Noth didn’t really believe what he was hearing. There’s no way anything she’d been saying could be true. Why would the angel tie her life to his awful one? Didn’t she know how risky that was for herself?

The angel planted a loving kiss on Noth’s forehead.

Her face really radiated with the love she felt for him, and the bashful teen was bewildered for how to respond. She always told him she loved him, but what she’s just told him somehow felt even more personal and deep than just that simple phrase. Noth opened his mouth, trying to desperately figure out what to say back, but his angel suddenly continued on and ruined the touching mood.

She stood up straight and smiled down at him with a slightly unhinged look before tilting her head back and letting out a few very evil cackles unbefitting of an angel. Noth quickly closed his mouth, the tender feelings from just a moment ago being thoroughly forgotten with this new knowledge.

“...So you’re saying even if I die, you’ll be perfectly fine?”

Her face when she looked back at him practically had the words ‘oops’ written all over it. The angel coughed and giggled, nervously smoothing down her robes for a moment before kneeling down in front of him and taking hold of his hands.

Noth’s completely unconvinced and unimpressed expression prompted her to keep talking and explain herself further.

The angel gave him the cheesiest smile she could.

He did his best to stubbornly keep the sour expression on his face, but eventually Noth had to cave in and crack a small smile as his angel continued shining her cheesy look at him. He weakly coughed and rolled his eyes around the room in search of something to distract himself and hopefully help him wipe the dumb look he could feel on his face off. Of course he easily found something to focus on instead, lying stiff and cold on the floor, right next to his kneeling angel. How could he have forgotten the dead man in the room so easily? Noth tilted his head and sighed as he motioned towards the corpse with a wry expression on his face.

“So what do we do with this? I have no intention of sleeping with something rotting next to me, and waking up and tripping over him after forgetting he’s there doesn’t sound so great either. At least I don’t have to worry about one of the servants walking in and finding this mess, since they’re all so afraid of me.”

The angel sprung up with a little bit too much excitement, taking the hand of the pristine cadaver almost like they were close friends, and dragging him along as she lightly skipped out of the room. Noth stared after her with a concerned if not exasperated look until she turned the corner. If she didn’t look the part, he never would have called the weird woman an angel. The boy sighed and climbed out of bed, curiosity and worry telling him to go and see what absurd thing she was off to do this time.

~~~

Noth found his angel deep in his greenhouse with a much dirtier and more scuffed version of the corpse she’d been carting off. It seemed she hadn’t taken even a small amount to care for the body as she’d been dragging it around, and had let it slam into, and get caked in, whatever was on the way. When he’d followed the trail she’d left through the filthy floor of the greenhouse, the boy eventually arrived at the scene her humming and dancing around in the air in a small clearing just a little distance off from Jeck. It all looked so surreal, and yet somehow he believed that if he searched hard enough, he could find a far too similar painting of this scene in a church somewhere. A jubilant angel was a for sure check, and of course a poor corpse being brought to its final resting place wasn’t all that uncommon as well, and if any of the bushes or trees around them looked healthy or were blossoming in any amount instead of the unkept and gloomy atmosphere they gave off, then the picture might just be complete. A small piece of Noth actually contemplated trying his hand at making the painting himself one day; It just felt like it had to be done.

“A good spot for what exactly?”

The angel didn’t even bother to respond to him. Instead, she skipped a merry circle around the slain man, her wings flapping and fluttering behind her in almost a sort of dance, and when she finished a few laps around him, she skipped her way over to Noth, stopping behind him. She hummed a jaunty version of a funeral tune as she reached around and showily took one of his hands and then the other, bringing them together into a praying position.

The boy looked down at his hands and pulled a face. He didn’t really know what to say, especially since she’d suddenly sprung this on him. Noth had never actually been to a funeral, so he’d never witnessed what priests or anyone else did or said on such occasions. In his studies he’d been instructed on proper noble etiquette in the assumption that one day he would become one, and yes, that had a chapter on proper noble funeral etiquette, but it didn’t instruct you on how to pray. Perhaps this was just something it was assumed a person knew how to do that he was just somehow lacking, like the social cues he’d had to slowly learn. How frustrating.

Eventually Noth gave up and decided he was overthinking things too muc, and making it more of a big deal than it should have been, so he threw in the towel and made a wild guess.

“Whoever you are, I pray that you go gracefully to the God-dess’s side and live a better life.”

He felt his bracelet tingling like it usually did when he made a wish, but instead of the heat he would normally feel, a sensation of a nice, cooling breeze swept past his skin. A cracking, rumbling sound came up from the ground in front of them, and a small yet deep chasm formed underneath the waiting body, dropping it down into its depths before suddenly closing up with the same speed. It almost looked like that ground had opened its mouth and ate him up. A brief twinkling glow lingered over the area where the phenomenon had just occurred, and only a minute later a beautiful red bush full of various scarlet flowers had sprouted up as if from nowhere. It was obviously unnatural, if not because of the immediate speed of growth, then because of the strange fact that no two flowers on the bush were of the same kind. Noth came closer to the bush, reaching out to gently caress his fingers over the various petals, but when he moved his hand to try and pluck one, it was swiftly caught and pulled away.

Noth quickly retracted his hand and held it firmly against his body, staring down at the terrible plant in front of him in silent horror. As he watched the shrub like it would move at any moment, the very same angel that had warned him of the dangers of this plant lovingly ran her hand over one of the flowers and lightly picked it, bringing it closer to the flinching boy and showing him its thorns from only meer inches away from his face. Then, after slowly running her finger against the many barbs for him to see, she instead tilted her head to the side, letting the blood dripping from her hair land on a thorn. In an instant the stamens of the flower erupted out like tongues, wriggling hungrily in search of the source of their sustenance. Their tips and sides seemed as sharp as knives, seemed to be able to extend about 10 feet away, and moved desperately in the air looking for where the blood had fallen from. The angel immediately had to fling the offending flower a few feet away in response to the flailing appendages, and after about a minute of intense thrashing, the entire flower fell still, withering and dying in an instant.

While his eyes kept flickering back and forth between the angel’s unmarred hands and the withered remains of the monster flower, Noth’s mind was busy running a mile a minute. There was such a vile monster as this? His angel didn’t have any blood in her body? He’d actually come so close to touching something so vile and yet he never even realized it? The angel’s ok with growing a literal monster plant right next to where he lives? The flowers were still evil even if they’re not attached to the bush anymore? What would the detached flowers do if they drank their fill of blood? Would a second bush sprout? If this was what happened when he prayed for a sinner, what would happen if a good person was prayed for instead? What if he prayed for a living person?

Noth’s litany of questions was stopped abruptly short by the casual next words of the angel that had been holding him from the behind ever since he fell into deep contemplative silence.

If the boy’s head could turn 180 degrees it would have. He practically jumped out of her arms so that he could look her in the eyes. He’d been waiting so long to hear the answer to one of the many riddles he’d been stuck with, and now she was actually going to tell one directly to him?

“You really mean it this time? You won’t bullshit me, or string me around like usual?”

The hopeful glimmer in Noth’s eyes dulled just a tad at her falsely ignorant words. He knew she took great pleasure in teasing him with information. The soft giggle she let out upon seeing his face basically confirmed it.