Coaxing, he purred, "I'll tell you secrets, like I told Izîl."
"Ask for something else," Karou snapped. "I will not carry you. Ever."
"Oh, but I'll keep you warm. I'll braid your hair. You'll never be lonely again."

Their human lives passed so quickly: mayflies in a summer storm, cobwebs in an elephant's wake. Razgut's beggar mules died as quietly as they had lived, with no one to mourn them.

No one, that is, but him.

Razgut was haunted by them, the humans. He would never admit it aloud, of course - who would understand the language of angels if he did? - but he felt a strange connection to these beings who spent their whole lives in shadows.

It was no great tragedy, he told himself, that they should die from one.

Razgut's pain was a constant now, ever-throbbing in his ragged wing spurs and pulverized legs. He delved into it, lived in it, fashioning himself an invisibility such as he had learned centuries ago from the magi. No one spared a downward glance for a misshapen shadow among the glorious hues of Morocco.

At first, he had dragged himself painfully along the unforgiving earth, every inch a fresh ordeal. His arms, at first spindly from lack of nutrition, became unyielding.

So, when the first unlucky beggar had stumbled by, Razgut was able to secure a vice-like grip around his neck. The human had soon gone mad from the incessant whispering - susurrous yet sinister - that came from the invisible hump on his back. Razgut had felt no pity for him then, immersed as he was in his own agony.

This was how the Fallen seraph spent his thousand years in Morocco: watching civilizations flourish and die from his perch on a shadow's back.

Until Izîl had made his wish.

Razgut had sensed the devilish magic - oh, a bruised sky, an eclipse of beasts - somewhere in the tangled streets of Marrakesh, and had dragged himself toward it, knowing that it was of something that did not belong to this world.

The man had been seated cross-legged, his head bowed over a metal disc the size of a dinner plate - a bruxis, Izîl had later called it - that glinted darkly gold against the cream of his djellaba.

Razgut inched closer along the baked stones, keeping to the shadows despite his invisibility. He was struck by the alarming sense that the magic might reveal him, and yet he could not keep away. This metal inspired no gold-lust for him, but the Fallen seraph was drawn to it as inexorably as a salmon is lured back to its natal stream. He was so close that he could hear the man's laborious breaths and make out the burnished grooves of an engraving.

Then the human muttered a phrase that seemed to leave him as hoarse as if he had recited an epic - and the bruxis vanished, simple as that.

Except.

Razgut felt a pull deep inside him: at the same time he could see, through his pain-infused vision, black-gold tendrils of magic ensnare him and bind him. To the human. To Izîl.

Only later did he realize that this enchantment had broken the barrier of language between them: now, he knew only that the man's hopeful face had fallen as he cast himself to the ground in despair. "All that pain for what? I wish for knowledge and I receive only nothingness. How can I face the old monster again?"

It was too easy.

Izîl did not notice the shadow that crept up behind him until he felt thin arms around his neck - bound by something more than strength - and heard a whispered, malefic promise in his ear:

"You want knowledge? I can give you that.

.

.

.

I can give you more than you ever wished for."

A/N: Thanks for reading so far... bonus points if you can guess where the phrase in the first sentence of the third paragraph comes from.