Clothes

The sudden silence of the ion engines piqued Ylfa’s curiosity until she could no longer resist. She pushed her head out of Jere’s pocket and blinked into the rushing air. Below, a vast forest stretched out, a patchwork of greens so dense that the canopy looked like an unbroken sea of leaves. They were descending slowly - not to attack, she realised, but to observe and land without drawing attention.

She stole a glance at Jere. His eyes flicked minutely, scanning the canopy as though it were transparent glass. Ylfa squinted downward again, baffled. The treetops formed too thick a barrier to see anything beneath. Yet Jere’s tiny corrections in course, the twitch of his wings or the shift of his weight, betrayed that he was tracking something only he could perceive.

At last, with a single controlled flap, they alighted at the edge of the forest. The impact barely disturbed the grass. Jere’s wings folded neatly, plate after plate interlocking into place. He placed his palm under the pocket, and Ylfa climbed onto it. He lowered her carefully until her feet touched the soft ground - and instantly, her body expanded to match his height.

She considered enlarging further, to stretch to her full wolf size, but thought better of it. The trees loomed close, their trunks thick and their branches tangled. A giant’s frame would be clumsy here. With a huff, she settled for matching Jere.

He strode into the forest without a flicker of emotion, and Ylfa followed, padding lightly behind. Her long ears stood tall, swivelling, twitching, filtering sounds the way her people had done since the dawn of their kind.

Then Jere slowed. His wings unfurled again, but only halfway before stopping. A low hum trembled in the air, and Ylfa’s eyes widened as four of the feathers separated from the main span - two from each side. They lifted into the air and hovered above his head, aligned like a quartet of gleaming blades suspended by invisible strings.

The sight made her chest tighten. She had only seen magic like this once in her life, and that single memory had left devastation burned into her mind. If Jere’s detached plates carried anything like that same destructive potential, then the imps lurking in this forest had no chance.

As if to prove her thought, one feather darted away in a blur. A shriek split the air, cut short almost instantly. The plate zipped back into formation, its sharp edge streaked crimson. Ylfa stiffened. She knew that cry - high-pitched, guttural, unmistakable. A higher imp.

Her ears flattened against her head. Higher imps were not sentries or fodder. They were used sparingly, reserved for tasks of importance. If one was here as a scout, then this detachment was stronger than either of them had expected.

The forest march continued. Every so often, one of Jere’s feathers would break from formation, slicing into the undergrowth before returning with fresh blood glistening across its surface. The kills came quick and clinical. Ylfa found herself shuffling along uselessly, her ears hearing nothing that still lived.

She hated the feeling. She wasn’t interfering. She wasn’t slowing him down. And yet, she felt like dead weight. Worse, her stomach twisted with hunger, her throat scraped with thirst. Her body’s complaints dragged at her, reminding her how fragile she truly was beside him.

“If… if you don’t need me right now,” she asked softly, “can I go look for some food?”

Jere inclined his head once. A wordless acknowledgment.

Relief flooded her, and she darted off into the shadows of the trees, her nose to the ground, chasing every hint of musk or fur. She wanted meat - needed meat - and she would not return until she had it.

Jere watched her go, his expression unchanged, then turned back to the path ahead. His drones continued their quiet hunt, weaving through the forest at his command. Yet deep inside, something strange rippled through him. A faint, unsettled distortion.

His processors checked themselves, running through endless chains of diagnostics. All systems displayed green. No faults. No errors. Still, the discomfort pulsed within him, buried but present.

Magic, the processors were beginning to realise, contained far more variables than they had calculated for. Too many shifting factors, too much unpredictability. It strained their models, stretching logic to the breaking point. But by the time this truth had been discovered, it was already too late. The process had become woven into him.

The processors adapted as best they could, straining to hold every system stable. Jere felt the faint warping in his core, but the readouts assured him: irrelevant. All systems nominal. He trusted them. They were his life.

So he walked on, silent wings half-spread, as the hum of the floating plates drifted through the dark forest.

When Ylfa finally found him again, he was waiting where they had first landed, seated at the forest’s edge with his eyes fixed on the horizon. The late sun slanted low, painting the sky in amber streaks, and Jere sat utterly motionless beneath it, a silent sentinel. He only lowered his gaze when she approached, his expression as blank and unreadable as ever.

Ylfa, by contrast, felt restored. The deer she had brought down had been her salvation. She had devoured it with single-minded hunger, ripping into it as though her very life depended on each mouthful. She had drunk greedily from a nearby stream, half-filling herself with water in preparation for the long, uncertain wait before the next chance to drink.

On her zig-zag return through the trees she had searched for imps, nose sharp, ears swiveling - but had found only corpses. They littered the forest in grim silence, all carved apart with surgical precision. The metallic feathers that had cut them down were no longer darting through the canopy. Instead, they had rejoined Jere’s wings, now spread wide and catching the sunlight. Blood clung in dark crusts along the polished surfaces, though here and there the glint of steel shone through.

Ylfa had washed the deer’s blood from her muzzle before coming back. She shifted down to her smaller size and padded to Jere’s side, sitting at his feet like a loyal hound before tilting her head up at him.

“Did you kill them all?”

He nodded once.

Her eyes lingered on his wings. The sunlight made them blaze with sharp reflections, turning each panel and feather into something more than a weapon. Something… almost beautiful. She caught herself in the thought, recoiling as if burned. How could she even think such a thing? These wings were not natural. She could see that plainly - every seam, every inhuman angle spoke of an artifice beyond her comprehension. She did not know who had made them, or why Jere had been chosen to bear them. And yet, despite herself, she recognised the craftsmanship, the sheer dedication behind their creation.

The words hovered on her lips, begging to be spoken, but fear held her back. What if he didn’t understand? What if he rejected the thought? She swallowed them down and lifted her eyes to the clouds instead.

“What are you looking at?”

His voice was flat. “The sky.”

She almost smiled at the simplicity of it. “No, silly. I mean what in the sky are you looking at? Why are you looking at it?”

He shrugged, a small motion, then answered, “I just like the sky.”

She waited, half-expecting that to be all. But then, to her surprise, he continued.

“The sky is empty. The sky is big. The sky doesn’t care why you’re up there. It just lets you. It doesn’t stare at you with contempt. It doesn’t stare at all.”

His face never changed, but the words carried a weight she hadn’t anticipated. Ylfa stared at him in silence, struck by the sudden wash of feeling hidden beneath his monotone. For the first time she wondered just how deeply he thought about the things around him, and how much he chose not to reveal.

At last she found her voice. “Your wings. What do people call them?”

He looked down at her briefly. “They don’t have a name. They refer to them and me as the same object. The Angel of Death.”

She nodded slowly. “Do you like your wings?”

His gaze returned to the sky. “They let me fly. They keep me safe. I cannot dislike them.”

Ylfa lowered her ears. “I like your wings.”

Jere’s processors flared with warnings. A sudden spike in heart rate. Anomalous emotional patterns. Her words spun him into confusion. By every logical metric, she should despise his wings. They had slaughtered her allies, torn through her countrymen, been used as weapons of terror against her kind. Yet here she was, saying she liked them. Saying she liked him.

It didn’t compute.

He trawled through memory banks, cross-referencing. He had seen compliments exchanged before, in crowded Earth cities where people interacted with warmth he never understood. His processors scrambled to construct a formula, to imitate the proper response. A dozen possible reactions spiralled through the calculations.

All this passed in less than a second. To Ylfa, there was no pause. Only Jere’s stillness as he looked at her, then rose smoothly to his feet.

“Let’s get you some clothes.”

Ylfa blinked. Of all the replies she had been bracing for, that wasn’t one of them. Yet she found herself smiling anyway. When it came to Jere, she was learning to expect the unexpected.

“Really?”

He nodded.

Her tail wagged before she could stop it. “Thank you!”

Inside Jere’s mind, the processors logged the phrase and the corresponding physiological reaction. “Thank you” equaled an elevated heart rate. Harmless. Normal. No further action required.

He crouched, and Ylfa shrank again, down to rodent size. She scrambled into the waiting pocket, curling against the fabric.

Moments later, with a single thunderous beat of his wings, they were airborne again, leaving the forest behind and angling toward the city.

When they alighted once more on the palace hill, Ylfa couldn’t stop wagging. Her tail thumped and swayed inside Jere’s pocket, her excitement practically bubbling over. When he extended his hand to let her jump down, she shook her head.

“No, I’ll stay in here. Then I can choose the clothes I want. Because who knows what you’d get if you went looking alone.”

He nodded, processors clicking through possibilities and quickly determining that this arrangement was acceptable. Without another word, he strode down the slope. Each step jolted Ylfa inside the pocket, far less comfortable than the smoothness of flight.

As she bounced with his pace, her mind wandered. Why didn’t he simply land in the city square, announce himself with the roar of his engines and wings, and be done with it? If it were her, she wouldn’t hesitate - after all, she had nothing to lose beyond her life. But maybe Jere did. Maybe there was something, hidden deep beneath all that cold machinery, that he valued. Something he didn’t want jeopardised by a public show of power.

She didn’t know. What she did know was that she was about to walk in a human body again. The thought thrilled her. Finally she would shed the wolf’s pelt, finally regain her hands and voice in full, finally channel magic without struggling through her nose like a fool.

The bustle of the city pressed in around them as they reached the shopping district. Market calls, the shuffle of boots, the scent of fresh bread and smoke - life carried on, oblivious to the angel of death in their midst. Jere slowed his pace, scanning, waiting for her direction. Ylfa poked her nose out and studied the storefronts until one caught her eye: a neat little shop with a painted needle on the sign.

“Let’s try the one on the left,” she whispered. “The one with the needle.”

Jere turned without hesitation, pushed open the door, and set off the cheerful jingle of a bell. Inside, rows of garments hung in ordered lines, the air musty with fabric and dye.

“There,” Ylfa whispered, pointing with her muzzle toward a rack.

Jere obeyed, flicking through tops under her direction. She considered each one carefully, her nose wrinkling, ears twitching, until she settled on a particular piece. They moved on to skirts. Again, she selected quickly, and then hesitated, drawing in a deep breath.

“Okay. I’m sorry about this. But… I need underwear.”

Jere didn’t know why she apologised. To him, it was a matter of necessity, as simple as fuel or ammunition. He gave no reply, only shifted to the section she indicated. Ylfa buried her face in his pocket, ears flattened, as he - without the slightest flicker of shame or hesitation - sorted through racks of women’s underwear. The shop wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t empty either, and she could feel the stares prickling her fur. A tall, stoic man browsing women’s garments, his face expressionless, his movements efficient. He didn’t care. She wanted to die of embarrassment.

By the time he carried the items to a changing room, Ylfa was half convinced she might faint. But when he lowered her to the floor inside, she bolted upright.

“Close the door and wait outside.”

He did so without question.

Her body shifted as soon as the latch clicked - seamless, clean, as natural as breathing. Wolf became woman in a blink, paws becoming hands, fur becoming pale skin. She knelt for a moment on the floor, staring down at her fingers, flexing them, marveling at the return of sensation. Then instinctively she checked - no ears, no tail showing. Safe.

She rose and began to dress.

Meanwhile, Jere shifted uneasily a few steps back from the door. She had told him to wait. But waiting directly outside felt… wrong. His wings itched, the retracted plates grinding with discomfort against his back. They always itched like this when folded away, but his processors had never found a solution. Worse, that strange unease he had felt earlier still hadn’t faded. His systems reported green, so he dismissed it. Unimportant. Probably temporary.

He stood, hands in his pockets, motionless.

Minutes later, the door creaked open. Ylfa’s head peeked out, her eyes darting left and right. She gestured him closer. He obeyed, stepping into her orbit. When the coast was clear, she pushed the door wider.

She stood before him clothed at last - draped in a dark grey-blue long-sleeve fold-over crop top layered over a black turtleneck similarly cropped tank that neatly covered her collar. A high-waist pleated skirt framed her legs, leaving only the barest sliver of midriff exposed. For a moment she looked down, her hand fiddling with the hem of the skirt.

“Do I look alright…?”

Jere’s processors scrambled. What was the appropriate response? He combed memories, patterns, social fragments. The formula was simple enough. He spoke.

“…Yes.”

Her face lit immediately. “Really?”

He nodded.

Her grin broke free, bright and unguarded. “Thank you. Shall we go back to the palace now?”

Again he nodded. Despite numerous warnings, his processors didn't lift a finger to his increased heart rate. It was normal now.