Page 28 of At The End There Was You

Winter frowned. She didn’t know there was a language that old.

He took her hand and guided her finger across the odd letters. “I am only what I can be. What it reads.”

She licked her dry lips. “And what is that?”

“How about I let you figure that out? On the seventh day, tell me what I am.”

Something was wrong with Winter—very wrong. “Don’t I have to know you to answer that?”

“You can know me.”

“Do you truly believe we are not worth saving, is that why you are not trying harder to work out a solution?”

“Yes.”

She gathered herself tightly. “Maybe they should've sent someone else.”

“There was no one else to send to find something that does not exist.”

“What does that mean?”

He leaned back until he was laying down on the blanket, both hands under his head as he stared up at the strange skies that were beginning to murk over. For a moment, his eyes turned grey from their reflection. “What they call humanity.”

“It is not something you can search in books, let alone find it there.”

A strange look passed over his stark face when he looked at her. “Indeed.”

“Then why did you seek it there in the first place?”

“It was something I had only read and heard about. Never seen. I had little hope to find it elsewhere. Aren’t you going to ask why it is that I am looking for?”

“It would never make sense to me as it does to you. You’re a Mage, and I am not.” She chewed on her lip and then stopped when she noticed Azriel’s attention dropping there. “You said you’ve never seen it? How have you never seen humanity?”

“Have you?”

Winter hesitated for a moment. She debated how sure she was of her answer before she went with a meek, “Yes.”

“From who?”

“From many. Take Alyssa, for one, she is one of the priestesses here. She always made sure I had enough to eat and drink, and that I wasn’t cold at night even when she knew nothing of me. She always comforted me, pulled me aside when she felt something was wrong, stayed with me at night when I couldn’t sleep.”

“Because that is her duty as a servant of her God.”

“Not necessarily. Not all was her duty.” She laid on her side facing him, their faces only inches apart. “Think about it, Azriel. The action itself is humane, is it not? The fact that it becomes a duty to obtain reinforces it. To know right and wrong, good and bad, knowing to act on that same basis of knowledge is what humanity is all about. People sometimes are tired, heartbroken, starved, sick, deliriously happy or overjoyed, other states of mind where inhibition is stolen from you, they might act upon how they feel at those moments, but acting upon those feelings is the most human thing one can do. Not all is inherently bad.”

“Not all is good either.”

“But we shouldn’t assume some can’t be.”

He trailed the back of his hand down her jaw. “If Death saw the world with that amber colour lens of your eyes, little sun, he’d be doomed. He’d start sending people back to the land of the living before they stepped on the gates of his land.”

She was trying very hard not to smile. No one had ever given her a nickname before. Winter reached to touch him as he was touching her. “He has a duty to hold. He is part of nature, born as it. No one blames him for what he does or what he is. Asking him to look at us another way would do us more harm than good, he only has to keep looking at us as he has.”

“I think these eyes would change his mind.”

“My world is sometimes grey, he wouldn’t like it.”

He turned to her fully, his hand spanning across the nape of her neck. “Who would dare paint it as such?”