Page 92 of Glass Wings
The butter sizzled in the ceramic pan, drowning out the faint sound of Hadley’s cries, melting Amis’ stress away as if he were in the pan himself.
Several minutes later, he had two beautiful yet simple plates in his hands and walked over to Hadley to serve them. He sat beside her, picked up his sandwich, and took a large bite. The bread crunched, and the cheese oozed; he understood why this seemed to bring her some small amount of bliss.
“For you,” Amis said as he pushed Hadley’s plate closer to her. She hadn’t moved when he sat beside her, her head buried in her folded arms across the counter. He watched her back tense after he had spoken to her until finally, she raised her head to peer out at him and, of course, the sandwich.
“How do you expect me to eat when I just watched someone be eaten?” she asked in a hushed voice.
Fair point.
She didn’t break eye contact, hers red from crying.
“What did I do to deserve this? I just wanted to go home,” she continued. “How can you work for a monster like him? What do you gain from all of this?”
Amis was aware of another presence in the background, Sheng likely hovering in the hallway, listening.
Hadley sat up a little more, pulling the plate in towards her.
“That’s my girl,” Amis smirked at her, trying his best to be kind. According to Sheng, all of their lives were in this child’s hands. He didn’t like it, but he would take care of her.
“I belong to no one,” she whispered.
He watched her, frowning at the sandwich, contemplating. More tears fell freely, decorating the plate. Her eyes gazed out the window,life draining from them. A harder shell formed, a new sense of numbness, right before his very eyes.
She pulled the sandwich apart and took a bite from each side’s middle section.
“Should I be scared?” she asked, licking the remaining butter off her fingers once the last bit of crust was eaten.
“I’ve been scared for most of my life,” he answered. “I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.”
With the girlsleeping off her grief in her bed, door locked from the outside, Amis already felt regret for what he was now expected to do. Confronting Arryn about this, about Reign’s fate and his daughter in wedlock, sounded like his own death sentence.
I hate my life.
He did the best he could to block out the sounds and visuals of the Kinnari woman being chewed on, her voiceless scream reaching no one. Truthfully, it brought him back to that horrible day, the day that decided the rest of his life, the day that Tristan was attacked.
Amis left the house, passing several Vrae in their human form, hooded cloaks down and revealing their faces, all the more beautiful and relaxed after Reign’s slaughter.
He couldn’t count on his fingers how often they stared at him like a roasted leg of lamb. His blood chilled whenever he was surrounded by them all in the ceremony room—which was far more often than he would have liked.
Now, however, they ignored him. They were satiated, and it made his stomach turn.
Amis walked out to the backyard and stripped off his shirt, letting his wings bloom from his back. He mentally prepared for the long, grueling flight to his childhood home, to the temple that he had not been back to since, praying that they would leave their creator's realm with their lives.
The Kinnari male took flight, taking no precautions against being spotted, yet quickly disappearing into his ascent.
The next time he landed,his shoes were heavily soaked as they plunged into deep, powdery snow. His hands showed signs of frostbite, blue and black in the fingers, as if he were a corpse.
Amis cursed the fact that his wings made it so impractical to dress for inclement weather.
“Would it be too much to ask to be comfortable?” he muttered under his breath while looking at the mountains of snow before him, trying to decipher exactly which spot covered the door.
With all his misery, Amis found himself sticking his hands into the snow piles, feeling the temple's solidness but not the entrance's etching. Finally, after going elbow-deep, he felt the latch and began to dig in that spot.
Should he knock? He didn’t live here. What was the protocol?
Amis used his shoes, as his hands might have fallen off if he were too much rougher with them to pound on the stone. After impatiently waiting for an entire three or four seconds, he gave up and lifted the latch, again using his right foot, balancing rather poorly on his left, considering he was supposed to be a divine, graceful creature.
“This is just so impractical, Arryn,” he muttered, as if any of them had a choice of where their consciousness began. Arryn did have a choice to move to a tropical beach, though, and if he were Allienna, Amis would have probably left this hellish snowscape, too.
