Chapter 191: I met Ophaniel

Seraphel

I held onto Azriel for far longer than I should have, long enough that the entire hall fell silent around us.

"Are you quite finished?" Sariel asked eventually. "Some of us were in the middle of something. None of us particularly wish to watch the two of you carry on like this. Perhaps you should find a room."

I let go and stepped back, wiping my face roughly with the back of my hand, and only then did I take in the room properly.

Pazuzu still had one arm wrapped around Luceriel’s waist.

Tobias was still rubbing at his throat where fingers had been closed around it minutes ago.

Every single one of them was exactly where I remembered, exactly as they had been, and not one of them had any idea that I had already watched them lose this war.

"Seraphel," Azriel said gently, both hands framing my face now. "What happened to you? You went pale and simply stopped speaking."

"I saw someone." My voice still would not steady itself. "I need all of you to listen to me, and I need you to not interrupt until I am finished, because I do not know how to explain any of this in a way that will make sense."

Luceriel pulled free of Pazuzu’s arm and straightened his robes. "Then begin."

I took a breath.

"I met Ophaniel."

The reaction was immediate.

Raizel’s fan stopped mid-motion. Taizel set his goblet down so hard the base cracked against the table. Uriel rose halfway out of his seat before he seemed to realize he had done it.

"That is not possible," Luceriel said flatly.

"He came to me while I was unconscious. He said it was the last of what he had left, that he is already dead, and that he has spent centuries trying to reach all of you and never once managed it." I looked around at them, at seven faces holding seven different versions of the same expression.

"He said he is bound to stay away from you because of what he did. He could not reach you through dreams, or through anything else. But he reached me, because I am tied to Azriel, and through him, to the rest of you."

"Convenient," Sariel said. "A dead father appears to the one person in this room whose account cannot be verified by anyone."

"Sariel," Uriel warned.

"No, he has a point," I said. "I cannot prove it. I would not believe me either." I turned toward Azriel, because this was the part I had been dreading since the light took me. "He asked me to tell you something."

Azriel had gone very still.

"He said he never meant to abandon you." The words came out thinner than I wanted them to. "He said to tell you he loves you. Every one of you."

Nobody spoke.

Lumiel’s sword slid slowly off his shoulder and came to rest point-down against the stone floor, and he did not pick it up again.

Taizel stared at the cracked base of his goblet as though it had become the most fascinating object in the room, turning it slowly between his fingers without once lifting it. "That is the worst thing I have ever heard in a long time."

Raizel snapped his fan closed and folded both hands in his lap, and for the first time since I had met him, he had absolutely nothing to say.

It was Uriel who broke first.

"He said that," Uriel repeated. His voice had gone strange and careful. "Those exact words."

"Those exact words."

"Then he is a coward twice over," Sariel said, and there was nothing amused left in him at all. "Once for leaving, and once for waiting until he was dead to say anything about it."

"He does not deserve to be heard at all," Taizel muttered.

"He said it anyway," I answered. "I am not telling you it means something. I am telling you it happened."

And Azriel simply looked at me, his crimson eyes unreadable in a way I had almost never seen from him.

"He does not get to say that," Azriel said quietly.

"I know."

I let out a long breath, already aware that none of them were going to take it the way Ophaniel had hoped. He had been a terrible father, and no amount of dying changed that.

"He does not get to vanish for centuries and then send those words through you, of all people, as though that costs him anything at all." Azriel’s hands had dropped from my face at some point. I had not noticed when. "Do you know how many years I spent waiting for him? Not hoping. Waiting. There is a difference, and I learned it very young. He left his children to suffer through torture that lasted lifetimes, and when they finally cast us down out of that realm, where exactly was he then?"

"Azriel—"

"And now he is dead, and he is sorry, and I am expected to hold that." He let out a breath that shook slightly on the way out. "I am not going to hold that."

"I know. I am not asking you to." I reached for his hand and he let me take it, though his fingers stayed loose around mine. "I am only telling you what he said, because he asked me to, and because he is not coming back to say it himself. What you do with it is yours."

Azriel clenched his jaw, but he did not answer.

"Is that all he came to tell you?" Luceriel asked, and there was something carefully flat in his voice, the sound of a man holding something down with both hands. "Sentiment?"

"No." I straightened. "He came to warn me. Draca is already awake."

That got their attention faster than anything else had.

"Impossible," Tobias said hoarsely. "The seal—"

"The seal is broken. It has been broken for a while now." I turned toward Pazuzu, who had not said a single word since I started speaking, and who was now watching me with an intensity that made my skin prickle. "You told them his body was destroyed, that only his soul was sealed. You were right. He has been searching for a vessel ever since, and he has found one. He is coming here, and he is bringing the seven lords with him, and every single one of them will be wearing the face of someone we have already buried."

"What?" Lumiel’s voice cut sharp across the chamber.

"Their own bodies were sealed away with his. They can only return inside the dead." I made myself say the rest of it. "One of them will be wearing the face of Kaevian."