Page 60 of Torn

***

He’s gained a few millimeters. Now he reaches Envy’s height, though not the boy’s muscle mass.

But the best part is that Anger towers overher. That nuisance goddess, Love.

Sitting in a misty enclave, he and his class—Envy, Sorrow, Wonder, and Love—listen to their respective Guides’ lecture about being the most exceptional class in the Peaks. Them, immortal archers destined to wield the most potent assembly of emotions.

Anger’s attention diverts toward Love’s runty limbs hanging over her chair, her toes unable to meet the ground. She’s a rail with marble skin, threads of black hair, and an annoying face.

Anger doesn’t know why it’s annoying. It just is.

He wants to scratch her cheek, just so she’ll change expressions. What makes the Court deem this blushless waif worthy of being the first Goddess of Love? She’s pasty and bony, lacking pigment or paunch, with no curves or girth to speak of. Not like perfectly fleshy Wonder.

And she’s not even listening to the lecture!

He sees nothing tantalizing about this Love candidate. Yet his eyes continue to stray toward her during the lesson. And when she catches him, there’s a look.

It strikes Anger in the chest. In those eyes, a coalescence of envy, sorrow, wonder, and anger—and something else that disables him. It’s the opposite of docile. He sees ardency, an audacious zest for companionship. The sort of need that might lead to revolution, a suppressed yearning for physical contact.

For touch.

Not from Anger, but fromsomeone. It brings out the austere and rigorous in him. Despite his meager years, it’s a complex and intricate look, of which he’s never been on the receiving end. It’s the look of insubordination.

It’s the capacity to love.

***

In order to regulate anger, he must know the emotion inside and out. In order to decipher which humans need a dose of it, and which humans need a reduction of it, he must study the art of fury. He must become fluent in its scents, sounds, tastes, textures.

The sour bite of resentment. The chafe of frustration. The roar of hatred. The sulfuric rot of enmity.

The composition of rivalry. The propulsion of tempers.

He learns from his Guide, who takes Anger on field trips to the mortal realm, to examine inferior humans. Anger is an apt pupil. He soaks up the education with a porous but reserved air, observing his future targets like specimens.

Not like Love, who peers at them with her whole body, with more than just her mind, more than logic. Anger isn’t biased. He’s withdrawn, as impervious as a proper deity. He schools himself to not invest in empathy or dwell beyond the intricacies of mortal conniption fits.

He dismisses the little things like their creativity, their prayers, their dreams.

What could any of that possibly teach him?

Instead, he pays attention to screams and tears, the weights of footsteps, the octaves of words. Not all humans control their anger, which leads them to chaos and poor decision-making, which only shreds their world asunder rather than maintain strength and unity. It reduces them to imperfection.

That’s why they need the Fates. That’s why they require Anger’s arrows, to reel them in or fuel them with just enough indignation, in order to defend themselves.

Yet during one expedition, he does pause. One time, he does this.

In the bedroom of an aristocratic townhouse, Anger witnesses a middle-aged human wearing a loose cravat and strumming a guitar, acrimony leaking through his fingers and hitting the strings. When he’s done, he apologizes to the lover with whom he’d been arguing.

The melody confounds Anger. The pure intensity of it. The voluntary manner in which the human atones for his mistake without intervention.

Anger shakes himself. Not all humans are capable of this enlightenment on their own. He can’t be everywhere at once in this realm, taming every mortal simultaneously, but he can distribute his power to the crucial recipients. That creates a wave, small adjustments that culminate in a larger shift, a greater influence.

Without the Fates, it would be a messier world than it already is.

But when Anger returns to the Peaks with his Guide, the music replays in his head.

***

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