There had always been a Seraphina in between realms. She was created—carved from light and melody, formed in the still moments before time itself began—rather than born. Her wings were enormous and glistened with a silver-blue light that was invisible to human sight. Every feather held a memory of a life she had never experienced, such as the sound of a newborn's sobs, the first rays of summer heat, or the pain of unrequited love. Angels served as observers, balancers, and protectors of the invisible. They did not linger, they did not hesitate, and they did not desire.
Nevertheless, even Seraphina—immortal, limitless, and radiant—saw the initial twinge of an odd, indescribable tug. Seraphina had never known hunger. She had never known cold. She had never known fear.
She had known eternity. She had known light. She had known the gentle pull of stars in motion, the slow and precise rhythm of the universe as it turned beneath her wings. Each feather shimmered with the memory of worlds she had never touched, the echoes of lives she had never lived. She had been made to watch, to witness, to hold the balance of everything that existed between heaven and earth. And in that watching, she had felt nothing but serenity.
Something stirred inside her tonight that she was unable to identify. An anguish that was sharper than the edge of the universe and deeper than eternity, a pull she had never experienced before. It was strange, unclear, and indisputable. It encircled and squeezed the heart she does not genuinely have.
Unseen and untouchable, she loomed over the city like a silent god. The rain-soaked streets beneath her were dimly illuminated by the neon lights of passing cars and signs. Ignorant of the chaos that may tear through their nights, humans went about their brief, transitory lives. From the brittle bliss of first love to the horrific fall of civilizations, she had witnessed innumerable lives. She had witnessed grief, death, and despair. She had never longed for one soul.
Until him.
He moved like a shadow and flame. He did not belong, not in the way humans belonged, there was something magnetic about him, a pull that drew her eyes and held them, made the air around her taut. She had seen killers before, predators who lurked in the dark. But they were simple, blunt, obvious. He was something else—calculated, subtle, alive in a way that frightened and fascinated her.
Seraphina felt the first tremor of something mortal inside her—curiosity, yes, but something deeper, warmer, impossible to name. She should have turned away. She should have remained a guardian, a witness, detached and untouchable. But she could not.
She felt herself stretching, folding, expanding. Her wings itched with the energy of something forbidden. She had been made to be eternal, to float above desire, to move through time without attachment. And yet she found herself drawn to him as if he were gravity itself.
The thought frightened her.
She had known the rules once. She had known order. She had known the serene detachment of the divine. She had never faltered. And now, sitting on the edge of the night, wings folded like Armor around her, she realized that she was faltering.
Her hands, pale and luminous even in human guise, tightened into fists. Not from fear—but from the unbearable tension of wanting something she could not have, a pull toward a mortal being who existed in darkness as much as in light.
Seraphina had spent centuries watching humans cling to one another, desperate for love, desperate for connection, desperate for warmth in the face of chaos. She had understood it from afar, analytically, as one studies a phenomenon in a lab. But now she felt it—not in theory, not in observation, but in her bones, in the tremor of her wings, in the echo of her heartbeat, which should not exist at all. He did not know she was watching him. Perhaps he never would. He was too consumed by his own dark brilliance to notice the presence of something beyond him, something that shimmered like a star in the empty night. And yet, the pull grew stronger. Every calculated movement, every flicker of his eyes across the street, every curve of his smile—it called to her, reckless and impossible.