Elham found John late, after the fire had burned lower and the music had slowed. The families were beginning to drift home in the gradual way celebrations ended when they'd been genuinely good ones. John was sitting alone on a stone bench that had probably been there since before the hall was built, his staff leaning against the wall beside him, his hands folded on his knees, his eyes on nothing in particular.
The posture of a man who had been waiting.
Elham sat beside him. The last lamp in the party went out as he sat down, leaving only the distant light from the main street. The two of them in the dark at the edge of the celebration's end.
"Gabriel spoke to me during the gathering," Elham said.
"Oh, what did he say?"
"He told me to ask and see what you're willing to tell me." Elham looked at him. "He said you'd answer honestly and that the answer would be partial."
John was quiet for a moment. Not deciding whether to answer. Deciding where to begin.
"Ask," he said.
"Do you have an archangel?" Elham said.
Something moved in John's face, the composed acknowledgment of something that had been waiting to be named and was now named.
"Uriel, the archangel of wisdom and illumination, revealing what the darkness hides," he said quietly.
"You were another of the seven I had to find," Elham murmured. "For how long, have you had him?"
"Longer than you've been alive," John said. "Longer than your father was alive. I was the eldest prophet when we walked together."
Elham held that for a moment.
"You and my father were on the same road I'm on now."
"Yep," John said. "The same sins and war we were fighting then. But now, they're no longer the same, the cities are different, and the faces have changed."
"My father's archangel," Elham said. "When he died, what happened?"
John looked at him carefully.
"His archangel wasn't destroyed. You see when archangels lose their host, they're displaced and look for a new host to fulfill God's duties."
"And now it has one, doesn't it?" Elham said.
Gabriel had implied this without confirming it.
"Yes," John said. "Someone I believe you'll encounter on this road eventually. Not in Gibeah. Further along. When you meet them, you'll understand things about your father that I can't tell you now, because some things are only transmissible through the living presence of the archangel that was inside the person you never knew."
The lane was very quiet.
"And this staff," Elham said.
John looked at it, the plain worn wood leaning against the wall beside him, then at the identical one in Elham's hand.
A long pause.
"John," Elham said.
"Yes," John said very quietly.
"It was his, wasn't it?"
Elham looked at the staff in his hand.
He'd carried it for months. He'd set it against the wall at Mireh's inn so many times that Mireh had begun leaving a specific space for it near the door. He'd lean on it in every difficult moment in the past eighteen days. He'd gripped it too hard when things were going wrong and loosened his hold when things became right.
His father's staff.
He sat with that in the dark, and John sat beside him. He didn't try to fill the silence. He understood sometimes people need to heal in their own ways.
"...Why didn't you tell me?" Elham said at last.
Not an accusation. A genuine question.
"Because a prophet who knows too much about where he came from before he knows who he is becomes the history rather than the person," John said. "Your father knew his bloodline, his calling and his lineage before he had the faith to carry the weight correctly. It bent him in a specific direction, toward the belief that having the archangel was sufficient, that what had been placed in him was enough on its own without ultimate faith in God."
He paused.
"I gave you the staff because you needed one, and because it was his, and because I wanted some part of him to continue walking this road. Even if it was only a piece of wood."
Something crossed John's face in the dark. Not the composed patience Elham had seen on it for six years, but something older and more personal. The expression of someone who'd been carrying a burden for years and was finally able to place it in the hands it had always been meant for. He was still deciding how much of the weight Elham was ready for and how much to continue carrying.
"His guardian," Elham said. The shape of what hadn't been said yet arriving in the lane with them. "When my father died, his guardian died with him."
"Yes," John said.
"Who was he?"
John was still for a long moment. The last sounds of the celebration drifted from the main street, a song, someone walking home still humming, the city settling into its late quiet.
"Let's leave that story for another night," John said. Not an evasion. The specific weight of someone telling the truth about his own limitation. "Not because you aren't ready. Because when I tell you who he was, and I will tell you, Elham, I promise you that, I want enough time to tell it completely."
He looked at Elham directly in the dark.
Elham looked at him.
At the old man who had found him at ten years old in a temple in Aram. Who had given him a staff, a calling and six years of preparation for God knows what. He carried Uriel, the archangel of illumination, and had carried him since before Elham's father was on the road. He had walked beside his father for eleven years as a fellow prophet and had watched him fail from the outside. He must've carried that for sixteen years without speaking of it until now.
"...All right," Elham said.
"The road," John said. "In three days, we'll go east and I'll come with you. On the way I'll tell you more."
"More," Elham said. "Not everything."
"More," John confirmed. "Truth arrives in the right order or it doesn't arrive correctly. That's not a rule I made."
Elham looked at his father's staff one more time. Then he stood.
"Get some rest," he said. "Three days."
"Three days," John agreed.
Elham walked back through the darkened lane toward Mireh's inn. The celebration was over. The city was quiet, lamps extinguished, Dothan settled into its late stillness. He passed the gathering hall and looked east from the hall's door, toward the road, toward the dark there was a prophet out there who didn't yet know what he was carrying.
The warmth pointed that way with as if reassuring him that we was right.
Three days.
He went inside and slept.