I think it was the fourth year that we had known each other than I suddenly realized I kept thinking of her as ‘Annie’ and not a Angel anymore. It threw me off balance at first, but it didn’t seem to affect my mission or my resolve, so I gave into it.
I was still kinda pissed of about her giving me a stupid nickname. ‘Tessie’. It didn’t sound demonic at all! I disliked it intensely at first, but somewhere down the line it grew on me. Maybe I was adjusting more to Earth. But I found myself thinking about me more and more as ‘Tessie’, and less ‘Ther’ezen’.
My work with the book was excruciatingly slow. I hated translating Ancient Hellish. It took me the first two years or so to translate the first chapter, and it had like a hundred. Many a night I lay awake cursing my fate. It got a little easier as time went by, but I still found occasionally I had ignored previous context and had to come back and re-translate pages and pages of it.
One of these times I mixed up "promote" and "kill," and, well, it made a slightly confusing story afterwards. It was one thing to have a battle with the translation, another with how the book was written. It was boasting so much about the author themselves, that it took several pages to get anywhere. The whole thick book could probably be condensed into a few pages if you’d remove the author’s ego from it.
I once spent and entire spring locked inside trying to translate a particularly hard piece of it, which ended up being nothing more than a detailed description of how many souls the author had corrupted in the last hundred of years and how.
I was so mad after figuring that out that I broke our silence with Annie and talked to her about the book for a long time. She laughed at me and smiled, and somehow it made me feel better. Her laughter was like tiny raindrops falling on thin crystals in the morning light. That’s not a thing I’d guess Demons usually say, but eh, I don’t give a fuck.
Somewhere down to line our silent coexistence turned into long discussions. First it was once a month here and there, then once a week at our coffee meet at the corner shop. I lived one year just for those fleeting moments and didn’t figure out why. We started attending different schools and lectures together and before either of us realized it, we were practically always together. It was after one of these days, it was almost midnight and we needed to be up early for our school that she looked at me with a peculiar expression. It was somewhere between a frown, a smirk and confusion.
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