Caelum had been avoiding looking at her.
Which, for him, was already an admission.
Liora moved through the city with an unassuming steadiness—like someone who had learned to step into danger without ever naming it as such. She listened carefully. She knelt when others stood. She placed herself between fear and consequence without realizing she'd done it until it was already over.
None of that was unusual.
What unsettled him was the pull.
Not recognition—not at first. Something quieter. Something deeper. A sensation like a memory refusing to stay buried, pressing upward through centuries of restraint.
He hovered unseen above the rooftops as she calmed a frightened child, her voice low and steady. The tilt of her head. The faint crease between her brows when concern outweighed caution.
There.
That angle.
His breath stilled.
"…No," he murmured.
He reached inward—not with power, but with memory, brushing against something he had sealed away long ago.
And the past answered.
---
He remembered light.
Not the blinding, sanctified brilliance the hymns insisted upon—but the softer glow of eternity before it hardened into doctrine. He remembered long conversations that had no witnesses. Disagreements that did not end in judgment. Laughter that was allowed to exist without meaning.
He remembered her.
She had been thoughtful where others were absolute. Gentle where others were sharp. She questioned orders in private and obeyed them in public—not out of fear, but out of hope that obedience could still be shaped into mercy.
They had been friends.
Not allies forged by shared cause.
Not rivals sharpened by ideology.
Friends.
And when the decree came—when exile was declared necessary, inevitable, correct—she had been the one ordered to carry it out.
Not because she wished to.
Because she was trusted.
He remembered the tremor in her hands as she raised her spear. The way she could not meet his eyes when judgment was spoken aloud. The apology she whispered, meant for him alone, swallowed by the roar of righteousness.
She cast him out.
Unwillingly.
But she did cast him out.
He understood why.
That did not mean it did not hurt.
---
The memory bled into the present.
Caelum's gaze returned to Liora.
The resemblance was not perfect. Humanity had softened her. Mortality had rounded edges heaven kept sharp. Time had added warmth where eternity demanded clarity.
But the soul—
The soul carried echoes.
"So," he said quietly, the word heavy with realization, "that's where you went."
He felt no anger.
No fury.
Only the dull, persistent ache of betrayal that never quite faded, even when understanding dulled its sharpest edges.
"You obeyed," he murmured to the long-dead memory. "I know why. I always knew."
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"But knowing does not erase consequence."
Below, Liora brushed dust from her hands and smiled faintly at something Aiden said—awkward, earnest, human. She stood a little closer to him than necessary, protective without intending to be.
The same instinct her mother had carried.
The same refusal to step aside.
"She was yours," Caelum said softly. "And you never knew."
He watched Liora move, unaware that an ancient grief had just found its shape.
"She died the way angels who refuse extremes always do," he continued, voice barely more than thought. "Between sides. Between certainty and doubt. Between heaven and hell."
In the space where mercy is punished by both.
---
He straightened, wings shifting imperceptibly in the unseen air.
Corruption recoiled from Liora because heaven still remembered her blood. Because something in her carried authority without permission. Because the war had never quite finished erasing what it failed to control.
"Well," Caelum muttered dryly, the familiar edge returning to his voice, "that explains several inconveniences."
He paused.
"And why I don't intend to see you broken."
That admission surprised him.
He accepted it anyway.
---
Below, Liora shivered faintly and glanced around.
"Did you feel that?" she asked quietly.
Aiden blinked. "Feel what?"
"I don't know," she said after a moment. "Like someone… remembered me."
Aiden smiled gently. "You're probably just tired."
She nodded, unconvinced.
Above them, Caelum turned away.
He would not interfere.
He would not explain.
This knowledge was his burden alone.
But he would watch.
Because heaven had taken enough from him.
Because hell had taken more.
And because this living echo—this daughter of a woman who had once been kind, loyal, and unwilling—
This, he would not allow to be wasted by a war that never learned restraint.
Not by mortals.
Not by gods.
Not by the past.
---
Far below, the city continued to argue, fracture, and choose sides.
But for Caelum, something had shifted.
Not strategically.
Personally.
And that, he knew, was far more dangerous than any open conflict.
---