A Word for Shelter

The girl reached the temple gate and stopped with one hand on the broken stone. Snow clung to her hair and the shoulders of her coat. She looked past the fallen pillars, straight at Aurel, and asked, “Are you lonely?”

He had expected her to run. People usually did, once they saw the size of him. The braver ones asked for help. A few had begged him to guard them, as though the old stories still belonged to him.

The girl only stood in the snow, waiting for an answer.

“Yes,” Aurel said.

The word came out rough from disuse. She nodded, as if he had told her the path was slippery.

“I thought you might be.”

Aurel lowered his head until one golden eye was level with her. She was small even for a human child, and her cheeks had gone red with cold. Her fingers curled inside sleeves too long for her hands.

“You climbed here alone?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was looking for somewhere to go.” She glanced at the crumbled temple around him. “This looked like somewhere.”

The answer sat between them. He could have asked what she had left behind. He could see enough: the thin pack, the worn boots, the effort it cost her to keep standing. Instead, he shifted his weight and felt the old, useless drag in his wings. They had not lifted him in centuries. “There is shelter inside.”

“Is it warmer?”

“Somewhat.”

“Then I’d like to see it.”

She walked past him before he could decide whether he had meant the offer. Aurel watched her pick her way through the temple’s collapsed entry. Her pace was slow, but she didn’t ask him to carry her.

Inside, the roof had fallen away over the eastern half of the hall. The western wall still blocked the wind. Aurel had made a nest of old cloth and dry branches beneath it, near a cracked stone basin. It was no home for a child, but it was less exposed than the gate.

The girl set down her pack and looked at his wings.

“You can’t fly?”

“No.”

“Did they break?”

“They grew tired of holding me.” He heard how strange that sounded and did not try to repair it.

She accepted it as she had accepted his loneliness. “I’m Lily.”

“Aurel.”

“Just Aurel?”

“It is the name I have kept.”