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[Mikhaeil]

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Mikhaeil lowered his gaze. The sword lay on the brimstone close within his sight, its blade a gleaming mockery of yesterday in the dimness of his eternal damnation. Satan's stench permeated the gloom. A single torch set in the wall high above his head savored the pleasure of its acrimonious light enjoining that of the flames that leapt about the sweltering chamber in savage voracity. Heavy golden shackles bound his wrists behind his back, their weight incomparable to the melancholy binding his conscience to his guilt. Wrists similarly bound to ankles forced him to his knees in an awkward posture of submission.

Talons tore at his flesh, ripping through his sinews like a sharpened quill rivens parchment beneath a heavy hand. A voice reverberated throughout what remained of his awareness as it proclaimed his purgatory in barbaric tone -

"Whosoever owns your sword owns your will as well. Attempt to retrieve that which is no longer yours and face His final retribution."

[Xoriah]

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“You will be nothing here when I am finished with you.” His voice was soft, yet reverberated off the cavernous walls with a sound like rock rumbling against rock.

“Ask me if I care.” Xoriah spat words laced with venom. If only they had a dagger’s edge to corrupt the flesh with their fetid intent.

“Serpent. Remember your place!” The archdaemon extended his hand above her head, and she fell prostrate at his feet. She tasted the dust upon her tongue as her head was forced down by forces invisible. “Upon your belly, vile snake. This is where you belong. Another word and I will destroy you.”

Xoriah lifted her head against the forces pushing her face into the dirt at his feet. She looked into his face and tried to form a word, but the roots of her tongue could find only the power to hiss. The archdaemon laughed deeply and lowered his hand, turning his back on her to go.

As he disappeared through the doorway, she regained her own power to stand again. She stung with humiliation. And to have done it in front of the Fallen! She looked to the golden-haired angel, kneeling shackled against the wall, then to the doorway where the great winged form of the archdaemon had disappeared.

“You take what is mine. My will, and my dignity? You will remember my name! I will take what is yours. This indignity you suffer at your own hands, Lord of Swine!”

Mikhaeil did not stir in his silent submission. Not until she lifted his sword from the brimstone did he even raise his head. His piercing green eyes met her own blank gaze for only a moment before she spun and fled the darkened chamber.

Hell quaked behind her as she half ran and half flew through the winding corridors. Thus she heard, more than felt, the ground split and grind against itself in her wake. No matter, she thought. What was yours is now mine. She smiled as a screech of rage rent the cavern behind her in two. She abandoned the crevice and soared into the night sky, starlight glinting off the sword’s blade as she held it aloft. Behind her the earth belched sulfur and smoke into the frozen night air as she paused only a moment to look back. She wondered briefly how he would follow, but gave it only a fleeting thought before her leathery wings carried her and her vengeance-borne trophy hastily toward the mountains to the north.
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Come with me where chains will never bind you...all your grief at last, at last behind you. ~Les Miserables

[Xoriah]

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Suppose it doesn’t work this way....Suppose he was killed in the wake of my escape? Or perhaps they found a way to keep him there, bereft of his sword. Matters not, I suppose. They’d destroy me even for the attempt, should I try to find out.... Here in the depths beneath the mountains, there was no sound but the tattoo of water spattering on stone and the occasional rustle of her wings as she folded them against her back. She held up the sword, swinging it in a graceful arc. There was little light here to illuminate the blade, but what scant reflection there was still painted an array of arcs and crescents of light upon the ceiling and walls. A glint of the blade's cast light caught a splash of white behind a formation of stalagmites and Xoriah paused, shifting her gaze in that direction.

“So it worked.” Xoriah raked back her hair, a hopeless tangle of unnatural crimson, as the figure rose and approached her, halting a few steps away. He stood as tall as she – taller! White feathered wings rose several feet in the air at his back, not unlike her own fleshy wings when unfurled. Dressed only in a crude swathe of white cloth, he glared at her defiantly, then fixed his gaze intently upon the sword in her hands.

“What do you plan to do with that?” He spoke evenly, his words laced with spite.

“I don’t know yet.” She shoved the point of the sword into the cave floor and leaned against the hilt, watching him narrowly. “You know, you’re a lot taller when you’re not kneeling in the dust.” Her thoughts, however, turned more frantic. How the bloody hell am I supposed hide that?

The angel clenched his jaw and tore his gaze away from the blade to glare at her again. “Shouldn’t you have figured that out before you took it?”

Xoriah pointedly ignored the question. “So this is how it works aye? I take the sword, and you’re mine. It’s really just that easy?”

The angel’s expression changed as he stared at her incredulously. Slowly, a sardonic smile spread across his face and he began to laugh. “You don’t even understand how it works?”

“I know that you can’t touch the sword and take your own freedom, or you would have by now.” Xoriah took a step closer, keeping the sword pointed upward between them. His smile faded quickly, and he swallowed hard as the blade lingered an inch in front of his face, but he did not back away.

“I didn’t care how it worked. What was his, is now mine.” She lowered the sword with a dramatic flourish. But her words rang truer than she had hoped. As the sword was hers, so was its original owner. What was she going to do with an angel?

Xoriah paced a wide circle around the cavern, dragging the blade’s point across the rock and mud beneath her feet. What did she need to know? What wasn’t she asking? Basic questions? The most essential? She turned and faced him again. His hands were still before him, wrists bound in gold shackles and chains. “What do you eat? Or do you? Do you require water?”

The angel smiled sarcastically again. “I require no such sustenance. I am not a pet.” His laughter echoed throughout the cavern.

Xoriah felt burning rage boiling up within her and crossed the cave in four paces, halting before him and holding the sword menacingly. “No. You are a liability. I acted in vengeance. You are merely a side effect. Perhaps I should just give you the sword and let you face your retribution.”

The angel’s features darkened as he looked from the sword back into her face. When he spoke, his enunciation was crisp as he accentuated each word. “Then get on with it.”

“I would take no pleasure in destroying you. I have no need to do so.” Xoriah narrowed her eyes.

“Then mind your tongue, daemon wench.” The angel strained, whether subconsciously or not, against the shackles.

“Mind your shackles, Fallen.” Xoriah took a gold key from her waistpouch and threw it in the dust at his feet. “Bound to me as you are, they are useless. I will need your help if we’re going to avoid being found.”
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Come with me where chains will never bind you...all your grief at last, at last behind you. ~Les Miserables

[Mikhaeil]

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"Bound to me as you are."

Bound to a succubus! Mikhaeil bristled, his emerald gaze shifting from the discarded shackles to the daemon who'd so haughtily surrendered the key. Of course she was right - it was impossible for him to refuse or resist her. Such physical fetters served little purpose beyond manifestation of the image they provided. His true restraints were imperceivable and far more burdensome.

Did she really think him to believe the ignorance she pleaded? Slavery wasn't a game and he was not her toy!

[Xoriah]

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Sleep was a stealthy prey that left Xoriah wanting. The night and his accusations replayed themselves in her mind over and over again. The Fallen was right. There had been method to her madness. She wanted what was his. She had wanted it since the first day she laid eyes upon the golden haired angel shackled in the archdaemon's chambers. If she had ever once given in to the archdaemon's desires, there would never again have been reason for him to summon her to his private chamber. Never again a chance to watch the angel with a covetous gaze. Never again a chance to take the brilliant blade that would bind him to her. She had been presented an opportunity, and the rage with which to carry out such a deed with any chance of success. And she had taken it. She had taken him.

He was hers.

In the stark cold of the abandoned house, she now lay curled tightly, wings furled around her on the bare floor. Xoriah's eyes flashed open, glowing faintly in the darkness. He watched her, as she knew he would. His gaze was heavy with mistrust and pain, but he did not speak. The exchange was one of many wordless conversations between the two. Not the first, nor the last. He watched her unwaveringly as her two pale white orbs blinked twice, then she closed her eyes again.

Hers. Soft in the silence, she smiled.
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Come with me where chains will never bind you...all your grief at last, at last behind you. ~Les Miserables

[Mikhaeil]

---

Mikhaeil returned to the abandoned house Xoriah had found for them. Its plaster walls rotted with age, weathered wooden planks buckled precariously beneath the weight of an ancient stone rooftop that gaped in more places than it gave coverage to. She'd asked him to prepare a bed for her . . . asked or commanded. Either way, it was merely a matter of semantics. Her word was law to him, her needs and desires his precedence. Choking back the bilious rise of contempt suddenly threatening to rob him of reason he threw wide the door and walked inside, paying little heed as the moldy oak portal fell away from its hinges and crashed to the dirt floor behind him.

An exasperated sigh echoed its way throughout the emptiness as he surveyed the dilapidated remains of a structure that, much like himself, now bore but little resemblance to its original state. He'd long ago closed his mind to the vision of an archangel whose scars had become too deeply embedded to be dealt with, a soldier whose sword had been wrested from his grasp by a power too hallowed to oppose. The Stonegate king had wanted to know whether a pacifist would wield a weapon of war. If only he knew of the battle the warrior who he'd just welcomed into his realm had been fighting for years -the combat between acceptance of his guilt and the humiliation of his castigation. The female sitting down the table from them had laughed when the truth of his submission had become obvious. She'd then apologized, but without necessity. Who could blame her for finding the situation amusing? An angel yoked by a daemon was hardly something often encountered.

Mikhaeil spat in disgust. Prepare me a bed. Eyes scanning the room, he set to task in obedience of the order.

[Xoriah]

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Something was different. Another morning. Coldest yet. Better, still, than the bitter chill of Stonegate Valley. But something was different. Faintly glowing in morning’s gloom, Xoriah’s eyes scanned the room before she stirred an inch from where she slept. A neatly packaged basket of food sat beside her bedroll on the weathered floor planking. A brightness flooded in from the windows, unnatural at this early hour. Slowly, she began to unfurl her wings from around her and uncurl from the fetal position in which she slept. A light whish through the room betrayed the source of new light.

Snow? Seriously? Isn’t this why I found a house so far from Stonegate? She shook snow out of a thick red blanket that she was sure she had not covered herself with the night before. The fresh white powder whirled and eddied across the floor, caught in the drafts that whistled between cracks and floorboards.

Xoriah stretched in a spectacularly releasing manner, the tips her soft red wings brushing against the ceiling. Bereft of the spell that usually hid those aspects that identified her as distinctly what she was, she reveled in the freedom to simply be. Not that the spell was all that useful, when the Fallen kept calling her “Daemon” in front of others. Perhaps, she mused, they think it’s a pet name. She grinned at the thought.

Where is he anyway? The thought no sooner entered her mind, than she heard Mikhaeil stirring upstairs. He hastened downstairs, his hands still laden with heavy stone shingles from the roof. He set them aside and knelt before her, his great white feathered wings outstretched. She found herself distracted by the vision of her snow-dusted angel, and he lifted his gaze to look into her face briefly.

“I am patching the roof to keep the snow out. I will make your house a more livable home for you.”

“For us, Mikhaeil. It is your home too.”

He lowered his gaze again and shook his head. “The house belongs to you. As do I…Mistress.”

She didn’t have to see the heat in his eyes to feel the sting he gave to the final word as he spat it. But she knew, too, that the word had a dagger for him as well.
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Come with me where chains will never bind you...all your grief at last, at last behind you. ~Les Miserables