There is a silence that precedes the scream—not the absence of noise, but the stillness of awe and dread, when the world knows what is coming but has not yet named it. Samael existed in that silence now.
He did not dream. He could not. Dreams require wholeness. Instead, he observed, tethered in shadow, cast out of time, soul-fractured and hollow-eyed. The ritual that gave him his eyes had not ended the torment—it had simply opened the door wider. Now he saw too much. Not only what was, but what could be, and what should not have ever been.
The future writhed around him in serpent coils—possibilities like broken mirrors, reflections of reflections. Some showed him flying. Others, falling. And in too many, he saw death not as an end, but as a second birth.
But before those fates, there was the man—again. Always the man.
Ekrizdis had not slept. His robes hung in tatters, his eyes sunk like dying stars. But his magic pulsed stronger than ever, drawn from grief and obsession and something fouler still. Around him, a new ritual circle burned—lines drawn in blood that refused to dry. A smaller ring glowed within it, and upon that ring, Samael's body lay unmoving.
The soul inside watched—half foreign, half native, neither whole.
The man's voice cracked the air.
"Form is not yet finished. The shell breathes, but it does not move. We have given it sight. Now we give it absence. We give it dominion over the unseen."
He raised a silken bundle—grey, thin, translucent.
Demiguise fur.
Samael's soul recoiled.
No more.
The last ritual had burned away pieces of both selves. The eyes still pulsed with power. But they saw too much. The walls bled secrets. Time folded in corners. The man had looked at Samael and seen only success—but Samael had seen himself from within and without, a paradox made flesh.
Now the flesh would be unseen.
The fur unraveled in the air like mist. The strands shimmered, weightless, and danced through the chamber like falling snow. Ekrizdis chanted softly, hands weaving the fur strand by strand into the scalp, binding it with spells of concealment and stillness. Not merely invisibility—but erasure.
The fur stitched itself into the skin.
Samael felt it as if scalp and skull were still his. A burning coldness spread from his crown to his spine. His body, still sleeping, flickered. First in patches—then entirely. One moment he was there. The next—gone. The silver eyes floated in midair, disembodied. Then they too vanished.
And with it came the weight of vanishing.
Samael's soul screamed without voice. The chain around his wrist tightened, as if anchoring him to something, lest he drift too far into the ether. For a moment, he no longer knew if he existed. Was he watching himself disappear, or was he the disappearance itself?
He saw his reflection, flickering, in the polished stone of the floor—a boy without body, a name without voice.
Then came the storm.
It was not outside. It was inside the chamber, born of it. Wind spiraled from nowhere. The torches guttered. Lightning crackled in the corners of the ritual circle. The man bared his teeth in ecstasy.
"Now we give him wings."
Two massive phials were uncapped—one filled with feathers black as grief, the other with down etched in blue fire. Thestral. Thunderbird.
Samael's body did not resist. It could not.
But his soul twisted in horror.
He saw the scalpel again. This time not at the face, but the back.
Sinew was split. Bone was carved. The man worked not like a surgeon, but like an artist drunk on madness. From the base of the boy's shoulder blades, twin incisions bloomed like crimson petals. Blood pooled. Flesh opened. Into the gaps, the feathers poured—not laid gently, but forced, bound by magic so ancient it warped the stones.
First the Thestral—death's silent echo, grace visible only to those who had suffered.
Then the Thunderbird—storm incarnate, fury born of sky.
Samael felt them both.
He had no body, but the nerves still screamed. His back blazed. His shoulder blades cracked, realigned, extended. Bone grew where it should not. Skin stretched and reformed. He felt his muscles twist around alien joints. Wings, not of skin or mere spell, but organ, instinct, soul.
They were not passive additions.
They were alive.
The Thestral essence crept into his awareness first—ghost-silent, mournful, ancient. It brought stillness. Not peace—never peace—but the hush of a funeral, the weight of inevitability. It whispered of death not as doom, but as truth.
Then the Thunderbird came.
Where the Thestral whispered, the Thunderbird roared.
Lightning crackled across the altar. The chamber howled. The silver chain around Samael's wrist sparked, drawing magic from the storm to keep his form from disintegrating. The wings flared outward from the boy's back—immense, terrible, divine.
Feathers spread like shadows and starlight.
The man knelt, weeping now.
"You were meant to fall," he whispered. "But I have given you flight."
The wings stretched. Their span touched the edges of the circle. They twitched, then folded, wrapping around the child's form like a cloak. And Samael felt it:
Danger.
Not abstract. Not philosophical. But present, near, alive. The wings warned him, instinctively, as a beast might sense the presence of another. Not enemies. Not yet.
But fate.
The storm dimmed.
And then Samael moved.
Only slightly. A breath. A twitch of fingers. But it was enough. The man gasped. "Yes. You feel it, don't you? You hear the wind. You sense it. You are not yet awake, but your body remembers what you are becoming."
He stepped back.
The ritual had finished.
The body on the altar now possessed wings of void and thunder, silver eyes hidden behind hair that no light could touch. The room smelled of ozone and ash.
And Samael, soul-witness and silent sufferer, saw himself—not a child, not a construct, but a myth forming in flesh.
The storm had not passed. It had entered him.
He would never again be a creature of quiet.
He would be silence's master.