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Saint-14 knows how to cook for an army. He knows how to cycle meat on a dozen grills, clipping each cut firmly in his tongs and turning it when the juice starts to sizzle; he knows how to ladle pepper and vinegar sauce over the meat without sending up a plume of smoke or flame. The sauce burns onto the grills over time, of course—it caramelizes and crystallizes into black residue at the edges of everything—but Saint can take it off again with a stiff wire brush and a Titan's strength.
There is skill in this work, too. There is value in it. A secure source of food can forge people into an army, perhaps, but Saint thinks that more than that, it can forge an army into people again. It reminds them that they are not only an engine for building a city; they are also the people who will one day live in it.
It reminds them to live.
You could do the work of twenty on that wall, Osiris had said. You could be patrolling with the Iron Lords. His eyes had been so hungry, not for meat but for purpose, and Saint had longed to put it on his plate for him with the shaved pork and grilled squash.
In the referred glow of the floodlights over the construction site, Saint puts his shoulders into scouring the grills clean. He empties and soaps up the catch-pans, soaks them with white vinegar to get the grease to lift and then scrubs them with spinfoil wool. When that's done, he works his wire brush patiently across each surface, angling it into every corner and divot until the grime falls away. He takes his time. Even this is worth doing well.
By the time he has finished, the grills all shine like newly polished armor. A faint, pleasant ache of exertion yawns through him, from his fingertips all the way to the small of his back, and he can't help grinning in satisfaction.
As he stands up to crack his back, Saint glimpses a shadow at the blurred edge of the light. He recognizes it at once—those feathers are unforgettable. It's too dark to see the man's handsome face, but Saint's memory conjures it up all the same. The frown lines between his brows, and the serious set of his jaw, and the earnest blaze in his eyes as he probed for answers.
Saint lifts his hand in a wave, and Osiris turns away into the shadows.
* * *
They find each other again in the shadow of the Traveler. A pair of Warlocks have decided to build a meditation garden, a tiered confection of vines and flowers with a fountain and a reflecting pool, and they refuse to wait for the city to be finished. Saint likes them very much; he thinks they, more than most, understand why they are building the city in the first place.
So it is that he finds himself turning over earth, making a hole for the reflecting pool one shovelful at a time. One of the Warlocks lays stones, while the other soaks herself in Void until her hair starts to drift in loose waves. She will hollow out the deepest part of the pool with a contained nova, warping gravity until the earth shatters around the dense core of her Light; Saint's job is to meet her halfway.
"Is this truly the best use of your time?" asks an almost-familiar voice, and Saint looks up from a mess of roots and worms to see Osiris regarding him patiently.
"My friend," Saint cries gladly, and leans on the shovel. "Someday, this will be a garden to inspire grand thoughts. We will sit on the edge of the water, here—" and he points to a mound of earth studded with rocks "—and we will contemplate the Light together."
"See, I told you it wasn't just a big hole," says Osiris's Ghost. Sagira. "There are going to be trees here, right?"
"Trees. Flowers. Fish in the pond. Pigeons wanting to be fed. Vines everywhere." Saint can't help smiling at the garden that the Warlocks have made him see, at the dream of lush grass and the gentle plash of the fountain. "So much that lives, Osiris. I can't wait for you to see it."
Osiris slowly paces across the raw wound in the earth, through the rich brown dirt, and joins Saint at the edge of the hole. He looks away, as though weighing what to say. As though deciding whether to say anything at all. "I had words with the Speaker," he says at last.
Something in the way he says it makes Saint's gladness falter. "And?" he asks, as though probing at a wound.
Osiris is quiet for a long time—for so long that Saint begins digging again, driving the shovel down into the earth with his foot and levering up broken heaps of earth. "I did not come to this place for faith," Osiris says at last.
It is not the admission Saint expected, and that eases him a little. "Of course not," says Saint. "You have come for answers. For purpose. You think finding answers will help you find your purpose."
For a moment, Osiris stills. Then a smile touches his eyes, brief but sincere. It catches at Saint's heart with all the sudden magnificence of a sunrise. "Am I so transparent as that?"
Saint only laughs. "I think you make your purpose. You choose what is important, and you work to defend it—and there are answers in that."
"And you choose this garden?" Osiris asks. Although his voice is light, there is a deep current of passion in it that Saint cannot bear to refuse.
He reaches an earth-stained hand out and lays it on Osiris's shoulder, stroking down feathers. When Osiris meets his eyes, Saint feels as though they are the only two people in the world. "I choose life," he answers.
* * *
Saint sees Osiris again a handful of times, after that—speaking in a close huddle with Iron Lords come down from Felwinter's Peak; poring over tomes brought in with a caravan of refugees; lost in an array of calculations with Sagira darting around his shoulders.
The Wall goes up. The garden blooms. The Pilgrim Guard brings back new people every week, until Saint no longer knows everyone's name.
He goes out with them a few times, into bunker complexes carved out of mountain ranges, out to riverside farming villages still clinging to life. There is a city, they tell these hollow-eyed strangers. They show them pictures, tell them stories, offer them fresh bread and vegetables and meat.
Most of the time, the bread is what gives them the first flickering ember of hope. They can imagine that the Pilgrim Guard is lying, that they would make up stories and doctor photos—but the bread is real, still fresh and soft, baked with leavening and sugar. They cannot imagine a safe city, but they can imagine a place with ovens. They can imagine a place with sugar. For the first time, they can taste the good yeasty bread and imagine having it every day.
Every time he comes back from the outside, Saint finds himself baking dozens of loaves of fresh bread. There is peace to be had in kneading dough, in waiting through the first rise and the second, in filling his empty house up with the smell of baking. There are farms now at the edges of the city, in the shadow of the Wall, and there is always grain enough for what he needs.
It should not surprise him, that he needs peace so desperately after the firefights and the lost pilgrims and the memory of death on death on death.
It should not surprise him, but somehow, it always does.
He could never eat all the bread he makes, so he brings his spares down to the kitchens. These days, the kitchens have a roof and a fan to help vent the smoke, but they still have enough grills to feed an army, and they still need every hand that can be spared.
A part of Saint longs to see Osiris there, doling out short ribs and grilled corn. It would do him good to get out of his head, to be among people—perhaps there would even be answers in it, of a kind.
Perhaps the answer Osiris seeks is not in the intimate mysteries of the Light and the Traveler, but in the rise of dough and the scrape of the scouring brush and the smell of new-turned earth. Perhaps there is no ineluctable truth at the heart of their resurrection; perhaps there is only the truth of labor, of care, of the impossible gift of life that is not the Traveler's to give.
He finds himself turning his steps toward the garden at the heart of the new-flowering city, his empty bread basket still slung over his arm. Curious pigeons trail him, seeking crumbs, and the sight of them fills his heart with a warm, inexpressible gladness.
Saint is not entirely surprised to see Osiris sitting in meditation on the stone bench by the reflecting pool. His eyes are closed, but he shifts in a listening way as Saint approaches.
Slowly, Saint settles down on the bench beside him and sets the basket on the ground. "Osiris," he says. "Are you still looking for answers?"
Osiris's eyes slide open, and he looks up at Saint with a strange softness that gentles the lines of his face. He is, Saint thinks, the most beautiful man he has ever seen. "No," he says. "I am looking for questions."
Saint's heart is in his throat. He reaches between them and takes Osiris's hand. His skin is dry as paper. Osiris folds his palm against Saint's as though it belongs there.
Together, they watch the light shift across the water, reflecting the vast mystery of the Traveler above.