Fowlhunter [GL]

This assignment was frankly embarrassing.

She, a grown sixteen-year-old, the top of her cohort and a Brigadier to boot—being assigned to make friends.

It's not that I don't know how to make friends. I just choose not to, Ennanis thought sourly. Thus she wanted to get it over and done with. The next morning, she rolled off her bunk. The brown-haired angel sleeping on the bunk below hers was sleeping peacefully, tangled amid a jumbled mass of blankets.

Reaching out, she whisked away the blankets and grabbed hold of both his shoulders—and started shaking him violently.

"Gah!" cried the angel, jerking awake. "What in Prometheus'—Ennanis?! What's wrong?"

"Can you be my friend?"

"What?" the other angel frowned, dumbfounded.

Seeing his confusion, Ennanis began to explain. "It's for an assignment by my mentor. You don't have to actually be my friend, just say that you are."

The angel's face twisted. "I'm not going to be your excuse for a stupid assignment. Do you even know my name?"

Ennanis did not.

“God, it’s too fucking early for this shit.” Grumpy, the angel tossed his blanket over her head and went back to sleep, or at least snored dramatically and never talked to Ennanis again. So there.

Ennanis' second attempt was on the cloud fields.

Her hair gathered into its usual pink ponytail, she readied her sword, glancing at the target ahead. But really, she was looking at the crowd gathering on the sidelines through the corners of her eyes. No matter how many times she’d barked at them, they never stayed away, unable to contain their curiosity and nosiness both.

She raised her blade, pointing it at the target as if to summon a Soleki beam. However, instead of doing just that, she spun around to point it at the crowd instead. The blade flashed in the sunlight, the tip glittering with the beginnings of Soleki enhancement.

“Do any of you want to practise with me?”

The brainless stream of cheering from the crowd stuttered to a halt. For a long moment a cricket silence ensured as they stared at her, struggling to comprehend what was going on.

Finally, someone stepped forward.

It was a burly woman with short oak hair. Wings fluttering, she landed on the cloudbank in front of Ennanis.

“Halla, of Canmore clan,” she bowed, introducing herself with an easygoing grin. “It would be an honour to practise with you, Brigadier Zoleil.”

“Likewise, Lieutenant Canmore,” Ennanis inclined her head. “Get a sword. Let’s duel. Half-fight.”

Halla nodded, fetching a sword from the weaponbox. These swords were real swords. Beyond cadethood, angels trained with real weapons. They had no real danger of dying from any wounds that could possibly be inflicted. In angelic duelling there were two types to be had: the half-fight—where you merely tapped your weapon against a vital point to call the match—or a full-fight, where you fought to the death, to resurrect later. Dying hurt, though, and so angels chose a half-fight as default, generally avoiding the latter option.

Ennanis had always wanted to try a full-fight, obviously, but most angels were no fun. She studied her opponent. Halla sucked in deep breaths as she settled into stance, blowing her hair out of her face. Her two hands were curled tightly around the hilt of the sword.

“You’re too tense. Relax your grip,” Ennanis said automatically. “Your feet are misaligned; if you lunge like that you’ll lose your balance. And either keep your wings folded behind you or spread them out properly for action. If you dangle them like that, they’ll just be easy injuries for me to score.”

“Stop lecturing me,” Halla rolled her eyes. “I just wanted a duel, not to be one of your Brigade’s lieutenants.”

Her comment drew derisive chuckles from the crowd. Exhaling, Ennanis adjusted herself—then drew back and leapt into it.

The fight was over disappointingly fast. It wasn’t that Halla was a shoddy fighter, but Ennanis had always trained twice as hard as anyone with twice the talent to carry her through, and more recently flourished under the tutelage of Amanita Zoleil. Halla simply couldn’t compare.

Halla glared at her under the press of Ennanis’ flat blade to her neck. “Couldn’t you have eased up on me? I didn’t get to do anything!”

“I thought you wanted a duel, not a lecture,” Ennanis stated plainly.

Halla scrunched her brows. “What in the-” She seemed to have more choice words, but she bit them back, probably once again in fear of the Brigadier’s authority.

Ennanis withdrew her sword. She held out her hand. Halla stared at it quizzically.

“Let’s shake on it and be friends,” Ennanis said, nudging her hand towards her.

Halla raised her brows. She ignored her and got to her feet. “I have to go,” she said curtly, and doubled back, no doubt eager to mouth her off among her own friends. No one else volunteered after that, and when the crowd receded, Ennanis spent the rest of her morning no less alone than she always was.

Something deep down in her twisted. Ennanis hadn’t been scathed during the fight; this was an ache that had existed for much longer.

~~~

It wasn’t that Ennanis had never had friends, in her sixteen years of living. Back in her cadet days, she'd had plenty of people by her side. She’d hung out with them, drunk with them, …cavorted, with some of them. But all she'd found them was an inconvenience. They were less friends and more people that took pity on her, occasionally talking to her or inviting her to things, but she’d never felt any real connection with any of them. They were interested in things she wasn’t, and things she was interested in they weren’t. When she grew older, her talents stronger, her rank higher, the looks of pity turned to looks of envy. Or both.

You see, it wasn't that Ennanis was a miserable person who hated the idea of friends; it was simply that…

“Maybe I’m just not the type of person who can be with others.”

Ennanis muttered this to the scant breeze that filtered through the rustling leaves. She was sitting on a swing in the Cascan gardens, pushing herself back and forth. There was no one to reply or disagree with her. Her words simply echoed back to herself.

Becoming a Brigadier had given her access to the elite paired-wing barracks. So far she had made use of the garden the most. It was hot and dry, as it always was on Mount Casca, lacking any of the pleasant water features like ponds or fountains that undercloud gardens often had. The plants, uprooted from the undercloud and repotted here by cadets on beginner duties, were always fighting an uphill, impossible battle to survive the scorching heat. But it was a good place to sit and think about nothing, as no one else ever came here.

Ennanis sat on the creaky garden swing, pushing methodically with her feet as she continued to muse to the dehydrated shrubbery. After countless attempts to befriend her comrades, all she had managed to get in return were incredulous stares and affronted remarks. Worse, word was starting to get around that Ennanis was looking for a friend because of an assignment, and people found that such a great mockery that it was now impossible to even greet someone without them immediately brushing her off, hiding snickers behind their hands.

Ennanis was by no means shy. She was not scared of talking to people. Maybe if she had been she would’ve had an easier time. There was probably something wrong with what she was doing or saying, but she had no one that she could remotely ask for help. Ego had initially stopped her from crawling back to Amanita to ask for advice, but after weeks with nothing to show for her efforts, Ennanis was ready to concede defeat. So maybe she didn’t know how to make friends; what did it matter? She could still finish any mission thrown her way. Ennanis just wanted to move on.

But no matter how much she tried to contact her mentor, she couldn’t reach her. Amanita usually was the one coming to find her, but she hadn’t come to see Ennanis ever since that day by the ocean in the Archizoun town. Ennanis had made the long trek to the eastface of Mount Casca, dragging her legs over the scorching rock to knock on the door of the General Office, but when questioned the clerk said that Amanita was ‘unavailable’.

Gold light twirled around Ennanis’ finger. Aiming it to the cloudless sky, she let it fly. But when she fired the beam it barely made a few yards before disappearing halfway in the big blue. Ennanis’ charms were being blocked by a watertight defence, shrouding Amanita’s location impeccably.

Amanita Zoleil most likely had her reasons. Perhaps she was stubbornly refusing to see Ennanis until she completed her assignment properly. Maybe she was simply too busy to entertain her—a Warden often had many responsibilities far more important than dealing with a kid. Or maybe…

Despite knowing better than to, Ennanis worried. If something had happened to her mentor, Ennanis had no way of knowing. Honestly, she was pissed off. Amanita had wanted her to make friends because she was afraid for Ennanis. Couldn’t she see that Ennanis, too, would’ve been afraid for her?

But there was no one for her to talk to about it. There was no one for her to even get mad at. So Ennanis could do nothing but wait, whittling her days away with mission after mission, training and eating alone as she once had.

Days turned into weeks. Into months. Soon, two years had passed.

And then, one day, she woke up to see a letter on her bedside.

~~~

“Congratulations on your promotion,” Emperor Prometheus told her. The ruler of angels, bearer of the Sun, personally looped the golden ribbon through the collar of her new uniform. “Warden Commander.”

There was no crowd to bow to. Emperor Prometheus did not like ceremony. For once there were no eyes on her, and Ennanis appreciated it.

There was one person she wished to hear congratulations from. But she wouldn't get to hear it now.

~~~

As we know it, many stories were told about the Golden Rose.

This is one of the stories that signalled the beginning of the end.

This story takes place in the deep of night. Ennanis, now eighteen years old, was carrying out her first duties as a Warden. She was on the east face of the sixth peak, the highest anyone could go on this elevation before they reached the summit. On the outside, the place was deathly still. But it was far from deserted.

This was the mountainface where the sunprisons were located.

The sunprisons housed the most atrocious individuals of the world. The most despicable, most despotic, most brutal of criminals of the undercloud lived here. As punishment, their fate was to be sealed within the rows or cells that crawled along the second-highest peak of Mount Casca. Where many humans kept their prisoners in dark, dank dungeons, the sunprisons employed an opposite approach. These prisons were perfectly open-air, dry and bright. Their atonement lay not in choking on mildew and rot, but in blistering under the rays of the sun, the jails intentionally built and positioned to be hit with the worst of the heat.

Many thought death to be preferable. Ennanis knew this because the inmates spent the entire day screaming it at her, howling and pleading with hoarse throats for her to put them out of their misery. Prometheus’ sun was as harsh as it was life-giving; while the heat subjected their bodies to incredible torture, it also fuelled them with just enough energy to remain alive. This cycle would go on for a long time, but it wasn’t endless. Soleki couldn’t reheal a mortal infinitely. Eventually, the prisoners would be slowly, painfully, mutilated to death.

Even knowing that these were all very bad people, she couldn’t help the recoil in her gut whenever she heard those helpless cries of pain. She had been raised her whole life to defend others from harm; even when she arrested someone, she sent them away to be incarcerated by someone else. She wasn’t used to being the one actually meting out the punishment.

“All the junior wardens are put on guard duty. Once you've promoted you won't have to do guard duty anymore,” the senior warden who'd showed her the ropes on her first day said. “That screaming is a handful, I know. Wear these earplugs. They’re the only way to stay sane in here.”

Ennanis hadn’t worn them. It felt wrong. She thought it disrespectful, in some sense, to shut the cries out completely. To her, it was one thing to not acquiesce to the pleas of the inmates; it was another to pretend they didn’t exist at all. And so, she had continued to listen.

Now that night had fallen, the inmates were afforded a few hours of reprieve and recovery, and so the noises too quietened. Veiny, red-rimmed eyes watched as the young angel traverse the narrow paths, squeezed on both ends by prison cells. Few talked. Most got some shut-eye. The occasional ruckus started, but Ennanis would be there with her cane raised threateningly, and they would settle down. At first the inmates had put up more resistance against her, seeing that she was a new Warden and thought her possibly easy to game, but a few quick strokes of her cane sent them quiet. She couldn’t use Soleki at night, but a physical weapon was still well and capable of causing hurt. And though Ennanis did pity them, she was here with a duty to carry out.

Till the present day, she still didn’t know what had been special about that night. The prisonground was very large, which she went through at random. But on that night, she was walking past one of the cells when someone said:

“Hey, heyyy. You there!”

Ennanis would’ve normally ignored it. Many inmates tried to talk to her. But maybe it was because of how youthful the voice sounded—as bright as ringing glass—that she couldn’t help her curiosity. She turned around.

In the darkness, there was a small figure crouched in the cell the voice had come from. Ennanis lifted the lantern in her hand. The yellow glow streamed through the bars of the cell, casting long stripes of shadow across the rock.

“Your uniform looks big on you, doesn’t it?” chirped the voice again.

It was a girl.