Elza brushed the night’s snowfall off of her white cloak, part of her standard uniform now that she’d been Paired. It was almost certainly the last snow of the year, and that was something she’d have to deal with. The snow would cease, the ice would melt, and reaching the woods on the lakeshore would become a much more difficult task long before she could afford to stop doing so. Finding some spell to increase the viscosity of the water beneath her feet to some kind of slippery, non-Newtonian fluid would probably be the optimal solution - freezing it and using her go-to heat-skate magic would leave too much thermodynamic evidence behind.
But she supposed that the real answer would be something she didn’t, or couldn’t, know yet.
She had resources she had yet to tap into.
Resources none of her hypothetical pursuers could even guess at.
That speculative superiority made her feel somewhat less terrified than she’d felt that first night, late last December, when she’d struck out into the darkness only to be interrupted by an Angel intercepting something, someone who couldn’t be allowed to live.
She was so much better, so much stronger, than she’d been back then. It hadn’t been long, and her test results hadn’t reflected it, but she’d evolved. She felt secure. The snow crunched beneath her feet.
Her heightened senses could feel the sub-degree increase in temperature in the concrete bunker.
She’d have to scold him for that. Not that it would matter much. But trying was better than not trying.
It still seemed so insanely improbable that she and Alexander had been paired, but maybe that was just the cruelty of the True Church at work. More than two months ago, they’d found this abandoned fortification - though he’d most definitely found it long before - and sequestered the maleficus inside it, to save a man’s life.
Elza traced her fingertips down the pockmarked concrete as she descended, feeling the cold, the sharpness tug at her flesh. If she pushed hard enough, it would rip it away, and she felt more than a little tempted to experiment with that possibility. But she resisted as best she could.
Posters on the walls exhorted resistance against powers that no longer existed. Exalted politics that were no longer viable. Promised a world that could no longer be. She didn’t know when this bunker, or when many of the ruins around Arcadia had been made, and she suspected that no one truly knew. The past on the other side of Midnight was known, and their history was known, but as was implied by the name, the Midnight was a true period of darkness. The indeterminate period of time between the end of the old world and the beginning of the new simply could not be summarized, or even made real. Even just looking at the propaganda extolling the virtues of a France that now only existed in patriotic hallucinations felt like being lied to, to her face. Her respect for truth, for preserving knowledge, was the only thing keeping her from burning such nonsense into ashes.
There were a number of submarine-style hatches she had to open on her way into the inner sanctum, spinning large wheels to cast aside ancient locks. Some of these had been restored by her and Alex on that first night, and the deeper ones had been subject to later excursions. But eventually, food in hand, she reached her destination.
Deep within the earth, many flights of stairs and blast-doors down, she opened the final chamber.
“Hello, Elza,” the maleficus said, softly.
He’d come a long way since that first night, when his organs and bones were a barely-coherent slurry, and he was only alive due to sheer force of will. She and Alex had done an admittedly fine job, which, in retrospect, was fairly shocking - he was so easy to antagonize, but in that moment, and that moment alone, he’d actually gone with the flow and done something useful, rather than desperately chasing his own self-importance, trying to “out-rank” her.
He was smiling, propped up on one elbow on an old cot she’d restored, long, dark hair draped over him. He’d requested that Elza shave his face, but he’d never asked her to cut his hair. He would have done it himself, he explained, but while the large-scale damage done to his organs and brain had been repaired by Elza and Alex’s efforts on that night, the micro-scale damage was extensive, and most of his energy was consumed in keeping his body and mind together, despite diffused axonal damage. Keeping each individual neuron connected magically took a lot of effort, and biologically repairing it took a lot of time. She’d wondered why he kept the hair, and supposed that maybe he wanted some symbol, some evidence, of his struggle. Elza kept a close eye on his hair because of that supposition: If that was the case, and he cut his hair, it would mean that he’d be leaving soon. And she’d lose her chance to learn more about magic in the world outside the True Church.
And more importantly, beyond the long hair, beyond the soft, smiling face, beyond his roughspun clothes that she'd created, behind it all, was the slowly reconstructing crystal of his wings. The clear, glass-like shards in the shape of feathers grew every day, new ones sprouting and expanding from his shoulders.
“Hey Mal,” she said, holding up her take-out bag. In the several weeks before he’d regained consciousness, she’d wondered just what his name was - where he lived - how he had lived - all those sorts of personal details. She’d projected a lot, in retrospect, onto the half-corpse she spoon-fed every night. And when he finally woke, he provided exactly none of those details. Not even a name. So, instead, she took the sobriquet of “Mal” from “maleficus”, the one thing she could conclusively identify him as, and he hadn’t objected. And so, it stuck.
He nodded, and barely reacted in time to catch the bag of food, as Elza hurled it at his face. As much as she wanted to learn from him, she still enjoyed messing with the fact that, with his nervous system still being mostly magically-manual, he had awful reaction times. She didn’t want him to starve, but she still wanted a bit of fun, so-
The disposable fork-spoon combo rebounded off his forehead while he was occupied with the food.
“Hey!” he shouted.
Elza laughed.
And Mal laughed too, arresting the utensil in mid-air with a sudden application of magic, and snatching it with a free hand. He ravenously tore into the take-out bag. She’d stacked as much protein and nutrients as she’d been allowed into it, and while she missed having dinners, he needed food far more than she did. Sacrificing one third of her meals to give him any at all was clearly worth it. Elza could just make up for her lack of physical energy with more magical effort.
In moments between stuffing his face with beans and wheat, he found time to converse.
“So, Elza, how’d today go? Make any progress on your grades?”
Elza found a heretofore un-tapped-into reservoir of shyness, and kicked at her heels. “Not really.”
“Ah,” he said, and didn’t question further. He knew better, at this point.
He’d nearly finished his meal, Elza bringing him cups of water from a tub of accumulated snow-melt, before he cleared his throat to speak again.
“You know,” he said, “you’re going to have to figure out a better way of getting here, and getting back to school. Once the ice melts, they’ll have an easier time tracking you.”
Elza frowned. “I’ve been thinking about it. But won’t you be better by then?”
“Maybe,” the maleficus said. “But say I make a breakthrough on reconstructing my wings. Say I’m ready to leave in a week. Will you be okay with that?’
The word “will”, rather than “would”, tore at Elza’s mind. It sounded less like posing a hypothetical and more like asking for permission. But she did her best to manage herself. “Yeah, I guess…” she said, looking at the floor.
The maleficus snickered at her, mockingly. “Nice lie, Elza. But you want me to stick around. You want to know how I work, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Elza repeated, almost subconsciously, before it felt like she lit on fire. Her chest felt like a storm. She dashed across the room before she knew what she was doing, and grabbed Mal by the collar, yanking him nearly out of his bed. “Of fucking course I want to know how you work!” She shook him with that one hand, the other twitching, barely aborting itself from executing an array of Irinaen symbology. “How the shit did you stand up to an Angel without training?” It was absurd that she’d gone through fourteen years of mind-numbing, psyche-destroying drills and memorization and yet this civilian had managed to survive, albeit barely, an encounter with what she was suffering immensely to become. Her other hand lunged into action, grabbing hold of one of the cold crystals of his nascent wings. “And what the fuck are these wings?” She felt it crunch in her grip, and the maleficus gasped in pain.
“Sorry,” she said, letting go of him suddenly, stepping back and away. She always fucking hurt people, didn’t she?
“It’s okay,” he said, but the anger had flowed back into her again before she even processed his words. “You don’t fucking get it, do you?” she asked, teeth grinding against each other. He shook his head. “I do, Elza. I do.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “You’ve got two choices. Execution for being a maleficus, or a long, happy life without magic. Do you know what my choices are?”
“I-“ the maleficus started, but even he knew that sentence was never going to be allowed to finish.
“I’ve got “execution” or “die young in service to a fucking empire I don’t even understand”, Mal, so you know what? I’m the one getting fucked over here!” she screamed, tears she hated already streaming down her face.
Alexander, meanwhile, was surprised at the fact that he wasn’t scandalized in the least by her foul language. Sure, he’d heard plenty of swearing from Francesca, but he thought that that just came with the territory of her doing so much research into Twilight-Era society. Hearing it from anyone else should have felt like nails on a chalkboard, but at this point, it felt like it was coming from his own mouth, and therefore was, probably, fine.
“I mean, if you don’t understand, I think I can explain anything about the Empire to you, Elza,” Alexander said, dropping Obscuration and suddenly appearing in the middle of the room. “I get that not everyone is going to understand the underlying philosophy, or get the sense of glory, or-“
“What the fuck?” Elza exclaimed.
The maleficus recoiled back in his bed, and raised his hands, fingers splayed, purple tendrils of magic writing spells out in the open air.
The strange experiences of the last day suddenly started making sense to Elza. She hadn’t quite felt like herself, but she couldn’t put her finger on how, or why. She’d felt a little more obedient, a little more aware of her surroundings, a little more submissive. Even going to the restroom, something had felt just a little bit off about the fact that she was sitting down to pee. She’d attributed it to just feeling off - it wasn’t like she was the most psychologically stable person she knew, in fact, she was one of the least, so it all made sense, at least in the sense that it didn’t. But now?
“You’ve been in my mind all day, haven’t you?” she yelled, wheeling around at Alex, sputtering flames from her outstretched fingers. A lingering sense that he was her was, maybe, the only thing keeping her from scorching his entire face off.
“Uh, maybe,” Alex said, awkwardly, not bothering to raise a defense. He looked a little… out of it.
“You bastard!” she exclaimed. She felt her face flushing, half with rage, half with embarrassment. How much had he felt? How much had he seen?
“You do know that I’ve got kill-spells pointed directly at both of your brainstems, right?” the maleficus said.
Alex was in little place to comprehend those words, having only just now been kicked back into his mind by the righteous assertion of Elza’s consciousness melting the magical connection with his blood rune, allowing the cells to finally die, and Elza was in no place to listen.
“Uh,” Alex said, to the best of his abilities.
“Yes,” Elza acknowledged, looking to the maleficus, “and I’m a little fucking busy right now, okay?” She focused back on Alex. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Alexander blunk. It felt almost like he was accusing himself, and while he didn’t feel enough of Elza’s rage to be taken up with it personally, he felt like he deserved it, and should honestly and truly explain his thought process. “I was worried that you were cheating on me,” he said, earnestly.
Elza squinted so hard she felt like her face might become a gravitational singularity. “What?”
Alex was re-establishing the connections to his own emotions and memories too slowly for them to inform his response, but he continued anyway. “I was worried you were, uh… getting intimate with another student.”
“Wha-“ Elza said, and the maleficus laughed. His spells, however, still developed.
“That wouldn’t have been good for either of us, Elza,” Alexander explained. “It would really impair our development as Angels, and-“ Alex trailed off.
Elza stared at him, confused.
The maleficus stared at him, relatively sure of what was happening. The air hummed with magical exertion.
SNAP.
Alexander blinked. He was suddenly, fully, entirely back within his own mind, in command of his own thoughts, without a single bit of Elza within him.
“WHY IS HE HERE?” Alexander yelled.
The maleficus laughed. “Oh boy, I think it just hit him.”
“Yeah, it did,” Alex said, dismissively. “Elza!”
She refocused her eyes on him. She still hadn’t lowered her hands, and while those initial flames had sputtered out, the air in front of her fingertips still warped and crackled with the influence of her mind.
“Oh, stop with that,” Alex said, like he was scolding a disobedient child. He swatted her outstretched hands away.
This only enraged her further, and she lunged for his throat. He didn’t bother to dodge.
“You lied to me!” he gasped.
“Yes,” Elza said, “and?” She kept pushing into him, and he kept stumbling backwards, trying to relieve the pressure on his throat, but ran his back into a cold concrete wall before accomplishing anything of the sort.
He honestly wasn’t sure if this was better or worse than his suspicions. “You gave your word!”
The corners of Elza’s mouth turned up in what might, charitably, be called a smile, if she wasn’t contorted in the effort of choking Alex. “What’s the value of “my word” against a life, Alex?”
He was rapidly running out of air, and as such, struggled to respond. When Elza noticed, she, oddly enough, let go. Alex slumped, sucking in fast breaths.
“Come on, Alex. Answer me,” she said, coldly.
He braced himself against his knees, and looked up at her. “I told you. It’s more complicated than that, and we need-“ he coughed again, “adults who know better to help us.”
Elza’s lip trembled. “Who says they know better?”
Alex would have answered that, but- “You’re not just dragging yourself down, you understand that, right?”
“Yeah, I do,” Elza said, defiantly. “I’m starting to like that part.”
“Oh for God’s sake-“ Alex started.
The maleficus cleared his throat loudly. “May I get a word in?”
They both turned. The maleficus had levered himself off his makeshift bed, and, magic still humming and crackling around him, directed, quite clearly, at the two of them, stood up. He wore a simple robe and trousers, but that just drew more attention to his half-made crystalline wings, which cracked and shuddered as he stretched. "Is this the Alex you've mentioned, Elza?
“What?” Elza sputtered.
“What?” Alex said, simultaneously. It was absurd that Elza wasn't just protecting, but consorting with a dangerous heretic. But here they were, and she'd apparently brought him up, too.
The maleficus shrugged, and winced as the natural motion rubbed malformed crystals on his back against each other. “I mean, you Angels are supposed to be in pairs, right? And you two are Paired? Am I getting the terminology right?”
“Yes,” Alex answered instinctively.
“Thought so. You two are working together about as well as three gears meshed in a triangle, and unlike you True Church types, I see people being wrong as something to fix, not punish.”
“We’re not like that,” Alex protested. “We-“
“Save who we can, and purge who we can’t?” Elza said. That was, as far as Alex was concerned, correct. “How does that feel for those we can’t save?”
Alex didn’t know what to say to that. Empathy for the fallen was good, and even pious, but the more you had, the more pain it brought. There had to be a cutoff point. Thankfully, his indignant anger at being lied to so blatantly took back over. “You’ve ruined us, Elza.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, taking her eyes off the maleficus.
“Yeah!” Alex shouted. “There’s no good ending to this! We’re going to die. Either he kills us, or-“
“You both get executed for protecting and preserving a maleficus?” the maleficus offered.
Alex pointed at him. “Exactly!”
“Only if we get caught,” Elza added.
“WE?” Alex took several slow, deep breaths, trying something, anything to calm himself down.
“If I did nothing,” Elza said, “He would have been killed.”
“AND?” Alex yelled.
The maleficus gave Alex a mock pout.
“No offense,” Alex said.
“None taken,” the maleficus said, smiling. “And, while this little spat is more entertainment than I usually see down here, I must ask that the both of you listen to me.” The last words echoed unnaturally around the room.
“You-“ he looked to Alex - “Want to kill me.”
“Turn you in to the authorities,” Alex corrected.
“Same thing,” the maleficus said. “You-“ he looked to Elza - “Want to keep me alive. I get where both of you are coming from, but I, being me, and being alive, have to argue in favor of still being alive and free. Surely you understand my position, Alexander.”
Alex nodded.
“Good. At least you’re acting like I’m a human being. That’s a surprisingly high bar to pass for a lot of Angels, though the one who broke, uh…” The maleficus looked down at himself for a moment. “Well, all of my bones, did. He’s a good lad. Geoffrey, I think his name was? I probably could have killed him, but he was so earnest. Conversational, even. I hesitated. So all of this is on me, really.”
“Anyway,” he said, “You’ve got three options.”
“Yeah?” Alex said.
The maleficus nodded. “One, you leave me alone. Act like today never happened. Elza keeps bringing me food, and you do your best to forget everything you saw here.”
“I-“ Alex started. Nothing would improve. In fact, everything would just get worse. They’d grow further and further apart, and Alex would have a secret rotting in his heart. And Elza would be alone in handling this whole… situation. As much as he opposed everything about this, he also hated this gnawing feeling of jealousy in his chest that came from being left out of the loop on something so important to his own Pair. This was about as far from how things were supposed to be as he could get.
The maleficus saw Alex’s jaw hanging open, and took his silence as a response. “Yeah, thought that wouldn’t work for you. Option two - well, we’ve got two option twos.”
“What are those?” Elza asked.
“Glad you asked,” the maleficus said, smiling. “Two point one: I kill the both of you, right here, right now, and have to get out of here within the space of a couple hours.” Alex’s skin crawled at how casually he said it, though Elza seemed unaffected. “I think I might live through that,” the maleficus speculated. “Between the damage you’ll incur on me, and the panic caused by two students disappearing, I’ll have to be really good, but I think I can get to one of the maleficus transit networks in time.”
“Maleficus transit networks?” Alex said in disbelief. That there could be substantial material support for malefici this deep within Christendom beggared belief.
“Yeah,” the maleficus said. “You can’t just expect people, given the power to change their world, to not try to. It doesn’t often work out well, usually because you people hunt us down, but the moral option for a lot of people is to protect us. Hence, maleficus protection and transportation networks. Even though there’s dozens and dozens of different schools of training and philosophy when it comes to magic, we’ve all got common needs and dangers we have to reckon with.”
“And option two point two?” Elza asked.
The maleficus smiled at her. “I could just kill Alex. I can tell he’s a tough cookie, but with your help, I think we could handle him without either of us taking too much damage.”
Elza, much to Alex’s alarm, mulled this over. “Yeah, true. But how would we explain his absence?”
The maleficus laughed. “That’s your problem. I mean, realistically, it’d be both our problem, but-“
“We’d die,” Elza said, flatly.
“Oh, come on,” the maleficus said, “we could handle it.”
“We couldn’t. There’s someone-“
“Ooooh, yeah,” the maleficus interrupted. “I forgot about that, my bad.”
Alex blinked. “What the Hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Elza snapped.
“Yeah, she’s still figuring that one out,” the maleficus said, before being told by Elza to “Shut up.” He pulled his thumb and forefinger across his lips, miming zipping them shut.
Alex didn’t like option one, and found that he liked both permutations of option two even less. “So… What’s option three?”
"Well," the maleficus said, leaning back in his bed, "something mutually beneficial, I think."
Elza squinted at him, but said nothing.
"Oh?" Alex said.
The maleficus looked deep into Alex's eyes. Alex looked back as best he could, trying to discern in the deep blue of the maleficus's irises, what kind of person he was.
"Everyone in your school, in your whole society, breaks the rules, don't they?" the maleficus asked.
A week ago, Alex would have thought this an insane assertion. But now? Between the things Francesca had told him, and what he'd done in the last few days to track Elza, he no longer had clean hands, and he wasn't sure he knew anyone who did.
"... Yes." he said, begrudgingly.
Elza shot him a surprised look.
"Do you think it's fair that someone like you, who's tried so hard to obey the rules, is at an inherent disadvantage?" the maleficus said. "You were never told that the rules weren't the real rules."
A pit formed in Alex's stomach. As bad as his fear that Elza had been "cheating", whatever that meant, he'd been avoiding confronting the thought that he'd drastically misread his world. That the best of the best were operating on assumptions completely foreign to him.
That, at the most fundamental level, he'd been lied to.
"It's not fair," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Don't you want to break the rules better than them?" the maleficus asked.
"Mal, I don't know if this is a good-" Elza started, but Alex's response was inevitable.
"... Yes," he said.
His answer sat there in silence for a few long moments, pierced only by the repetitious drip of groundwater leaking through a crack in the concrete somewhere deep within the bunker.
Elza sidled over to him, slowly, and then, grabbed his hand in hers. She stuck her fingers between his, and held his hand so tightly it would have hurt, well, if Alex wasn't swept up fully in the moment.
"Don't you dare let go," she whispered in his ear, and then turned to the maleficus. "Are you saying... I mean, will you...?"
The maleficus nodded. "Option three is that in exchange for you not reporting me, and for helping me recover, I teach you what I know of magic, and of what your masters don't want you to know. We know of your curriculum, and what they try to control and withhold, and therefore, I can teach you things that none of your peers will know. You're both clearly skilled, and with the knowledge I can grant you, you can surpass your peers - Elza's told me that you've both fallen quite far behind your classmates."
Elza's mouth hung open.
Hours and days ago, this would have been an incomprehensible offer, something Alexander could never accept, something that even thinking about would have him running to a confessional. But he was gaining an intense awareness of just how far behind he was falling. And he was a holy man. He could be resilient against whatever corruption, whatever terrible things might lay at the heart of the maleficus's magic, and maybe, just maybe, learn something useful from it all. There was even a precedent for integrating non-Angelic magic into one's repetoire - some students, Alexander included, had a cursory knowledge of the Demetrian Order's school of magic, and while it was drastically different from their own, it still informed and elevated Alex's understanding of magic as a whole.
This was an opportunity.
This was a path to becoming not just great, but the best.
"Yes," Alex and Elza said, at the same time.
"Good," the maleficus said, and levered himself slowly off his cot, bringing himself to his feet with great effort. "We generally know your curriculum, and how you work. We can't re-create you Angels, of course - but we can, and do, adapt your teachings to humans as best we can, so I should be able to take off from where the two of you should be in your development."
Alex wanted to inquire about how such sensitive information had been leaked to the lay public, but instead, a word the maleficus said demanded his attention. "Adapt to humans?" he asked.
The maleficus shrugged with a little snort that felt like a quarter of a laugh. "Do you think anyone outside of Arcadia thinks of you Angels as human beings?"
Alex didn't know how to process this, or even begin to think about it. He squeezed Elza's hand, and she squeezed back.
"Anyway," the maleficus said, "Let's start the first lesson, shall we?"