to interrupt; he hated Aodhan talking about himself that way, but this was the past, unchangeable even by the Cadre.
“I did eventually tell Eh-ma—and even lost as she was then, she never revealed my secret. Instead, she used to sit there sketching while I painted feverishly, then she’d critique my work.”
He chuckled. “Took me a pitifully long time to work out that it was her way of taking the emotion out of it. She turned an act of anguish and rage into a thing mundane.” He pointed at his own painted face. “I think on this one, she told me I got the cheekbone shading wrong because I was working too fast.”
Illium loved his mother, adored her for being kind and generous and a loving pair of arms all his life. Today, he found himself aching to hold her tight, make sure she knew how important she was to him, to Aodhan, to the world.
“I’m glad you showed someone.” His eyes felt gritty, his emotions hard and brittle. “Are they all…”
“Like this?” Aodhan shook his head. “But there are only three variations. It’s either me, the box, or this.” He dug through the pile to show Illium a painting so black that that was all it appeared to be at first glance. A square of nothingness.
But a closer look and he began to see the screaming faces hidden within.
A horrifying vision of nightmare.
“The inside of my brain,” Aodhan said in a pragmatic tone. “Once.” Raising Illium’s hand to his mouth, he pressed a kiss to his knuckles, that beautiful starlight hair falling over his forehead as he did so.
“I know it’s a shock to see these, but I wanted you to before I destroy them all. I haven’t done one for the last three or so decades, but I couldn’t let go of them. To the extent that I boxed them up before I first left the Refuge, and every so often I’d ask the stronghold staff there to ship me a few boxes. No pattern to it, a way to keep from drawing attention.”
A noxious secret, Illium thought, a shadow Aodhan hated but couldn’t shrug off.
“Now, at last”—Aodhan took another canvas, scowled, dropped it atop the others he’d shown Illium—“I feel nothing when I look at them except annoyance that I was working so fast that I did nothing close to my best work. Eh-ma was right about the cheekbones on that first one. And this one, the definition’s awful. It’s fit only for the rubbish heap, all of it.”
Illium swallowed hard, his hands in brutal fists. “I feel like I should be a good citizen of the world and stop you, tell you this is a priceless collection of work for all that you’re able to find flaws with it, but fuck that. I want to burn it to cinders.” It was a physical representation of Aodhan’s pain, and Illium hated its very existence.
His hand glowed with power. “Can I do it now?”
“Blue, you’ll blow up the building,” Aodhan chided, his eyes flicking to Illium’s wings. “Especially when you’re glowing like that.”
For once, Illium didn’t care about the lingering symptom of archangelic power that wasn’t his, would never be his if he had his way. “How else are we going to do it?” He wasn’t leaving until he’d erased this pile of hurt and terror from existence.
“I never really thought about it.” Aodhan rubbed his jaw, scanned the piles. “I threw away all the boxes after I laid out the canvases, so we don’t have those to reuse.”
Illium’s rage was fuel for his brain. “I’ll get someone to drive a large truck here, and we’ll load up every last canvas, take them out to a remote location, and have the bonfire of all bonfires.”
It was Dmitri he decided to ask to drive the truck—because Dmitri had been there when they brought Aodhan home, Dmitri knew all of it, and he had no wings that made driving a truck awkward at best.