The world below was a tapestry of shadows and embers, but above the clouds, the moonlight was blindingly silver. Alaric's wings beat with a rhythmic, heavy sound—woosh, woosh—as he glided through the cold, thin air. Evelyn's weight against his back was the only thing keeping him grounded to his humanity.
"You're shaking," Evelyn said, her voice muffled by the wind. She tightened her grip around his waist.
"It's the cold," Alaric lied. In truth, it was the adrenaline wearing off, leaving behind a hollow ache in his chest where his soul used to be. "And the weight. My body... it feels like it's made of lead."
"That's the transformation settling into your marrow," she explained calmly. "Your bones are becoming hollower but stronger, like a bird's, yet the Chimera's muscle density is triple that of a human. Your mind is struggling to calibrate."
Alaric slowed his pace, caught in a thermal draft that allowed them to drift silently. He looked at his hands—the gauntlets were gone, lost in the escape, revealing fingers that ended in sharp, blackened nails. "Why did you choose me, Evelyn? There were hundreds of dying soldiers on that battlefield. You could have saved anyone."
Evelyn was silent for a long moment. Alaric thought she wouldn't answer, but then he felt her forehead rest against the cold steel of his shoulder blade.
"Because you were the only one who didn't pray," she whispered. "I watched you for an hour before your heart stopped. Every other Paladin was crying out to a God who wasn't listening. But you... you just stared at the sky with spite. You were too angry to die. I needed that anger. A weak soul would have been consumed by that heart in seconds."
Alaric closed his eyes. He remembered that moment—the feeling of being abandoned by the Light he had served for twenty years. "So I'm just a vessel for your experiment? A tool that was too stubborn to break?"
"At first, yes," Evelyn admitted with a brutal honesty that stung more than the cold. "But now... you are the only thing in this world that knows what I am and hasn't tried to burn me yet."
She reached around and placed a vial of blue liquid in his hand. "Drink. This will soothe the fever. We have a long flight ahead, and the Dead Marshes do not welcome the weak."
Alaric took the vial, looking at the witch through the reflection of the glass. They were two outcasts, stitched together by sin and survival, soaring through a sky that no longer had a place for them.
"If we survive this," Alaric said, his voice dropping to a low rumble, "I want to know the truth about the laboratory I saw in my vision."
Evelyn didn't pull away. "Then survive, Alaric. Survive long enough to make me tell you."