Chapter Text
Florence, Italy - 1537
“Levi!”
The word was, all at once, a call and a command – but not quite a name, not from the lips of the coarse old man. Levi was surprised the man still remembered how to form the word. The artisan’s preferred term for the apprentice he had taken in so unwillingly, so many years ago, was monello. Brat.
But that was just the man’s way. The only gentle thing about him was the way he handled glass, spinning it to life and teasing from it all the colors of the world. Firenze knew no better glassmaker.
“Lo vado!” the man barked, tugging the straps of the leather apron over his head and brushing the dust – the inescapable blend of sand and ash and soot that permeated the glassmaker’s studio – from his clothes. “I’m going to meet Padre Bozado to discuss the commission for the chapel’s new window. When you finish with the store room, sweep the floors – they’re filthy.”
“Sì, Maestro Cenni,” Levi replied to the glassmaker’s retreating form.
The rag slipped from Levi’s fingers, forgotten, as soon as he heard the key turn in the lock.
Through the door in the back, through the storeroom, to the small, dark room where he slept. The hard, too-small cot was shoved into the far corner, alongside a narrow wooden chest where Levi kept his personal affects – a few pairs of clean clothes, the threadbare silk of a woman’s shawl, carefully folded, and his tools. The rest of the space – for what little of it there was – was dominated by a large table, its surface covered by a heavy linen cloth.
Levi pulled the coarse fabric back.
An angel lay on the table before him, reverently wrought in colored glass. His life’s work, his recurring dream, rendered in scavenged pieces of soft metal and glass spirited from the work-floor when the maestro wasn’t looking. Something inside Levi ached as he studied the familiar curves, taking in the colors – the crystalline purity of the angel’s robes, its emerald cloak, the hints of sapphire in its brilliant feathers – with a longing that made his chest feel hollow.
“Perdonami,” Levi whispered, tracing the unlit, flightless wings with a soot-stained finger. His free hand curled into a white-knuckled fist. This was a creature of the heavens – it deserved the light of the sun and the stars, the spirit of the wind beneath its wings, not the fetters of this dusty prison.
The angel, however, captured in glass and curving metal, said nothing. It lay there in silence, face empty, eyes blank, just as it always had. And it would stay there – fallen and lifeless – until Levi could bring to life the angel who haunted his dreams.
In all the years he’d spent chasing this vision, he’d never once succeeded. His soul, it seemed, was set on a specific face. For this angel, no other would do.
“C’è qualcuno? Is anyone there?”
The distant sound of a young woman’s voice startled the young apprentice from his reverie. It would be Isabel, the painter’s daughter, coming to deliver the colored dyes. Funny, how demanding this world could be, when Levi was caught in another.
He rose with a sigh. “Sì, sono qui!” he called, coaxing the folds of the dusty linen shroud back over the table, hiding the pieces of the stained glass angel once again.
But before he turned to leave, he paused – frozen for a moment by the touch of a far-off memory, the shadowed image of that face. A whisper.
“Levi.”
So familiar, it made him ache. So distant, he hadn’t a hope of ever catching it.
But he would try.
“I’m going to free you,” Levi whispered, covering the angel’s empty face and turning aside. “Fidati di me.”
Trust me.
*
It had started with the man.
The shop had been quiet all day – quiet enough for Maestro Cenni to leave Levi behind to sweep the floors and dust the shelves and tell all the customers to return when the glassmaker did. The shop was closed.
Levi had said so, when the man approached, his green cloak drawn tightly around him to fend off the brisk winter air.
“I’m here to see the glassmaker,” the man had said. “Ho una richiesta.” I have a request.
“He isn’t here,” Levi had replied, the words cold and sharp on his tongue. There was something about the man that bothered him, though what exactly, Levi couldn’t say. It hid behind the gleam in those too-pale eyes, the knowledge of things unsaid curling quietly behind that smile.
“Come back when he returns,” Levi had said, but he hadn’t meant it. The heavy door couldn’t close fast enough, it caught on rusty hinges, squealed in protest…
And out of the sound and the hurry came a name and a word.
“Levi – aspetta!”
Wait.
And Levi had waited, caught between safety and an icy stare by the sound of a name the man couldn’t have known.
“You are Levi, yes? The glassmaker?”
“His apprentice,” Levi had replied. The words had been tight, strained, the question caught behind his teeth. How do you know my name? All of Levi’s work had been signed by the maestro. Such was art.
But the man hadn’t replied, only smiled – and there it was again, that light, the light that spoke of secret things that only he understood.
“I’ve been looking for you, Levi. La mia richiesta è per voi.”
My request is for you.
*
That had been six years ago.
Six years of scavenged glass, of bits of fallen metal re-forged in the heat of midnight fires, of secreting dyes from the painter’s daughter and buying his tools from the blacksmith’s son. Of colors coming together when the rest of the world slept, beneath the light of candles burning low.
Six years, yet the angel remained flightless, grounded, its face clear to Levi only at night, in the dreams that danced along the edges of Levi’s consciousness before they vanished with the dawn.
The dreams were the worst of it. Levi had them every night, dreams where his hands were stained with blood instead of soot, dreams that echoed with the clang of metal and the scream of horses and the rumble of the earth beneath inhuman feet. Dark, confusing dreams, dreams he chased until he woke with a gasp, the taste of a name he’d already forgotten on his lips.
If only I could remember, Levi thought to himself, pressing thin fingers to his temple. One quick glimpse was all he would need – how long had he carried scraps of parchment and crumbling sticks of charcoal in his pockets, ready for the briefest spark of inspiration, the barest whisper of his muse? The face, the name, anything…
“Levi!”
“Sì, Maestro,” Levi replied.
“We have a commission to begin,” the glassmaker called, finding his apprentice in the storerooms, charcoal in hand, parchment blank. “Scrub the tables and ready the ovens – Padre Bozado wants the windows ready before le feste di Pasqua, and that doesn’t give us much time. The Easter season will be upon us all too soon.”
Levi stood with a quiet sigh, folding the parchment in half again and slipping it back out of sight, the charcoal accidentally snapping in his fingers and falling to the floor. Chasing inspiration would have to wait for another night, then. And the angel would remain unfinished, just as it had been for every day of those six years. Until he could remember that face, the angel would be chained here.
And so would Levi.
By the time the glass-room was clean and readied for the coming days’ work, night had long fallen. Exhaustion sank chilled handprints deep beneath Levi’s skin, numbing him to the core. When he walked, his legs protested, and his back ached when he stood, and though he’d washed repeatedly and plucked all the glass from his palms, his hands remained raw and dirty, the creases blackened with soot. He staggered to his room and sank into his cot without a glance to the angel hidden beneath the linen on the table.
And so he slept, but his sleep was uneasy and his dreams were relentless, and though the day had been long, he found no rest.
*
Winter in Firenze quickly melted into spring, but the spring, it seemed, brought nothing but the stubborn traces of the cold, which lingered in the rains that swept through the city even as the sun turned towards the earth. The river swelled, but did not flood, and the glassmaker’s shop on the Ponte Vecchio glowed with the heat of kiln fires and the colored glass that painted the light that spilled out into the early twilight.
It came as no surprise to Levi that it was raining as he set out that day. The storm had settled in quietly during the early hours of the morning, bringing a gentle sort of stillness to the world outside the rain-blurred glass, and it held as Levi donned his cloak and left the glass shop, heading for the mercato. With any luck, Isabel would have the chalk and the linseed oil ready, and Levi would be able to prepare the finishing cement for the chapel’s window and then, perhaps, finally rest.
He scoffed at the thought.
The rains brought most of the city to a halt, forcing everyone except the stubbornly determined to surrender and take shelter from the cold. The rare few who braved the weather scurried quickly along the empty streets, wrapped in woolen cloaks in rain-soaked colors, anxious to be trapped inside once again.
Levi strode through the streets with a smile playing at the edges of his lips. Most people avoided the rain, but secretly, he loved it – loved the cool press of fresh air against his skin, loved the hush that fell over the city and the way the lights played in the pools of water that collected in the uneven cobbled streets. Water splashed in arcs around his boots as he skirted around puddles and over the slurry of small streams making their way back to the river. When he thought no one was looking, he threw the hood back and let the rain fall on his upturned face, washing from his skin the streaks of soot he never could escape back at the glassmaker’s shop.
But someone was looking.
Caught in his thoughts, as he was, Levi didn’t see the two shadows slip out from the alley behind him, the first one darting forward, their footsteps almost silent, while the other lingered, watching the young man staring at the sky.
It made little difference, however. He couldn’t be sure what tipped him off – perhaps it was the sound of footsteps in the rain or the feather-light touch at his hip or the feeling of the silent wish for his stillness – but Levi spun on the spot, his hand catching the slim fingers of the pickpocket trying to steal the coin pouch at his side. Levi expected the fear on their face when he turned.
He didn’t expect to find a woman.
Black hair and black eyes, foreign even to Levi, a stranger in a strange town. Her clothes were shabby, the faded scrap of red fabric wrapped tightly over her hair the only hint of color she wore. She struggled, but Levi held firm.
“Who are you, thief?” he demanded.
“Eren,” was all she said, the accent unfamiliar in Levi’s ears, “run.”
And then Levi saw him.
The boy stood in the alley, just barely within sight, his eyes alight with a trace of fear and an anger like fire, brilliant and green and familiar and foreign all at once. The knife in his hands was the only clean thing about him – the rest, his tattered clothes, his bare feet, the skin clinging to his all-too apparent bones, was filthy. Haggard. The rain plastered his brown hair to his forehead, traced streaks of dirt down his gaunt cheeks, but it made no difference.
“Mio Dio,” Levi whispered in shock.
The girl saw the opportunity and she took it – she planted a sharp jab to Levi’s ribs and pulled her hand free. She was off like an arrow from a bow, vanishing down the alley before Levi could remember how to breathe.
But the boy – the angel – remained.
Levi’s hands moved at the clasps of his cloak. “Take it,” he whispered, tearing the fabric from over his shoulders and casting it to the boy, who caught it and held it close.
And then he ran.
All at once, Levi knew why it rained.
Heaven wept for its angel on the streets of Firenze.
*
The doors to the glass shop opened with a crash and Levi didn’t wait to see if they closed – he was already tearing through the storeroom, water dripping from his rain-drenched clothes in thin streams and pooling on the floor. The maestro caught the look in his apprentice’s eyes and knew – he closed the store and left the shop without a word, leaving the boy to use the glass as a canvas for the fire in his soul.
Parchment. Brushes. Ink. Levi’s hands shook as he unfurled the parchment and pinned the corners to the table, readying his brushes as if preparing for battle, every movement breathless and decisive and precise. That face… Levi felt as though he was caught in a dream, tracing every curve with trembling fingers, coaxing the angel out of the parchment with unworthy strokes of ink.
For the first time in six years, it finally felt right.
From parchment and ink to stain and glass – Levi moved with a fervor, his blood running so hot he couldn’t even feel the heat of the kilns as he worked. Sweat slipped down his spine and streaked his face as he colored the glass, painting in hues he never knew existed, had never created before, and bringing to life the angel whose face he had finally perfected. The lights at the glasshouse burned long into the night.
The angel and the glassmaker watched the rising light of the morning sun with triumphant smiles on their faces.
“I have done it,” Levi whispered, brushing the angel’s cheek with a single, reverent touch. “Ora sei libero.”
Now you are free.
And as the sun rose soft and low over Firenze, the glassmaker slept, and did not dream.