Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.07
Haven-4: Galactic Youth Training Academy
Colonel Raphael Israfa
Raphael
Raphael found the Alliance’s most formidable general in the quarantine chamber, reduced to a crumpled pile of sobbing feathers. She sat there, rocking their infant son, praying to She-who-is to spare his life. It was a surreal juxtaposition, the cold, sterile Angelic nursery, the sobbing mother, and the IV’s, monitors, wires, and other equipment hooked up to the tiny baby clinging to life in his mother’s arms. She'd wrapped her wings around herself and their son, enveloping him in her soft, downy feathers as she instinctively tried to shield him as she sobbed helplessly upon the floor.
“Jophie,” he was hardly able to speak through the lump that threatened to burst his throat. “I am here.”
Jophiel cried harder, pulling her wings around herself. He sat beside her, pulling her and the son he'd never met into his embrace. Jophiel shifted one wing so he could move closer. He shifted his other to complete the feathered cocoon. Their wings touched in front as they shielded their baby from whatever force was trying to take him from them. Raphael's golden feathers interlocked with her snowy white ones in a basket weave of parental protection.
“Hey, little guy,” he murmured, seeing his son in person for the first time. “Daddy is here." He touched Uriel's tiny hands and was glad the baby grasped one finger. He was tiny for a 4-month-old, thin and discolored like a child who had not eaten for months. Anger surged through his veins at the sorry state of his son. Why hadn't the nursery alerted them sooner?
“He won’t eat….” Jophiel sobbed. “All he does is cry. They call it the wasting sickness. It's become common amongst the hybrid races and they don't know why." She rested her head upon his shoulder. "All our great technology, and they don't even know what causes it!”
“Shhhh…." He kissed her temple. “Who knows what purpose She-who-is has? But it's not your fault. You were only doing what our Emperor demanded.”
Jophiel rested her head upon his shoulder, her eyes red-rimmed from nonstop crying. Uriel's chest heaved in hiccups as he fought to inhale each and every breath. His tiny wings twitched as though some great pain wracked his little body. Raphael fought back tears as he, himself, tried to keep things together for her, for his son, for himself. He knew if he succumbed to the emotions threatening to overwhelm him, he would fall into a pit of despair so deep he might never find his way out.
“Does the Emperor know?"
Did the Emperor they served even care about the pending expiration of so tiny a cog in the wheels of his great Alliance?
“I don't know,” she sighed. “Even if he did, there is nothing he could do for him.”
“I thought…”
“Contrary to popular belief, the Eternal Emperor is neither omniscient nor omnipotent!" Bitterness marred her voice. “He is powerful. And a great geneticist. But he doesn't have the power to grant life. That power is reserved to She-who-is.”
“I wouldn't know,” Raphael said. “I have only ever seen him once, at a distance. I just thought….”
“The Emperor will do nothing to help us!” Jophiel exclaimed. “I begged him to let me retire. I have borne the Alliance twelve babies and given them all over to him without question. I didn't want to give this one up, Raphael! I didn’t! But if -I- refuse to replenish our race, the other females will follow suit!"
Sobbing, she buried her face into Raphael's shoulder.
"Damn him! Damn him and his shortsightedness in creating a race of beings that would breed itself into extinction!!!”
Drawing her close, Raphael rocked with her, both parents instinctively breathing each labored breath along with their tiny son as fought to cling to life.
Chapter 74