I. The Angel in the Orchard
Sanguinius came like dawn through stained glass—light made patient. Wings folded close, he bent to the formalities with an ease that made ceremony feel like courtesy rather than weight. There was no strain in his kindness; it was how he moved through rooms. Men who had forgotten how to breathe remembered.
Aurelia led him to her gardens. What had begun as cloisters of bloom had grown into orchards and water‑steps, kitchen beds and trellised shade. She spoke of strawberries—a word Malcador had read from poems older than most nations—and of fruits Terra might have forgotten. She had asked for seeds in the quiet place between names, and when she returned, her hands were full. Now vines climbed willing walls, espaliered pears learned obedience without misery, and small, hopeful plots made the air smell like a future.
The Angel of Baal walked there with the reverence he gave to chapels before battle. He did not ask how the grapes learned the trick of sweetness, or how the apple trees had found old memories in young wood. The Princess reached, and an apple came away as if the tree had been waiting to give it. She pressed it into his hand.
"For you, dear brother," she said. "Something to take when duty pulls you far."
He tasted and smiled—human, uncomplicated. For a heartbeat, the visions that crowded him stood back and let the present have the floor. Behind him, a single warrior of the Sanguinary Guard in auric plate waited at a respectful distance; even his gilded wings seemed to lower in approval.
He told her, in a tone that made dust sound beautiful, of Baal's red salt flats and the metal‑bright sky of its moons, of people who had learned generosity because anything else wasted time. She answered with the language of soil and water, of how patience could be taught to fountains and discipline to ivy. Their vocabularies met in the middle and shook hands.
Sanguinius did not mind her mischief. He matched it with an older brother's grace: careful where the Custodes stood, bold where laughter would not bruise a vow. They counted koi in a rill like two conspirators; they paced the water‑stairs until her halo lit the spray; they sat under vines and spoke of nothing with the intensity usually saved for strategy.
Remembrancers drifted at the edges of those afternoons like moths near lamps. The Angel let them sketch; he had a talent for making art an ally. Aurelia plucked a strawberry, new to Terra again, and placed it on a slate as if adding a small red comet to a map. The painter's hand remembered joy.
She teased him gently about Dorn. "He would ring a garden in stone until even the sun needs a gate," she said.
"He means well," Sanguinius answered, amused. "He builds because he loves. Tact is a tool he keeps for special occasions."
"I will always trust his walls," she said, "but life needs light and space to wander. Too much wall and you forget how to grow."
He looked at the green and thought: She is telling me something about herself. Peace here; war everywhere else. Soil and patience in a palace that had learned the grammar of oaths. He reached and steadied a trellis that did not need steadying and left his hand there for a moment longer than required.
"Does foresight hurt you?" she asked at last. "When you decide, does it feel like weight?"
"It is a tool," he said after a measured silence. "Like a knife. Useful, honest—and capable of killing the hand that holds it."
"It is a burden," she said, not as a protest but as a diagnosis.
He tilted his head. "Can you see as I do?"
She considered her garden, then him. "I could open every door at once," she said. "I could know the whole and wear it like armour—but it would hollow me. If I chose to be all‑seeing, I would be less than I am. I'd miss the weight of this apple, the sound of this water, your hand on this rail. So I keep the doors closed if not, small, and I stay here—now."
Sanguinius heard what she did not say and was quiet with it. A truth larger than any augury had been set down softly between fruit trees. He took her hand.
"The present matters more than any future," she said, and the knife that had always been in his grasp felt—if only for a breath—less eager to cut. The Guard at his back shifted his weight as if some standing order had been briefly rescinded: for this hour, stand and be untroubled.
They walked on, willing to let tomorrow find them when it had the manners to arrive. When they parted, he left behind a white flight‑feather caught in a vine. She did not move it. Some blessings should be allowed to look like accidents.