The picture was cut by the ice of horror. Mickle froze in the doorway like a stumbling block. His eyes, once narrow with former malice, became great white fields of fear, drawn inward by the black hole of his pupils. His mind, as simple and cramped as a wooden box, turned over with a snap. Thoughts bulleted along the hails of thought track, or rather the crooked path of instincts:
Protect yourself! The sharp shadow of the blade pulled his fingers to the scabbard on his thigh. The pungent odor of iron pierced consciousness, stronger than the stench of the rotting wound behind the scaffold. *All obviousness pressed against his temples: a distorted unknowing body. The thing glowed from the bed with obscurity, danger, like a smoldering coal among the hay in a dried-out barn. Was it this that made Sophia so "sickly"? Did this ghost steal her mind, her faith? Had it sheltered her? Fear turned into anger, and anger into barely perceptible action.
A primal jolt of panic slammed into Plissiades in an icy wave. Every muscle tensed for a leap she couldn't make. The brain stem screamed: DESTROY! RUN! PROTECT! But above that roar stood the authoritative hand of reason: Calculate. Control. Real estate is your weakness. Reason is your only weapon. She literally nailed herself to the cot with the force of her gaze. Violet pupils, like scanners of a kind of technology unseen on Earth, stared unblinkingly into Mickle.
Enemy Assessment: Earthy, dense, drenched in the sweat of fear and cheap alcohol. Not an ounce of pity, just the tribal instinct to destroy the outsider. His hand already clenched the hilt of his knife, a clear intent. Screaming would provoke a blow. Physical resistance was useless. All that remained was time, thinner than a spider's web. And words were an unreliable shield against the bullet of hot hatred. How do we make this biomass freeze? With mind-boggling lies? A threat?
The lightning bolt of decision: Wait for Sophia. She is an unknown variable, but her return must be inevitable. One must stall, demonstrating surrender or danger. Plissiades sensed the dryness of Mickle's intentions. He was confused, his desire to kill the creature growing by the second.
Mickle's moment of indecision burst, washed away by a wave of blind rage. "Yyyyysh!!!" - a hoarse cry burst out of him along with a thrust forward. The blade of the hunting knife whistled through the stale air of the hut, aiming straight for Plissialis's pale throat.
She didn't scream. Calculation overcame panic. In a split second, her left wing - sprung up and surged upward. Not for flight, for shielding. A blow! A dull, ripping sound, like hitting heavy velvet over an oak board. The knife went deep into the dense fabric of the wing between the bone veins, with a monstrous effort, wrenched from the world of feathers and eternity... The wing held back the deadly blow.
And then the blood rushed out. But not red human blood, but shining, thick as molten alabaster. It clogged vividly from the laceration, droplets, bright and impossible, falling to the dirty floor, boiling into little pearly balls of stumbling reality. Pain pierced Plissiades with white fire, making her shrink inside. Her jaws convulsed, but only a short, hoarse hiss escaped her throat, a brutal sound of humiliated grandeur. Her violet pupils, suddenly narrowed to dangerous slits, stayed fixed on Mickle, catching the slightest tremor in his knife-clutching fingers. The energy of the wound fed cold adrenaline to the tip of his mind, the point of his murderous will.
He tore the knife from his wing - and hurled Plissiades away. The angel's body, light and broken, hit the dirt floor. A short, hoarse howl - the primal sound of a humiliated celestial - rose from a mouth contorted with pain. At that cry, Mickle was already looming over her, his knife-fist dead in the air on the rise of the blow. The blade, wet with alabaster blood, gleamed a cold shard of hell over the defeated foe. Only the hoarse breathing of the hunter and the faint moan of a wounded wing beating against the ground in time with the stunned words of Sophia's heart.
"MICKLE! Spare her, for God's sake!" - Sophia's tearing cry interrupted the swing. Like a blade of grass tossed by a storm, she collapsed onto the bloody wing, covering the pale body with herself. Her chest heaved, deflecting the pointed knife with its fragility. Eyes full of icy terror and tempestuous pleading met Mickle's crimson face. Her fingers dug into the dirt floor beside the angel's feathers, a living, quivering buffer with a mute question: "Will you kill me along with her?".
"Damned demon!" - Mickle shook the bloody knife in Sophia's face, his scarlet face contorted with an all-burning anger. - "You fell from the sky to ruin us? How can you spare this creature!?" Saliva spat from his cramped lips.
-Sophia pressed herself even tighter against Plissiades' flinching wing, as if trying to stop the blade with her skin. Her voice trailed off into shrill desperation, "Not a creature! Do you hear that!!! I've been here a month! I live! I live! - Each word was a fist pounding into the wall of his rage. - You didn't! Good! I pray, Mickle, for the sake of-" Tears rolled down her cheeks, mingling with the alabaster blood on her sleeve. - Back off... Let's talk..." It wasn't a plea, but the last straw her shattered faith in humanity grasped at.
Mickle trembled like a strained bow. Eyes darted lightning bolts between Sophia and the expiring angel. Jaws clenched so tightly that the grinding of teeth echoed in the silence. Fury seemed about to tear him from the inside out.
"Fuck you...!" - A growl escaped through his teeth, barely contained, but there was already a crack in it - "Okay... By your stupidity. Respect... I know..." Each word came with an effort, like a stone from his throat. "But I will not be silent. My word! - A stone! - He thumped his fist against his chest, the oath mingling with the foreboding of retribution. The knife, wet with foreign blood, he lowered it but did not put it away.
Sophia exhaled convulsively, as if the air beneath the spud had been punched. "So be it... Thank you... love..." - A whisper, a shuddering faintness of gratitude, but in her eyes, not relief, but an icy dread of the storm he'd just delayed. The price of respite was Mickle's trust....
Carefully, almost reverently, Sophia lifted Plissiades' trembling body. "It's alright... It's alright," she whispered, more to reassure herself, laying the angel back on his former bed, as if correcting a cracked relic at the same time.
Plissiades obediently accepted the position. Silently. Her fingers - cold as Winter herself - slowly crept along the disheveled branch of her left wing. The touch froze at the edge of the gaping wound. An alabaster carved mark of resentment, painful, but most important: the mark of an inferior race's abuse of the last power of this world.
Violet eyes scalped with hollow thoughts . Her gaze - not oblique, but straight as a blade across Mickle's core - deadened on his figure. How dare he dare? How had the earth beneath his boots not opened? The anger was so global that it crystallized into absolute, chilling silent contempt. Every nerve trembled inside the petrified shell. It was not pain, but the freezing sickness of pride.
Mickle recoiled from them as if from leprosy. His gaze, brimming with bitterness and contempt, fixed on Sophia, "Sophia... I didn't expect that." A bitter snort broke the silence. "From the looks of it... a wench like a wench. But the soul..." He waved his hand as if cutting off the past.
"Tomorrow." The word fell like a stone on ice. "With the first rooster, wait for the elders, Sopha. Here. We'll decide the fate of..." He stammered deliberately, the snarling voice dropping to an ominous whisper of burning hatred, "...that... trashy thing."
He yanked the door open with such force that the walls shook. The rumble of slamming wood hit Sofia's heart with a deafening echo.
In the sudden oppressive silence of the hut there remained only the hoarse breathing of a wounded wing, the silken sound of alabaster blood dripping to the floor, and Plissiades's icy, unbroken gaze fixing the point where a deadly enemy had just stood and the shroud of a short-lived peace. The lull brought no peace. It was but a reprieve before doom or judgment.
Sophia collapsed to her knees, silently screaming hysterically. A look of utter world-destruction contorted her face. Tears flowed in salty rivers of despair, her fingers clutched at her headscarf. The ordinary girl was broken: the reprisal of the elders meant the collapse of life and home.
Plissiades, on the other hand, was watching. Sophia's tears only registered as data. Violet gaze, flickering with the sharp intelligence of jumbled thoughts, focused into the void. The elders... The feeble ones. Scared, decrepit to the core of their brains, ruling over a tiny world. A sudden, chilling realization: their fear, ignorance, power-hunger were not obstacles, but perfect cogs for a new machine. The first-stage plan was destroyed through Miklah, it didn't matter - a thorough bridge of a living garden of political moves sprouted through the wound. Hidden rage turned to pure, cold calculation. The ultimate goal remained immutable. Tomorrow would be the beginning of the first move. The body rested, the mind burned with a fierce flame, mobilized by the onslaught of thought work to transform reality for the better for himself alone. In the empty hut hung: a suppressed sob and the absolute, cutting silence of the architectural plans.
A chilling air hung in Sofya's hut. The stingy dawn barely penetrated through the windows, illuminating the gloomy figures of the elders. Three ancient elders, hunched by time and power, sat stern idols. Their faded eyes, narrow and suspicious, fixed on Plissiades. Nearby, Mickle stood frozen, his gaze a sentence without judgment.
Sophia sat silently by the couch, her fingers curled in mute horror. Plissiades seemed a living statue against them. Her back straight despite the pain. Violet eyes, cold and glimmering with bottomless calculation, slid over the old men like a blade over a sharpening stone. Insects of the mind. A flawless pattern of words formed in her brain, honed by pain and humiliation. Every muscle was ready. It wasn't their slumbering entitlement that would pass judgment - but her will. The first breath of defense froze. The battlefield was doomed to begin now.
The silence was broken only by the creaking of Agathon's joints. He slowly scratched his graying beard, his cloudy eyes narrowed into slits of wisdom. "It's hard..." - The hoarse word hung heavy. - "It's been a long time since fate set a task with feet or wings."
"Burn the winged pestilence!" - Mickle exploded, stepping forward. His face was crimson with impatience. - "You've finished Sophia, you bitch! You've driven her to the shadows!"
Sofia pressed herself into the wall, but a whisper escaped, prickly and unexpectedly stubborn, "Bullshit! I didn't... I didn't finish it..."
"Silence!" - Agathon rapped his knuckles on the table. A hum rolled through the hut. "One must think in years of built-up..." - His gaze slid to Plissiades, cold and impenetrable. - "Without you for now. Out!" The gesture of his hand toward the door was unmistakable: to Sophia and Miklou. Power closed the circle of judges over the eternal wanderer.
A heavy pause stained the air. Agathon rested his bony fingers on the table in concentration. "Did you get it right..." - his voice, quiet but cutting, enveloped each word, "...Winged Lady: are you not an enemy? Do you hold no grudge against Sophia the strong... nor against our small world?" The old man's eyes shone with the icy curiosity of a nature tracker.
Plissiades slowly opened her eyes. Violet pupils, colder than the cosmic abyss, stared into Agathon's cloudy gaze. The contrast was stark: eternity against the old man's blindness. The corners of her lips barely trembled, weaving a smile of inhuman subtlety - sharper than a razor blade, more dangerous than the winter wind.
"Evil?" - Her voice, silky venom, cut the silence with honed syllables. - "You judge... for the fall? - Violet's gaze slid over the crouched old men, taking in their fear. - For your filthy ground proving to be... harder than my wings?" The last phrase resounded with the resounding cold clang of thrown steel, highlighting the absurdity of their power over their celestial guest. The judges involuntarily cringed.
The elders looked at each other. There was no fear or submission in her words, just icy logic wrapped in silk.
Elder Eremey suddenly plunged his staff into the floor. The ancient wood groaned deafeningly. "We are judged not by the fall..." - his whisper was full of grave coldness, his eyes narrowed into slits of hatred. - "...But the threat." The word carried the age-old mold of fear, a stigma branded on everything unknowable by a sick mind.
"Threat..." - Plissiades' voice, exuding a cold chuckle, froze on the word. She barely moved her bandaged wing. A bright pearlescent drop of blood, like liquid alabaster, protruded through the cloth, falling to the bed with a quiet clinking sound. - "If I were your destroyer..." - violet eyes swept the walls dispassionately, disparaging any structure, "...would I be rotting here with broken bones?" The question hung blade-like over the emptiness of the judge's vulnerability of knowledge.
Silence. Even Agathon froze, as if pressed by an invisible weight.
- I am a guest," she said, her voice suddenly warm, almost human in tone, so unexpected in this gloomy room. - The very guest whom your little Sophia saved from death. Doesn't that act prove that she is... special?
The last word hung in the air, sweet and enveloping, but with the faintest tang of poison. Like the honey in which death lurks. The elders looked at each other, and a low whisper traveled through the hut like a snake, awakening long-forgotten fears in them. Plissiades watched them, her lips trembling slightly in the semblance of a smile. She could see her words penetrating their minds, taking root - first doubt, then fear... and then avid interest. They already wanted to believe.
- What if... - She leaned forward slowly, a cold, almost inhuman gleam in her eyes, "What if I offered you not just life, but power? Not a miserable existence, but power you never dared to dream of?
Agathon froze. The air in the hut became thick and heavy, as if filled with invisible threads, ready to tighten into a noose at any moment. The silence was such that the drop of blood on the floor sounded like the blow of an axe on a scaffold. Blood... Whose was it? No one dared to look.
The door of the hut creaked open like the groaning of a dead man. The three wise men came out, their backs hunched shadows in the morning light.
"Where to?" Mickle burst forward, face contorted with a grimace of disbelief. "The trial?! Is it over?" The voice tore through the silence with a hoarse roar.
Agathon turned through the freezing snowflakes. His faded eyes, heavy as stones on defeated kings, struck Mikl, then slid to Sofia: "Sofia... is free." Then a gesture, chopping the air to Mikl, "And you... Don't touch. Do you hear me? This creature is... not an enemy. Away!" The words coughed out like mud from his throat. Without waiting for objections, the trio moved away, avoiding shelter like a leper's court, their steps heavy and hasty, like fleeing from an unspoken conspiracy.
"Э?!!" Mickle jumped. Rage, dark and blind, boiled in his veins: "Leave it? That... Creature?! I can't!" He lunged for the door, clenching his fists like an arrow for the cause.
But suddenly Yeremey stood before him, a shadow out of the mist. A pitted hand clutched at the staff. Not a word. Only an animal, stony gaze of steel stabbed into the impudent fool. In that dead silence, in that long ago light of the pupils read clearer than a shout: "The decision is made. Try to step. We will slaughter you by right." Mickle froze. His breath was wheezing, his nerves were red hot, but the force of the ancient injunction crushed his anger like a wet thorn....
Sofia stepped timidly across the threshold. The room was flooded with pale light from the window, the only crack in the gloom. Plissiades sat facing the beam, her profile a carved violet mask against the dust. Her soul seemed to hover somewhere in space.
"W-What have they...decided...?" - Sophia's voice was barely audible, trembling on the verge of a hysterical beast's birth cry.
Angel turned her head slowly, as if awakening. Violet eyes, empty and deep as the abysses of the interstellar, met her gaze. "Nothing," the radiant and absolute word rang out with the icy drop of a Gothic statue.
"Nothing?! But what about..." Terror began to sprout.
Plissiades suddenly raised a thin hand, a gesture smooth, almost caressing, but carrying irresistibility. "Come. Sit down." Sophia, like a mesmerized woman, knelt by the bed. Cold, perfect hands took her shoulders, pulled her to the angel's frail body. Sophia's head rested against her neck where the icy whisper of life could be heard. "It's okay, it's okay..." - The angelic voice sounded like a lullaby of metal and stardust. Cold lips touched the girl's hair. Silence. "I'm grateful to you." Each word struck a nerve of honesty.
Tears - hot rivers of relief! - rushed from Sofia, dissolving the hellish stress. Her bones seemed to twitch with happiness, as if playing.
"You're free now," Plissiades pulled away, her gaze once again fixed on the window, on the distant light. Her voice became clear but definitively alien metal of confusion, "And the rest...is up to me." There was no comfort in that promise. Only the mountain wind of the impending Storm.
The memory surfaced in Plissiades' mind with icy clarity. Yeremei, purple with conceit, smashed his wormy staff into the floor:
"Bullshit! Power?" - His voice, hoarse with anger, scorched the air. Rotten teeth grinned in a grimace of contempt. "What's a feathered wreck good for?" He jabbed a bony finger at her bandaged wing, "You can't take a step! You're a miserable burden!"
There was a lingering silence in the hut. Agathon froze, as if sensing the invisible threat of frost, Agathon watched every movement of the angel.
Plissiades only squeezed her fingers lightly. She did not blink. Sparks of absolute contempt ran in her eyes, cold and deep as violet amethyst mines. Let them think of her as a broken toy. Come to that false belief. Sow the seeds of belief in their own triumphant weakness.
'It is now, old men,' she thought, watching Jeremiah's breath wheeze with anger, 'that you yourselves have become the first foundation stone of my new Trojan in history. All they saw was a sick bird. Didn't notice the titanium frame of will beneath the alabaster skin.
"You know..." - Plissiades' voice trailed off as steady as the flow of the star currents. She did not take her gaze away from the flawed window draped in cobwebs. - "Looking through this... slit in your world... I contemplated. Compared the peaks of Aetolonne, the marble peaks beneath the eternal dawn..." Violet eyes squinted, catching ghosts of former grandeur through the dirt of the glass, "...with this swamp of spirit..."
"So what!" - Eremey bellowed, jumping up. The abrupt movement, vulgar, deeply human, rudely intruded on the cosmic sadness.
Plissiades turned her head slowly. Not her body - just her neck, like a swan. A look. One look alone. Ice-cold, absolute, like the necropolis of oblivion. It stabbed into Yeremey, not like a knife, but like the conclusion of his soul. The elder's neck was an unnecessary decoration. His mouth froze in a grimace, his words tripped over an icy barrier. Fear - not tangible, but existential - gripped him. The air in the hut petrified. Even Agathon wrinkled his nose, as if he felt the glow of permafrost from Plissiades' eyes. Silence became a vacuum where Eremey was just ashes on the dusty floor of reality.
The silence in the hut grew thicker as Plissiades paused. Her voice was soft, but each word fell like a stone into standing water, the diverging circles touching the elders' deepest fears and hopes.
- I saw your pain," she began, and the sound of her voice changed suddenly, almost human, but with a metallic tinge, as if the warmth hid an icy calculation. - Saw an old man dying alone. His wife slammed the door shut, as if he had ceased to exist.
Her violet eyes, impenetrable as the night sky, slid slowly over the faces of the elders. They crinkled, some looked away, as if trying to avoid that calm, penetrating gaze.
- I saw children. Your grandchildren, I guess. They were running through the mud, wrapped in rags that no longer protect them from the cold. Their eyes are empty. They don't laugh.
Agathon rubbed the bridge of his nose nervously, and Yeremey clenched his fists, as if trying to suppress something in himself, either shame or anger.
- I've seen your men," Plissiades continued, and now her voice was cold as a blade again. - Strong, healthy. They took the last crust from the weaker ones. Their own.
She froze for a moment, letting those images freeze in front of them like paintings in black frames.
- There's no such thing at Aetolonne.
Her words hung in the air, almost weightless, but they reeked of something unattainably distant and desirable.
- There's no disease that makes you die alone. No hunger that turns a brother into a thief. No children who have forgotten what it means to be happy.
She raised her hand slowly - the gesture was unhurried, almost regal.
- I'm not just offering you help. I'm offering you a future. What is commonplace in my world will be a miracle for you. If you learn, you can cure disease. Embrace my knowledge and you'll never have to take your neighbor's bread again.
Her eyes flashed with icy fire, and for a second it seemed as if stars were twinkling in the depths of the violet abyss.
- Make up your mind. You can kill me. But what difference will it make? Your children will still be running around in the mud. Your old people dying in the dark. And I can give you more than you dare dream of.
She bowed her head as if giving them a final moments to think.
- But the choice has to be made now.
And then the hut was so quiet that you could hear the glass rattling from breathing. The elders looked at each other. Some sighed. Others clenched their hands as if trying to keep from shivering.
They were still afraid. They didn't trust.
But for the first time in years - they wondered if someone could give them something more than just survival.