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Gabriel shifted himself towards the campfire, poking the blazing logs with his sword. The fire burned through the wood slowly, releasing puffs of smoke into the soot-filled skies. His armor reflected the light that radiated off from the fire; it warmed the skin underneath the layer of metal, eagerly soaking up the heat and drying the blood that seeped from his wounds.
He lifted his head towards the skies. He'd been used by the Holy Council for their personal agendas, following blindly in their instructions after they'd distorted the Father's will with their interpretations. The tension in his chest made it difficult to breathe. Gabriel shakily took a deeper breath and pressed his palm above his chest, rubbing in circular motions to settle himself.
Gabriel had felt this way since the Holy Light was stripped from him; the white, hot pain that ruminated throughout his body when the Holy Council extracted the light couldn't be forgotten. He shivered. The light from the fire was starting to dwindle into a small ember that flickered and swished with a light gust of wind. He looked down at his hands, clenching his fingers and digging into the seams of his palm.
Gabriel swiveled his head around at the snap of a branch behind him. He squinted at a distinctive figure that slowly trudged up towards his campfire; in the hands of the figure was a stack of thinly chopped firewood, a lengthened twig, and a bright blue cooler with the handles missing.
He watched in rapt attention as the silhouette moved past him and plopped the chopped wood onto the dwindling sparks, urging the sparks to ignite with the stick it held in its servo.
“Machine.” He said, placing a hand on the trunk he'd sat on and standing up, wings stretching out from behind him in an attempt at intimidation, “Why have you come here?”
It turned its conical-shaped helm at him, unblinking, and glanced down at the cooler settled next to its pedes. It unlatched the lid of the cooler with its servo and slightly pushed the contents towards Gabriel. He'd noticed from where the machine stepped beside him that there was the familiar scent of iron. However, wafting from the contents, he realized, was the source of that pungent odor.
Gabriel sighed as he looked at the machine; it was still fiddling around with the fire, poking and prodding with its stick to rekindle the fire. The stretch of silence was deafening; all he could hear was the low whirring of the machine's internals and the pistons of its servos grasping onto the stick, “Do you know what you're doing?”
It paused and looked down at the stick it was holding and back at Gabriel, positioning its head to the twig that was placed beside him. A faint chill settled in his spine as he looked back up to the machine, “You've been watching me.” It wasn't framed as a question, but the machine nodded its head.
“I was under the assumption that you'd have better things to do,” he said, walking towards the machine and peering down at the contents within the cooler. “Oh, what's this?”
V1 beeped and rummaged through an opened section of its chassis, pulling out a small piece of paper and presenting it to Gabriel. He reached for the paper and picked it from the machine's servo, examining the contents and thoughtfully humming.
Gabriel brushed his thumb over the creases left behind from years of wear on the photograph; he hadn't seen one since he'd come to send the Father's message. He rubbed the stains that blotched the edges with grime and smoothed over the bends. The photograph was of a young boy in a winter coat made up of authentic animal fur, smothered by an oversized ushanka that covered the top half of his face. The boy was holding a forked tong with a jumbo-sized marshmallow attached to the end. It was lifted above the campfire and reflected the bright light of the fire in his eyes.
“So you've come here to roast marshmallows,” he said, placing the photograph back in the machine's servos and glancing back at the cooler.
V1 followed his line of sight and reached for the cooler. It dug around for a couple of seconds before pulling out a small, glass jar decorated with floral patterns. Within the glass jar was a blotch of peculiar, reddish molds that clung to the sides. V1 settled itself on the ground and unscrewed the lid of the jar and plucked out a squared blob, spearing it on the stick that it brought earlier.
“You're insufferable,” Gabriel huffed out a small speckle of laughter and shifted the weight from his legs onto one side, “clearly you have thoughts floating around in that human-made processor of yours, otherwise, you wouldn't do something as ridiculous as this.”
It shifted its mono-optic at him and cycled it once before releasing a winded out beep and curling into a shrimp-like form on the ground.
“...”
Gabriel felt his heart palpitate at the sight and shifted uncomfortably at the display; the machine that defeated him so easily was now curled up in on itself like an ill-behaved toddler that didn't get what it wanted. Eventually, he conceded, “Quit doing that, it's unnerving to witness this sight,” and with the slight of his hand, the campfire lit.
V1 scrambled to its feet, trotting to the place where Gabriel had sat and plopping itself down with a heavy thunk. Gabriel walked after the machine and placed himself beside it with the jar of congealed blood-mallows in his hand. He picked up one of them and turned it in his hand, watching as it dropped a few splotches of blood onto the ground.
“How'd you get these? Certainly the recipes from mankind aren't programmed into you, nor are there any ingredients left to speak of,” he stated, squishing the congealed blood in his hand and putting it back in the glass jar.
The machine was rotating the stick in its hand above the fire, allowing the blood-mallows to roast over the fire and develop a darkened shell. When it deepened into a brownish-red, it stuck the stick into the dirt next to its pedes and rummaged around in the cooler. V1 pivoted its head to Gabriel as it brought an insulated water-bottle, a plastic storage container with grayish powder, and the tip of a sword-machine's head to Gabriel's face.
Gabriel observed the machine as it laid the swords-machines cube between them; the blue bio-lights had their light snuffed out while its plating was scorched by plasma blasts, the jagged edges of what seemed to be remnants of a saw raised goosebumps on his arms.
Then, V1 shifted to the water bottle and dumped its bloody contents into the plastic container, mixing the grayish powder with a digit until its consistency thickened. It was apparent to Gabriel that these ingredients were harvested from Hell, as underneath the overwhelming scent of iron was the pungency of decaying flesh. “The powder, is it from a schism's grounded skin?” He asked, tracing the remnants of the flakes onto the pads of his finger, “Certainly. Schisms are conjoined humanoid entities; they've only managed to survive because their skin can resolve micro-tears supplied by their excessive movements.”
V1 beeped in a high-pitched tone, gesturing at the water bottle for him to guess the remaining ingredient. Around the rim of the water-bottle was thickened blood and a few clots that clung to the inner frames of the steel. On the exterior were outlines of thumb-pads where the machine placed its servos, decorating the bottle of flakes of blood in the shape of finger-prints.
Gabriel hummed to himself and placed his finger along the rim of the water-bottle to gather a droplet of blood onto his fingertips. He rubbed the blood against the pads of his fingers and examined the streak left between his forefinger and thumb. Gabriel then lifted it towards the light reflecting off the moon, and his blood shimmered with a golden hue.
An etch of silence passed when Gabriel lifted his head to meet V1's optic, “This is my blood.”
Underneath the metallic plating of his armor, his skin began to overheat, and the overwhelming sensation of his flesh boiling from beneath the surface made his hands clammy. A growing fuzz surrounded his mind and blurred his vision at the remnants of how he'd been stripped of his Holy Light, resulting in him sputtering as he attempted to heave.
“Beep?”
Gabriel huffed and returned to his senses, “You got something to say?”
V1 shifted its head side to side and attempted to reach behind Gabriel. He leans away from the machine, “What do you think you're doing?”
It stared back unblinkingly before picking up a twig from the ground and writing in all capitals: F E A T H E R L O O S E.
“You're talking about my wings. However, you're mistaken, my feathers don't shed,” he said, crossing his arms around his chest, “they're channeled through the Holy Light.”
As soon as he said that, Gabriel paused in his tracks and reached behind him to stroke the feathers on his wings. An amalgamation of thoughts spiraled throughout his mind as he reached a portion of his wing; a feather was sticking clean out, “I've already stayed here for too long. And I.. I've put my mind on what I'm going to do,” he said as he brushed over the section and plucked the feather, “what I want to do.”
Gabriel swiveled the feather in the tips of his fingers and handed the blue feather to V1. It took the feather with its servo and put it inside its chassis with a click and soft whirring of its internals shifting. A high-pitched beep, V1 whirled its servos and placed a congealed blood cube onto another stick and handed it to Gabriel.
“You're offering me to roast my own blood..?"
V1 nodded, ushering the stick into Gabriel's hands.
“Very well,” he said, picking up the stick and placing it over the fire, “you don't see anything wrong with this... huh.”
Another congealed blood-mallow was rotating periodically above the campfire; the silence was comforting as they basked in each other's presence. Then, a thought came to Gabriel as he glanced at the missing blood-mallow from beside V1's pedes, “Where did you put that one?”
Cycling its optic, V1 turned its head around and presented the back of its head to Gabriel. “Pf-ft-” he muffled a laugh with his hand placed over his intake while his shoulders shook. A congealed blood-mallow was glued on the back of V1's head, its plating was slowly disintegrating the thickening agent within the blood and absorbing into the wires below.
Gabriel retracted the stick from the campfire when his congealed blood-mallow formed a thin, brownish-red film. As he plucked the warmed blood and placed it into the palm of his hand, he watched as V1 slapped another blood-mallow on its helm-top. “What a ridiculous sight,” he stifled a laugh, sticking his cube onto the other side of V1's helm.
A night breeze settled into the seams of his armor and brushed through the feathers of his wings. The wounds that had healed eons ago ached underneath his skin, breaching the marrow of his bones and into the core of his being. He needs to go.
He raised his head towards the skies and released a deep breath, “As much as I'd like to stay a while longer,” he looked at V1's profile, “I'll leave you to your own devices, for now.”
V1's head swiveled to watch him, cocking its head to the side in an attempt at an expression.
“Perhaps we'll see each other again, machine,” he said as a blinding ray of light enveloped his figure, “may your woes be many, and your days few,” and dissipated.
An optic watched as a lone, blue feather floated down from where the divine being disappeared.