Next war, the angel decided, he was going to sit out.

Before the dust settled, before hosts rose and fell depending on their actions and inclinations, he fled. Cowardice, maybe. More like pragmatism, he rationalized. If he didn’t want to get roped in to any more conflagrations, this was the only reasonable course. No matter how great the arguments in favor or against, nothing would ever be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.

He found a space where no one would be likely to look for him: mountains. Remote, foreboding. The jagged, formidable peaks seemed to serve as a warning, an epic stone wall with spikes on it. He felt protected. The mountains surrounded an ancient glacial lake, ice cold and quiet. Below the treeline, a lush forest of pines grew, smelling of wood and growth, sheltering a pleasant array of life, insects on up to bears and everything in between. Good neighbors; when he asked them to leave him alone, they did. The sky was often searingly clear, a blue of dreams. Storms inspired awe. Mornings broke with a tinted light that crawled into the valley like a work of art. He sat on a rocky hillside and watched snow fall, cover the mountains, rumble down in avalanches, fall again, and retreat in spring, to the highest peaks where the blankets of it never melted. Warm and cold, summer and winter, a good variety. He was content.

He only realized after settling here that, from a certain perspective, he was halfway between earth and sky, above and below. Still refusing to pick sides. So be it. The world turned, circling on its orbit, as the arm of the galaxy spun ‘round, and time passed.

• • • •

When a human wandered into his mountain stronghold, he was shocked and offended. He’d picked this place because it was so far from anything, remote from any settlements that had the least chance of reminding him what he’d fled from. But here it was, with a pack on its back and a good woolen cloak, like it was planning to stay. The gall of it. He could smite the poor sad creature and be done with it. But then it sat by the edge of the lake, pulled up its legs, pressed its face on its knees and cried.

Humans were always crying over one thing or another, often for very little. But it seemed rude to smite one that appeared to be in such distress.

After a time—the sun crawled a little across the sky—the human stood, brushed itself off, and started gathering branches. Over the next several days it built a lean-to, a pathetic slanted roof of sorts propped up against one of the largish boulders, left by some glacier thousands of years ago, after the act of creation but before the mess that had brought him here. The human piled up pine boughs and made a barely adequate shelter. The first big snow would send the thing crashing down. Snow was still awhile off. Maybe the small human would leave by then.

The human stood with hands on hips and regarded its handiwork with what seemed to be satisfaction, a quick nod and a vague smile. As if it hadn’t expected any of it to work and was surprised that it had. Well, that was one thing they had in common. Next, it set about organizing the things from its pack: a jar, a blanket, a loaf of bread wrapped in a towel, and a small knife. These all seemed quite fancy, more developed than he thought humans were capable of, and he wondered just how long he’d been hiding. Clay, wool, wheat, and minerals, all turned into something else. Jar, cloak, bread, knife. These humans could take the most innocuous objects and transform them. That was part of the mess, that god gave them things and they turned those things into something else entirely. You either thought that was good or bad, and then you went to war over it.

What really shocked him, though, was when the human came to the shore of the lake, faced the towering peak, and sang. It raised its arms, obviously beseeching, or maybe celebrating, and sang words of praise. It also begged for favors. For insight, for safety, for a sign.

The creature was praying. To the mountain, as if it could answer, as if some divine force was even present.

A far-off gust of wind blew a mist of snow and ice that curled away from the peak like a breath. As if the mountain answered. As if it gazed down at the angel and laughed.

The human repeated this prayer every morning.

• • • •

After that, everything felt wrong. Maybe not wrong, exactly. More like when a few feathers on a wing were out of place, jostled out of alignment, so they pinched and itched until you preened them back. Just, a thing. And that thing was realizing that he couldn’t go anywhere in this territory without seeing the highest peak, a distinctive, toothy spire towering a good bit up from its neighbors, which seemed to gather around it like acolytes. Like angels swarming around god. He’d glance over his shoulder, and there it was. He’d have a pleasant walk through the trees, emerge into a clearing, and the granite tower loomed. Like it was watching him.

Some, both above and below, held the belief that god lived in the mountains of the world, the highest peaks, to better gaze down upon creation. To watch. He remembered, now.

This was likely the result of mere displacement. The awe one felt when encountering rough towers of granite, capped with white and swirling halos of mist and cloud sheeting off a knife edge of stone. The awe this view inspired must be very like the awe of gazing upon god. Or perhaps, since gazing upon god was impossible, this was the next best thing.

This mountain probably had a name. Probably had a hundred. Every group of travelers, every lone hunter who ever came through here probably gave it a name, until the mountain was stuffed with names and became holy with them. Maybe the folk from whatever poor, hardscrabble village this human had come from lit bonfires in its honor and shouted prayers to the god they believed was watching over them, as if god didn’t have more pressing matters: thrones and dominations, and managing rebellion.

The angel didn’t like to think that god really did live in all the mountains, keeping watch. He had come here for the quiet, not for god. Still, it became hard to not feel the dense presence of jagged stone at his back. The chill scent of ancient stone, lingering.

At night the moon rose and the cosmic map of stars spread overhead. The world turned silver with that light, which somehow made the peak seem larger, more menacing, and the shadows darker and longer. A cold light, not at all like the fire of the sun. The sky might break with the chill that fell over the world.

The small human stood at the edge of the lake and watched the movement of the universe arcing overhead, and when it looked at the looming peak, it smiled.

• • • •

Another part of the mess had come about when humans started predicting things like solstices because it turned out they were good at noticing patterns. If a thing repeated once or twice, they noticed and remembered, and tracking and predicting the sun and stars got them just a little bit too close to heaven, didn’t it? There had been debate on whether this was good or bad. This human looked east in the morning and west in the afternoon and seemed to nod sagely as if it had learned something.

The peak lit up like purple fire as the morning sun crashed into the valley and was the first bit of land to darken at dusk, and that shadow stretched across the valley while the surrounding peaks were still touched with golden light. Blessed.

The human survived, somehow. Settled in, much like he had. He made himself small and perched in a tree to watch. If the human had looked up it would have seen an owl, nothing more, but oddly it never seemed to look up.

Mostly, it foraged for food. It seemed to subsist well enough on plants and berries, and knew which mushrooms wouldn’t kill it. It didn’t seem like it would be any good at hunting, and sure enough, it never tried to trap the small animals that lurked. He’d have been shocked if it killed anything larger than a beetle, but it did manage to catch a couple of fish from the lake. He’d begun to work out a plan where, if the human began to starve, he would leave out bits of meat and tubers for it. Really, he thought it would have fled for home by now, or at least someplace warmer.

In fact, it almost seemed content. Living alone had a practical attraction when the life one had been born into became too much. He knew that well. He wondered why he kept watching it.

If he heard an amused rumble, it was surely a distant rockslide and not the mountain’s laughter.

• • • •

Once, a mountain lion stalked the water’s edge. Instead of passing through to the next section of its territory, the lion’s gaze found and locked on the human, who was piling another layer of pine boughs on its shelter. Unmindful, ignorant. The big cat would strike and the human never know what got it. A scream and a spurt of blood and it would be done, and the lion would have a meal. Not much of one. That was why he put himself in the lion’s path. There’s better hunting elsewhere, he told it. Not that scrawny bony little thing that still cried every few days or so, for no discernable reason. The lion curled its lip and swished its tail, but it walked on.

Same thing with a bear and its cubs. He patrolled and told them to move on, lest any of them be tempted by the small clawless thing that had settled in the valley.

It was like having a pet, he thought. Or maybe a tadpole in a jar, who must not have had any awareness of the large presence staring down at it, worrying over it. It swam and bumped its nose against the boundaries of its world, oblivious but somehow filled with purpose.

Time passed.

Golden leaves fell and carpeted the space around the lake, covering the path the human had worn walking back and forth between its shelter and the shore. Ripples traveled across the water, and lily pads swayed in a cold breeze that threatened snow.

The human showed no distress at the change in seasons and worsening weather, and showed no signs of leaving, to return to whatever more human-suitable habitat it had come from. It did start to wear the blanket over its shoulders as well as sleeping with it. It produced a pair of knitted gloves from its pack.

It couldn’t go on. It would never survive. Whatever it had fled from couldn’t be worse than winter in the mountains, when snow would pile up well over the top of the lean-to and halfway up the trees besides.

The mountain watched, but did nothing more than rumble and breathe wisps of ice. The increasing snowpack seemed like a festive cloak for winter. The angel flew to the rim of the valley and begged it: if it was capable of sending a sign to the human, it must tell it to go away, back to warm weather. “Don’t you care? It loves you. Are you ready to watch it die?”

As if god really did live in the mountain. The pile of rock didn’t answer, of course. Still, he felt that pressure, the tightness on his back that made him feel like he was being watched. He kept glancing over his shoulder.

If he didn’t want to watch the human freeze to death at the first snow, he supposed he could just leave. Find another retreat even more extreme than this. Some cave or scraggily island, maybe. Someplace without mountains.

But he’d been here first, and it would be embarrassing to let the human drive him away.

Each morning, the human came to the lake’s edge to pray and to collect water that it hauled back to heat over the fire. It scooped the water in the jar of well-made pottery it had brought and made tea out of a scraggily sage that grew in sunny clearings throughout the woods. Choosing between a well-made jar and a good weapon, he would have thought the human would prefer a weapon for the sense of safety. But then, he’d fled from a war, so maybe his outlook was skewed. When you were in a situation that required weapons, you grappled with the possibility that you might not be around long enough to need water, if you didn’t have the weapon.

He considered that his preference for a weapon was a symptom of fear.

The human wasn’t afraid, and this seemed odd. Maybe it didn’t realize its danger. Maybe it needed to be told.

So one morning he waited, sitting cross-legged at the water’s edge, his tunic bunched up at his knees, hisfluttering brown wings folded behind him. He had it all planned out. Hello, he would say to the human. You’re in danger.

The human looked up the path, saw him, and screamed. It dropped the jar, which hit a rock and smashed into several pieces and a dusting of shards.

So maybe it was afraid.

The human ran, even as he reached after it, calling, “Wait, please!”

But the human was gone, racing away through the trees, and he didn’t know if it would ever come back. If it had gone back to where it belonged, that would be good, wouldn’t it? Then why did he feel terrible?

Returning to his owlish vantage, he realized he had underestimated the difference in size between himself and the human. He had thought his approach would be unremarkable and that his soothing words would be enough. His kind used to appear to humans all the time, hadn’t they? Surely this one would be used to the idea of awe, if not actually being confronted by it. In fact, his presence must have come in like a thunderhead, towering, his voice booming.

Toward nightfall, the human returned, creeping warily, hiding behind one tree trunk, then the next. A soft chill rain had begun to fall, but still it spent a long time waiting, watching over the lake. It studied the skies, but only saw an owl soaring silently to its next perch. It built up its fire and huddled in its shelter, sleepless. It hadn’t slept particularly well before, but now it startled awake every hour, tended the fire, and stared into the night with eyes shining orange from the glow of the coals.

In the morning, the human used its inadequate little knife to carve a point at the end of a stick. Making a spear.

He felt a lurching in his chest, a brokenness he hadn’t felt since Heaven itself split in two and angels came raining down.

On reflection, he hadn’t felt much of anything in all the time since. That was why he was hiding, so he wouldn’t feel. And here was this small human carving a spear it hadn’t believed it needed until it saw an angel on its shore.

He ought to leave the poor thing alone.

Maybe now it would go home to where it would be safe, but no. The next day it tried to use a scraped-out piece of wood to carry water in. It didn’t work well—partly because it also tried to carry its pitiful spear under its arm, while searching the sky for danger and scurrying through the trek as quickly as possible. Alas, a wooden vessel couldn’t heat water over the fire, and so the pitiful creature couldn’t have its grassy, gamey tea.

It sat and wept. Tried again the next day. And the next day, even in the rain.

He couldn’t stand it anymore.

He gathered up the pieces of the jar and fixed it with a little pitch and a little prayer. A shift in time to when the jar wasn’t broken. Better than new. When the human was asleep, or close enough to sleep, he crept very, very quietly to the fire and placed the repaired jar beside it. Then he soared away to his perch to watch.

Morning. The human stood by the edge of the pond, hugging the jar to its chest and looking at the mountain peak looming over them. It had left the spear behind.

“I knew it. I knew you would answer my prayers!”

Figured, that the human would give the credit to the mountain. That was really too much, so he appeared—regular human-size this time—stepping through the mist gathered on the lake’s shore. The glow of the rising sun reflected off the water onto both of them.

Startled, it cringed back, then gathered resolve to itself like a helmet and armor. “What . . . are you the mountain?” It started to drop to its knees in supplication.

“No! Of course not. It’s just a mountain.” Though his glance darted to the peak’s wedge, as if he had to check.

“Then . . . what are you?”

“I’m just hiding here.”

“Me too,” the human said softly.

He shrugged a little. “I’m sorry about the jar.”

It shrugged in reply. “I shouldn’t have dropped it.”

“We can’t always help what we do.” He flinched a bit at these words, thinking of flames, terror, pain, and whether he’d fled out of principle or cowardice. If god lived in the mountain then surely he would have said something by now.

The sky had grown heavy, dark gray, thick as wool. Predictably, flakes began falling. Just a few, drifting weightless. Like ashes from a fire, but these were clean. They stung a little when they touched his face. The human tipped back its own face and smiled in what might have been wonder.

Humans were meant to be in groups. Herds, packs, tribes. They were so hairless and fragile, they needed each other. All in a burst the angel said, “You really need to go. It’s going to freeze. You aren’t safe here.”

“Freezing to death can’t hurt worse than being beaten to death.”

Well, that was a thing to say.

Surprising himself, the angel said, “Would you like to talk about it? Maybe over tea?”

“It’s not very good tea.”

The mountain was whispering, a low encouraging breath. The angel heaved a frustrated sigh. “Why are you even here, anyway?”

He assumed it was one of those quests or tasks that humans sometimes embarked on, like sitting on the top of a pole for a year to prove how much they loved god, as if god would ever demand or appreciate such an ostentatious stunt.

“He hit me,” the human said sullenly, looking off at nothing, a discouraged frown pulling at its features. “He hit me. I couldn’t stay though everyone said I had to stay, that it was my duty, my burden, that God wanted me to stay but that didn’t seem right. I couldn’t stay but I had no place to go, and I used to look up at the mountains and think they seem so peaceful, so above everything, and nothing could touch me here. Maybe if I came here God would tell me what to do. But I’m not sure God really is here. There’s just you.”

Oh, a million things he could say about god and mountains and peace. What he actually said was, “God wouldn’t want you to stay with a man who beats you. Know that above all else.”

“How do you know what God wants?” Then, quietly, it asked, “What are you hiding from?”

Choices, he thought. He was only hiding from choices.

“How about,” he said, hesitating, but when the words formed he knew it was the right thing to do. “How about I go with you? To someplace warm. To make sure you stay safe.”

“Really?”

“Don’t think this is the mountain answering your prayers or anything. This is just something I can do.” He wasn’t doing much else, after all. “We should go before the storm moves in. If we’re going to.” He nodded up at a swell of gray pressing over the peaks, that hadn’t been there a little while ago, and seemed to appear as encouragement.

“And then we’ll have tea,” the human said. “Where it’s warm.”

“All right.”

They packed up the human’s things—there wasn’t much, and the human insisted on carrying it all. They left the lean-to and found the path that led downhill through the forest.

He turned to get one last look, but clouds shrouded the peak. Somehow, though, the snow held off for their whole journey, as if they were being looked after.