POV - Azra'il
There are forms of torture that history records with solemnity: iron maidens, prolonged interrogations, sleep deprivation by various methods. History, however, had neglected to adequately document what happens when two married adults decide that the middle of the night is the ideal moment to reaffirm their mutual devotion with an enthusiasm that the other occupants of the household had not requested and had no means of ignoring.
I was lying on my back in bed, looking at the ceiling with the serenity of someone who had survived wars, cosmic catastrophes, and at least two hundred and fifty-three apocalypses that I could recall, and was being defeated by the volume of a thin plaster wall.
〈Eos... are they all right?〉
[Clinically, yes. More than all right, I would say.]
〈Thank you. That was simultaneously the only information I needed and the last information I wanted.〉
On the other side of the bed, Roxy was lying on her side with the rigid posture of someone feigning sleep with a dedication that would have been admirable in other circumstances. I could see, even in the darkness of the room, that her ears were visibly redder than usual.
I ran the probability calculation of Zenith becoming pregnant again at some point in the coming months and arrived at a conclusion I would have preferred not to reach.
〈I hope it is not a reincarnate.〉
[The statistical probability of two reincarnates in the same family is low.]
〈I also thought the probability of one was low. And look where I am.〉
[Fair point.]
A particularly enthusiastic sound came through the wall with a clarity that the local medieval architecture had clearly not been designed to filter.
Roxy shifted. Then went completely still again with the determination of someone who had made a decision about their posture and was not going to abandon it.
"Roxy," I said, in a low voice.
"I am sleeping," she said, in the voice of someone who was definitively not sleeping.
"You have been lying with your eyes open for forty minutes."
"I am resting my eyes open."
"That is not a recognised medical category."
There was a long silence. Then Roxy turned onto her back with a sigh that carried the particular weight of an adult professional who had accepted a tutoring position and had not anticipated every aspect of the package.
"Are they always like this?" she asked, in the tone of someone making a professional enquiry about working conditions.
"Somewhere between frequently and constantly," I said. "Think of two animals in mating season, but without the seasonality. The entire year. With consistent dedication."
Roxy went completely still for one second.
"Ah," she said at last, in the voice of someone who had received a mental image they had not requested and had no means of returning.
"Yes."
"And how do you manage to sleep?"
"I have developed a tolerance," I said. "You will develop one too."
Roxy looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone silently recalculating several aspects of the position they had accepted.
The silence that followed was the kind two people maintain when the noise around them makes any other conversation simultaneously necessary and impossible to sustain. Roxy attempted to discuss next week's study programme. I responded with the attention of someone technically present in the conversation. She then tried the topic of Paul's sword styles. I responded again.
The problem was that the noise continued, and there was a limit to how much any conversation could compete with it.
Eventually, the silence won.
Roxy was on her back, face turned to the ceiling, with the expression of someone performing a breathing exercise they had learnt specifically for situations like this. Her cheeks retained that particular hue I had catalogued as active embarrassment, level four of five.
A few more minutes of feigned silence. Then Roxy sat up with the careful movement of someone trying not to make a sound. "I am going to the bathroom," she said, in a low voice.
I nodded without moving.
She left. The door closed with a soft click.
I lay there for a few more minutes, conducting an internal conversation about the definition of probably versus definitely, while the room next door finally showed signs of diminishing intensity. When ten minutes had passed and Roxy had not returned, I got up to check.
The corridor was dark with the particular darkness of medieval houses at midnight, where no artificial light source existed. I had learnt to move in that kind of darkness across enough lives not to need light.
I found Roxy in the corridor.
She was standing a few paces from the door of Paul and Zenith's room, leaning slightly forward, with her eye applied to the gap with a concentration I classified as scientifically questionable.
I stopped where I was.
I looked at Roxy.
I looked at the gap.
I looked at Roxy again.
In one of my past lives I had been a goddess of lust and fertility. Not the decorative variety of deity who blesses weddings from a distance with a wave of the hand. The kind that presided over carnal rituals within temples, with hundreds of devotees actively participating, in ceremonies that lasted days and that the mortals of that world considered the most intense spiritual experience of their lives.
I had seen, done, and blessed things that would send any ordinary mortal into existential collapse merely from witnessing them.
And yet I was, objectively, the only person in that house with any common sense.
The universe has a sense of humour I would classify as sadistic if it were not so consistently precise.
I was processing that conclusion when something further down the corridor to my left caught my attention.
The door to Rudeus's room was ajar.
And in the dark interior, visible only by the specific position of his head, was my twin brother, looking in Roxy's direction with that expression I had originally catalogued as the smile of a degenerate.
I looked at him for a moment.
He realised I was there. His green eyes found mine in the darkness. There was a moment of mutual recognition.
Then Rudeus, with the dignity of someone who had made an executive decision, retreated silently into his room and closed the door with a care that no amount of composure could entirely disguise as innocent.
I looked at the closed door.
I looked at Roxy, still at the gap.
I went back to the room, lay down in bed, and pulled up the blanket.
〈Eos, do not record anything about tonight.〉
[Agreed entirely. No records. Good night, Azra'il.]
Morning arrived with the sun coming through the bedroom window and Roxy already up and immaculately composed with the posture of a professional who had slept perfectly well and had done absolutely nothing questionable in the corridor at two in the morning.
I came down to breakfast with my customary neutral expression.
Roxy was seated at the table with her tea, eyes fixed on the contents of the cup, the posture of someone reading a very important document printed on the bottom of the ceramic.
"Good morning," I said.
"Good morning," she said, without looking up from the imaginary document.
I sat. I picked up my cup. I took a sip in silence.
Rudeus appeared two minutes later with his hair still dishevelled and that particular expression I had learnt to classify as the morning state of someone whose thoughts at two in the morning had been of a specific nature. He helped himself, sat down, and spent the first five minutes of breakfast smiling at the contents of his own cup with a satisfaction that nobody present had solicited.
I drank my tea.
Roxy drank hers.
Nobody said anything about anything.
It was, in its way, the most civilised morning that table had seen in weeks.
------------(*)------------
The Greyrat kitchen had that particular quality of winter afternoons: the low fire on the range, the smell of wood and herbs, and the light that came through the small window at an angle sufficient to illuminate the steam rising from the pots without usefully illuminating anything else.
Lilia was at my side with her customary upright posture and the concentrated attention of someone who had decided to learn something and intended to learn it properly.
The art of tea had come to her gradually, the inevitable result of months of observing the instructions I gave and the visible results they produced in flavour. Lilia was the kind of person who would not tolerate doing something adequately when a better method was available. For her, preparing my tea well was part of the function. For me, teaching her was the definitive solution to the problem of depending on someone who had not yet understood why temperature mattered.
It was a functionally perfect arrangement.
"Orange blossom petals release their essential oils at temperatures between seventy and eighty degrees," I said, arranging the ingredients on the counter in the specific order the process required. "If the water is boiling when you pour it, the oils evaporate before they can infuse. The result is bitter without the freshness. If the water is too cold, the oils do not release fully. The result is weak."
"Seventy to eighty degrees," repeated Lilia, in the tone of someone memorising a technical specification. "How will I know the temperature precisely?"
"By the steam," I said. "When thin, constant threads of steam begin to rise, with no boiling yet, the water is in the correct range. You have approximately thirty seconds before it climbs too high."
Lilia nodded. There was in her eyes the particular expression of someone converting information into procedure, reorganising what had been vague intuition into repeatable process.
〈She learns well.〉
I did not say it aloud. It was a factual observation that did not need to be verbalised.
Whilst Lilia checked the pot, I began separating the herbs with movements that my fingers made without consulting the mind, the memory of hundreds of tea rituals across dozens of different lives operating through the small hands of that body with the efficiency of something completely internalised.
The melody began without any conscious decision.
It was the kind of thing that happened when the hands were occupied with something they knew well and the mind became slightly unoccupied, enough for something old to rise to the surface without asking permission. It was a melody of eastern influence, from a world where tea was a sacred ritual and each gesture of preparation had its correspondence in music, the movements of the hand at the height of the process and the notes that accompanied them being the same thing expressed in different languages.
Here it came out only as humming. Soft, without declared intention. The kind of sound a person makes when they forget they are making it.
Lilia stopped checking the pot.
Not dramatically. It was gradual, the movement of her hand slowing as her ear took priority over the task, until she was standing with her hand near the pot handle and doing nothing, because she had entirely forgotten she was there.
I continued separating the herbs.
The melody continued.
There were in the melody layers that the humming could not fully convey, harmonies that existed in the memory of the vocal technique, but that I was not using, employing only the main thread of something that in another context had been sung to audiences of a size this entire village could not have reproduced. Here it was simply sound in a rustic kitchen smelling of herbs.
It was sufficient.
The kitchen door made the soft sound of someone stopping in the doorway.
Zenith.
She was standing at the entrance with a dish cloth in her hand and the expression of someone who had arrived with a specific purpose and had lost the purpose along the way because they had found something else. Her eyes were on me with that quality I had learnt to recognise: not quite surprise, but the kind of attention people give to things they had not known they wanted to hear.
I stopped humming with the naturalness of someone finishing a thought.
Lilia blinked and returned to the pot as though she had never stopped.
"Was that you?" said Zenith, in the low voice of someone who does not want to break something still in the air.
"It was."
She entered the kitchen with careful steps and leant against the counter alongside, the dish cloth forgotten in her hands. "Where does that music come from? I have never heard anything like it."
"I made it up," I said, with the simplicity of someone reporting a fact. "Sometimes a melody comes into my head and I follow it."
Zenith looked at me for a moment with that expression. Then, with the care of someone making a request they know may be refused: "Will you continue? Will you sing?"
I looked at her.
At the tea in my hands.
At Lilia to one side, who had entirely abandoned the pretence of working and was waiting with the contained attention of someone who did not want to show how much they were waiting.
I sang.
Not the complete melody. A fragment, enough for the harmonies that the humming could not carry to appear, the voice finding the layers that existed in the original and translating them into the local tongue.
I sang a smaller version, simpler, filtered through the limits of a four-year-old child. It was not the voice I had possessed in lives where singing was connection, profession, gift, and in some lives, sacred responsibility.
Even so, it was more than anything that kitchen had heard before.
When it ended, the silence was the kind that people keep because they do not want the air to move before the sound has finished existing completely.
Zenith's eyes were faintly bright. Lilia was standing with the pot forgotten and an expression she was clearly struggling to keep professional.
"Where did you take that from?" said Zenith at last, in the voice of someone asking about something that reaches beyond the literal question.
"From my head," I said, returning to the herbs. "As I said."
Zenith looked at me for one moment longer. Then she nodded with the smile of someone who had received an incomplete answer and decided it was sufficient for now.
From the corridor, coming from the direction of the sitting room, there was the very particular silence of someone who had stopped moving.
I did not turn my head.
But I knew that Rudeus was there, leaning against the corridor wall with that expression he made when he received something he had not calculated and did not quite know where to put.
Lilia began preparing the tea with the correct movements, the right temperature, the herbs in the order I had taught her, the steam rising in thin, constant threads from the surface of the water.
I hummed again, lower this time, whilst my hands continued the work.
Zenith stayed in the kitchen without saying anything.
The tea came out with exactly the colour and scent it should have, and the three of us sat at the kitchen table with the warm cups in our hands whilst the afternoon light came through the window at a golden angle.
The melody continued, low and unhurried, filling the space between one cup and the next like something that simply belonged to that moment.
From the corridor, no movement from Rudeus. But no sound of footsteps leaving either.