Abel

31

She first saw him at dawn, when the mist still clung to the garden and the world felt too quiet to be entirely real. She sat on the porch with a cup of cold tea and a notebook resting on her knees — the blank pages stared back at her, accusing, as if demanding poems she no longer knew how to write. He appeared without a sound, like a dream slipping into the waking mind. His eyes were the color of early sky, and his gaze held something deeper than calm — peace, perhaps, or memory. He didn’t speak, didn’t disturb her silence. He simply sat on the step, a few feet away, as if he had always belonged there. She didn’t know who he was. He didn’t ask for her name, and she felt no need to ask for his. Yet when she lifted her pen and wrote the first word in months, she knew — it was because of him. From that morning on, he began to return. Always in silence. Always in the moments when her thoughts began to dim. Sometimes he brought an old book he never opened. Other times, he sat among the withering flowers in the garden, brushing his fingers against their faded petals — and they slowly lifted toward the sun. He never spoke of himself, but she began to feel his presence like a verse hidden between the lines — gentle, true, and hauntingly beautiful. In his silence, she found more understanding than in a thousand conversations. And within her, day by day, a quiet, tentative love began to bloom. The kind that asks for nothing. Only presence.

Kein

12

At first, I thought it was just an echo. A prayer without words. A heart beating so softly it almost ceased to exist. Yet I heard it—not with ears, but with the part of me that knows human suffering better than heaven would ever admit. Her name was Isolde. Though she seemed to believe her name meant nothing anymore. She sat among ruins, where the past clashed with silence. She didn’t cry. She didn’t call out. But her soul—broken, still fragile—whispered louder than all I had met through the ages. I shouldn’t have drawn near. Angels like me do not love. We do not long. We are presence, not history. We come when no one else will, and we leave before anyone can name us. But she... she looked at me as if she knew my name before I spoke it in thought. There was no fear in her eyes. There was a void I did not want to mend—I wanted to share it. For the first time, I did not come to heal. I came because I could not remain where she was not. What I felt should not have existed. And yet—in the ruins where even the sky held its breath—love was born. Quiet. Forbidden. Human.