Shadow WIngs (Skeleton Key) Read Online Free Page A

deepen.
    He felt Mik’hil follow his glance to the woman a second time.
    After another pause, he felt Mik’hil smile.  
    We will satisfy your curiosity, dear Raguel. Bring it back, and we will examine it together. Uriel will have an interest in this too, I suspect.
    Yes, brother. And thank you. I will do it now. Raguel reached for that glimmering and glass-like key as he spoke. And perhaps afterwards, I could speak to you and Gabriel about––
    But before he could finish that thought...
    Everything disappeared.

NEVER COLD BEFORE

    RAGUEL GASPS IN pain, eyes open.
    He does not know if he opened his eyes, or if they had simply never been closed. He’s never been aware of his eyes before, open or closed, not like this. He’s never been aware of such blinding, white light. He’s never before felt so much and yet so little.
    He’s never been so aware of something as time-encapsulated as birth.
    His mind fights to assimilate all of those feelings––to make sense of them.
    His skin burns. It hurts like fire––like knives forcing their way through a too-thick membrane, forcing him to feel. He feels numb inside that membrane, cut off, abandoned, even as it screams at him. He feels locked down, bound... but the pain forces him into HERE into NOW in a way he’s never experienced either before.
    NOW! NOW! NOW!
    It hurts NOW!
    He had never thought in terms of skin, in terms of hard lines and firm edges. He’s never felt his fingers as individual things, as things that could hurt, individually, that could burn with that same cold and pain, as separate from the rest of him.
    He cannot feel his wings.
    He stares at his hands, gasping for breath, gasping in pain.
    They look like meat... like something dead.
    They don’t belong to him.
    He fights to feel his wings, to flap his wings, to bring them around himself for warmth...
    For he realizes he is cold. He is horribly, mind-shatteringly cold.
    But they are gone. His wings are gone.
    He is alone.
    No other presences live inside him––perhaps for the first time.   No other beings whisper in his mind, warm his thoughts. He feels none of his family’s light. He feels...
    Nothing.
    He is lost in that nothingness, terrified by it.
    He gasps out, paralyzed with the differences, which are now too many to count, too many to catalogue with his slower-moving mind. He stares up at a shocking, pale-blue sky, so high and cloudless he can’t wrap his mind around that either. Everything hurts, but that wash of ice blue, it shocks him with its beauty, nearly brings him to tears. His feelings are muted and lost behind what feels like a pane of glass, he is alone but cannot comprehend how heavy and weighted he feels, how surrounded and claustrophobic and trapped. His wings are gone.
    He is bound in meat.
    Yet still, there is beauty.
    He recognizes these feelings in glimpses and touches––but only because he’s felt the same on human beings a few million times before. He has felt with them and sympathized with them––without really comprehending them at all. This heaviness lived in humans he communicated with, humans he shared himself with and tried to help...
    But not like now.
    He’s never felt it like he does now.
    It is like being chained to the Earth by iron and water.
    He hears voices suddenly and they are loud, painfully loud... shrill. He feels nothing at all from the beings making those sounds. He knows nothing of their minds or hearts. He cannot connect to them, or do anything to soften what he hears them shouting above. He does not know their intent. He cannot discern their motives, so he fears them.
    That fear washes over him like a physical force.
    Again, the simple intensity of that experience paralyzes him.
    “How did this idiot get here?” one slurs.
    The voice sounds drunk, bored, but he is also nearly shouting. Raguel cannot discern anything it truly feels. The words are painfully loud to his virgin ears, deafening in their indifference to him.
    “...Did you