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Your Champion aches.
He is Becoming- the process is long, and slow, and it will last him many mortal lifetimes, but he will come through it. This is the nature of angels. It took you a millenia to Become, compressed into the span of moments, but he is only an extension of yourself. To speed him through this would entrench him deeply in you, like cutting a butterfly out of a cocoon. He would not return from that kind of love.
You do love him. It’s strange.
Your purview is grief and loss and unfairness, and it is a right and natural thing for you to be ensnared in those domains, but it is a reminder that you were not created for immortality. You were not made for godhood. Perhaps your predecessor bore this weight more gracefully than you do, but that is not how you remember it.
He cried when you killed him.
Your Champion curls on his side at your feet, his wings stretched out behind him, light and soft and strong. You kneel behind him, the both of you still before your throne, run a hand through his hair, feel him shift slightly on the floor as he leans into the touch. He is a starving thing, as are you. There is not enough love in the universe to sate you both. You would gorge like a tick and pop before ever feeling full.
Your fingers move his hair aside, trace down the plane of his nape and further, to his shoulder blades and the wings that sprout from them.
He will have time, you hope, to be used to two before the next pair begins to grow in.
You don’t waste time asking if it hurts. He doesn’t come to you like this unless he needs it. You spread out one of his wings, let the feathers flare across your lap, dismiss the way he shivers as you do. The first time you tried this, you raised blisters on his skin by touching him, and he shuddered and sobbed as you tried desperately to heal what your love had wrought. You had asked him if he was alright, if you had hurt him terribly, hands shaking in a distinctly un-godlike way, and he had laced his fingers in yours and rushed to reassure you in a voice rough with pain.
You had hurt him, no matter what he said. You did.
That was the first thing you changed in his Becoming- that you wouldn’t hurt him again. Not just by being, not by accident. He asks you to make him sharper, sometimes, and the two of you fight, but that is another thing altogether. Your gaze does not blister his skin. Your touch does not burst vessels and spill ichor from his nose. You are careful with him now. You are turning your love into a gentle thing.
He shifts against you again, curls his back towards your knees, and you rub a hand over his wing to smooth the feathers there as he breathes a low, trembling noise. “Hush,” you whisper. “I have you. It’s alright.”
You dig your thumb into the base of his wing, and he cries out, briefly, before the cold of your being sets in, dulls the ache. You feel your power move through him, an alien, symbiotic thing, twitching through his veins like a poison. You cannot forget that you are the reason he hurts, even if you are the reason he stops hurting. He is being brave for you- the idea that he is brave is enough by itself, but the idea that he does it on your behalf puts something sharp and possessive like a lance through your chest. Your other hand goes to his shoulder, splays open over his skin as he begins to go still. “I have you,” you whisper again.
“Lady,” he chokes.
You have tried this before while watching his face, between the first time and now, to make sure you did not hurt him again. You cupped his chin in your porcelain smooth hands and watched his eyes grow dim and vacant and light as he moved beyond you, shuddering at the cold, his mouth falling ajar in your fingers. You forget, sometimes, though he tries to remind you, that your domain can be a respite.
You have always liked watching him come to pieces.
“I am here,” you whisper back. The air is soft and still, cold though it may be, and you pull it like a blanket around him. He will ache when he comes back to himself, insist that he is alright, but you will know, because you will always know. You cannot take the pain from him, but you can make him incorporeal to it, let it drift through him as he sinks further into what he is now- the thing he is Becoming, the thing he will never stop being, even after you release him from you and his soul fades to dust: Yours. “Rest, Champion.”
He goes still on the ground, a low, exhausted purr curling in his chest as the growing pains leave him at last. Something soft and sweet moves behind your teeth, and you let it out. You sing to him, sometimes, when he cannot hear you, when he is in this place far from pain. Lullabies from before the Calamity, that your own mother sang to you. Ballads. Hymns. Anything you can remember, and things you cannot besides, and you hope he carries them in him, somewhere, and that you are not the last to hold onto them. You carry so many old, broken things that you are unwilling to leave behind.
You take him up in your arms, his wings spread beneath him. The breath it costs you to sing ruffles his hair as you draw his still body to yours, and he hums in the dark of his throat as you lower your cold, masked lips to his forehead.
You cannot cut him free, now. The only way out is through.