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)
It was love, and it was transcendent.
* * *
* * *
Aodhan lay spent and sweat-damp on the soft grass, while Illium leaned over him, stroking his chest and dropping an occasional kiss on his jaw or lips. One of Aodhan’s wings was pinned under his best friend and lover…and Aodhan didn’t care. There was trust, and then there was what he felt for and with Illium.
“You feel like Smoke right now,” Illium said, a smile in his voice. “All drowsy and relaxed.”
Aodhan ran his fingers lazily over Illium’s wing. “She’s going to be mad we didn’t pick her up from Izzy.” Having realized early on what their day was going to entail, they’d asked the young angel to collect her from tech command at the end of the day and make sure she got her dinner.
Izzy had promptly stated his goal of “catnapping” Smoke for the night.
“I’ll buy my way back into her good graces with the special treats I ordered for just such an emergency.” A kiss pressed to Aodhan’s pectoral, Illium’s other wing sweeping over him in a silken blanket before Illium laid his head against Aodhan’s shoulder, turning so that he lay on his back, too.
As they lay there, sated and happy, the dark clouds above began to move.
A cool wind whispered through the trees at the same moment.
The storm was coming, but its leading edge pushed the clouds aside to reveal the stars.
Aodhan smiled even as his body began to glimmer at that far-off hint of light. It felt right, that they should lie here under the stars on this stormy night when his life had begun again in all its facets wild and astonishing.
Today
31
No one had ever described ascension to Illium. In truth, he’d never thought to ask. It had seemed self-evident: a massive surge of power into an angel’s body that forever altered him into something other, even among angelkind. He’d thought he’d experienced an aborted ascension when the Cascade attempted to force power into him.
How foolish he’d been.
The first punch of that violent energy, it was as he’d imagined—but it didn’t come from without. It came from within. As if a closed door in his mind had suddenly blown off with a force so vicious that it sent him to the sky without his conscious volition. Resisting it was an impossibility. To be an archangel was to be remade by the forces of the world itself. It was agony and it was beauty and it was all he was and all he could become and it was eternity.
As he hung in the sky, held up by nothing but the power of ascension, he felt it begin—the alteration of his cells. Each and every one in his body beginning to change in an unstoppable cascade. Every particle that made him Illium was reshaped in this endless time that was his ending and his beginning.
Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t endless. He’d witnessed Suyin’s ascension, read about others in their histories. But in this space that he occupied in the universe, time had slowed to where a breath took an eon, and his heart didn’t pulse so much as wait in echoing silence, the pause between beats was so long.
In that forever, he saw himself being born, a red-faced infant his mother cradled to her breast with infinite tenderness while tears streamed down her face. He cried, too, at the beauty of her love for him, her child that she’d nurtured in her womb.
Next to her stood Aegaeon, his face awash in a wonder that made him seem a wholly different man. The hand with which he touched his son’s head was proud, the kiss he pressed to Sharine’s cheek one of utmost love.
Another man. Gone now.
Illium mourned the loss even as his heart overflowed at being loved by a mother luminous and full of joy…and old, so, so old. He felt it now, the weight of her years, the countless scars on her soul, the fine fractures that had spread outward in a slow creep until they broke her. And still, she was this being radiant who grew ever stronger. To be the son of Sharine, the Hummingbird? It was the greatest honor he could imagine.
He saw every moment of his childhood, from birth to toddlerhood.
His heart cracked at his first glimpse of Aodhan, re-formed again with rivers of glittering brightness within that was his love for the boy who ran with him in his memories, racing him to the gorge so that they could get up to mischief.
Eyes of infinite blue looking into his as Raphael crouched down so that they were eye to eye. There was an amused affection in his smile and his expression held a care that Illium felt down to his bones. He had always known that Raphael loved him. But today…today he saw into the heart of an archangel, and he knew that he had always had a father even after Aegaeon’s abandonment.