The Pursuit: Part 1

Soft clouds, gentle winds, gold-lined buildings, and the scent of nectar in the air. Oh, it was all so sickeningly familiar. The Heavenly Embassy was a clear imitation of the meadow all cherubuns hailed from. But it lacked one figure that made the entire illusion crumble. No Melangel. No heavenly guardian hovering over her shoulder, keeping accounts of rights and wrongs, chastising their charges – no one to keep them under control. The closest equivalent was Primrose.

Oh yes, Rook remembered old Prim. Her recent head trauma hadn’t impacted her memories. She recognized him as soon as she pushed through the door of main Embassy building, standing at attention like a dutiful soldier at his station. His perfectly coiffed hair, his golden plate of a halo, the disdainful sneer on his porcelain face, were unchanged from when both of them were still trapped in Melangel’s garden. Apparently, by the glare that overcast his features, he recognized her too.

“I wish I could say I’m surprised to see you down here,” he’d said, sunshine-bright but ice-cold eyes scanning her up and down.

Rook looked fresh from the meadow. She still wore the humble robes that Melangel often dressed her charges in, which had always seemed to hang so awkwardly on her scrawny frame. She was still barefoot, her feet roughed up by their first encounter with Burrowgatory’s sharp rocks, unused to anything but clouds and soft grass. Rook bore a few new features, signs that she’d had a rough entry into Burrowgatory: the scar on her lip, tattered feathers, bruised limbs, and when Primrose slipped behind her to make sure the hands behind her back weren’t holding any stolen objects, he noticed an unhealed wound on the back of her head.

That was why she was here. She needed ambrosia to ensure it closed up properly. Didn’t want her noggin juices leaking all over the pretty sidewalks, she said, clearly relishing Primrose’s wince of disgust. Of course, she had no money to pay for the ambrosia. No need to worry, Primrose insisted, she could work off her debt by doing a few simple chores around the Embassy.

“I thought charity was a virtue.” Rook teased, leaning herself on Primrose’s desk. Her scarred smirk revealing her missing canine tooth.

“Keeping you busy is charity,” Primrose snapped back.

He gave her the ambrosia and sent her on her way. He would never be so rude as to slam a door, but Rook still knew it closed awfully quickly once she’d passed the threshold back out of the building. Poor Prim. He should have known she wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of.

For all her faults, Rook kept her end of a bargain. She’d pay off her debt in the Heavenly Embassy’s greenhouse, planting seeds for the ambrosia plants that kept fallen cherubuns like her healthy even in hell.

The work was easy. All cherubuns learned to plant ambrosia seeds back in the meadow, and even in this new place, Rook performed the task as adeptly as a concert pianist at her keys, fingers flying from seed to spade to soil. Not exactly the most glamorous task, then or now, but she found a use in it beyond placating Primrose. She always found it easier to think when her hands were busy. Her tongue probed the new hole in her gums, feeling for a tooth that was no longer there, knocked out after she fell from the Heavenly Meadow. Its absence was a pleasant reminder that she had changed herself forever. There was no going back home. Thank heavens. Thank hell.

As she turned over soil in a pot, tucking an ambrosia seed into a bed of damp earth, she turned Primrose’s words over in her mind. What had he meant by saying that funny little phrase – keeping her busy being charity?

Granting her the privilege of hard work? Melangel always insisted that serving one’s community was a gift, and virtue ought to be a pleasure. Primrose clearly adhered to those old platitudes, despite his change on scenery. But no, the way he’d said it had been with venom, not the holier-than-thou pedagogy of Melangel’s instructions. Perhaps – perhaps the charity hadn’t been meant for her.

A smile cracked her face. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, Melangel had told all her charges. Few cherubuns seemed to understand what it meant -- because it wasn’t meant for them. They were the good ones, the ones that had been so shaped by the comforts of the meadow and Melangel’s influence that they would never dream of sin. But others weren’t so virtuous. Some came out like Rook. Melangel had to keep those black sheep occupied, lest they break from the herd. Lest they get ideas. Lest they act on them.

Too late for that.

The seeds had already been planted. Nothing to do now but see how they’d grow.