I swore that day never to forgive her. …which lasted right up until she got back.

          “What took you so long?”

          “Turns out we are very close to a human town! Sadly, they don’t seem to like angels that much, I got chased out by a little lady with a broom…”

          “Do you want to set their house on fire later?”

          “Now, now, violence never solves anything and wanton destruction only caused heartache.” She gave me a disapproving look as if she hadn’t been the one to start setting fires in the first place.

          “What exactly are your moral boundaries? Most people have a straight line, you, yours seems like you watched ice crack and used that for you line.”

          “You are very good at analogies.”

          “Don’t change the subject.”

          “Well, I think it goes like this; I started out life with high morals and strict ethics but found that, over my life of constant war and dealing with demons more than other angels, they began to degrade until I found a nice middle ground. Whereas you probably started without morals and probably thought ethics were describing a type of food, but after years of fighting angels with strict codes of honor, found your own.”

          I blinked, and just stared at her for a moment. She was right, and in fact I had a similar idea earlier, but hadn’t actually put the feeling into words yet.

          “So, we met at the middle ground…well fine. What are we going to do about clothes now?”

          “Oh, I got some, we’ll just need to adjust them.”

          “I thought you said they didn’t like you and chased you out?”

          “I looped back and stole some off the clothesline.”

          Ignoring her, I went back to working on the chess set, I was halfway done with the pieces. We would need to paint them and I still needed a larger piece of wood for the board, but so far they were coming along nicely.

          We settled into a companionable silence as she started messing around with her forge, heating it up and messing with the embers. She came back every once in a while to sweep up some of the wood shavings and the cracked, unusable pieces to throw in. I took the time to give her a good look.

          Hair draped down her back between her wings to drag slightly on the ground, everything from her clothes to the tips of her wings were pure white. Her wings were large for an angel, though they were still smaller than mine, and she had to angle them up to keep the off the ground. She was still wearing the light under armor that normally goes beneath full plate armor and knee-high laced boots that I guessed she wore everywhere as a general.

          Aenaziel turned to look back at me, giving me a raised eyebrow to ask if I needed something. Gold eyes that always seemed mildly amused peered at me. I shrugged in response and went back to carving, only to stop again a few minutes later.

          “Where are we going to get paint if we can’t trade with humans?”

          “We could disguise ourselves as humans!”

          “How? Our hair is one thing, you could pretend to be old if you hid your face, but our wings are taller than we are even folded as tight to our spines as possible.”

          “We could pretend to be hunch backs?”

          “With feathers sticking out the bottom of our clothes?”

          “…Go at night and blend your wings into the shadows?”

          “No.”

          “Do you have a better plan?”

          “As a matter of fact, I do not.”

          “…it was easier when human worsphied the ground we walked on.” She sighed, “The good old days when humans were so weak we had to protect them from everything…now they have strength in numbers and weaponry to stand on their own, only to turn against those who once protected them…”

          “Didn’t the angels force humans to listen to ‘sermons’ everyday for hours at a time?”     

          “Most of them were so zoned out you could talk about the weather or your last meal and no one would notice or care! It was so much fun to just stand and talk while watching them droop off, occasionally you’d get one or two zealots, but oddly enough those types normal went to you people.”

          “They had their uses, but mostly they were just a pain…we’re getting sidetracked. We need more things for this place to be habitable.”

          “A bed would be nice…why didn’t we pack our stuff up before we burned them?”

          “Because it would be too much to carry and run.”

          “We just forgot didn’t we?”

          “It’s not everyday you get to burn down your own house.”

          “Speak for yourself.”

          “Right, blacksmith…anyway we need a real plan. There are traveling merchants we might try robbing along a highway, caravans and so forth. That’s what we would do when we ran low on supplies.”

          “Really? We would just send a few runners back before we got low. Planning ahead and all that.”

          “Demons can last weeks without food or water, not happily but we can. So, I never bothered keeping brats happy, just functioning.”

          “Tell me, were they happy when you retired?”

          “They threw a party, as far as I know it’s still going.”

          “Ah.”

          “Will robbing merchants hurt your conscious?” One side of my mouth lifted in a smirk, and with a challenge.

          She rolled her eyes, “No, merchants aren’t weak or innocent. Rob, knock around, all fair game. I still remember when I was but a child, before the war started in full swing, I was wandering the human realm after getting lost. I was found by a merchant and he tricked me into giving him one of my feathers…”

          “Were you young enough that they were still shedding?”

          “No.”

          “Oof”

          “Right? So, I had to tear a feather out of one of my wings to give this conman. Turns out I was only a few throws from the entrance and I would have seen it had I continued past him without stopping.”

          “Did you ever retrieve your feather?”

          “No yet, but that was on my list now that I have free time,” her face darkened and her voice lowered “and am no longer bound by military rules…”

          Now we were getting into my territory.