Azazel

He fell for seven days. His wings burned, turning to ash that trailed behind him like a black trail. By the time he crashed into the mud of a roadside ditch, the heavens had already slammed shut behind him like a trapdoor.

His name was Azazel. He had once been the guardian of the morning star. And then—he heard silence. Not the silence between notes, but absolute. A silence in which God had not answered for a thousand years. And it broke him faster than any curse.

He began speaking to the shadows. He commanded the wind to sing hymns. He smashed the harps of all the choirs because they were out of tune. He was overthrown the day before he tried to open the gates of the Underworld to ask them if they heard his voice.

Now he lay in the roadside dust, laughing convulsively at the sky from which he had been thrown. Laughing at himself, at the gods, at the fact that his eternity was worth exactly as much as this trash on his cheek.

She found him at dawn. A girl with a basket of herbs, thin, with frightened eyes, but she didn't run away. She squatted down and touched his forehead.

"You have a fever," she said, not seeing his wings (they became invisible to mortals when they burned). "Come on. I'll give you some water."

He looked at her with a mad, pure gaze, and for the first time in a thousand years he stopped laughing.

• Aren't you afraid that I'll kill you?

She shrugged, helping him to his feet.

"You can't even stand up on your own. How are you going to kill me?"

And he followed her, because there was more warmth in her voice than in all the choirs of heaven put together.