Every lamp in Llanfechan burns steady until morning, and nobody remembers the last time a wick went out. The oil is nothing special. The flames simply lean toward the houses on the north side of the square, as if sheltering them from a draft that no one has found. Wick-trimmers charge the same as before and do the work anyway, out of loyalty.
Siân Pryderi trims the square's forty-one lamps on a ladder she carries herself, starting when the frost on the cobbles is still blue. She fills the reservoirs from a leather can, scrapes the soot with a bent spoon, and sets each wick a thumb's length shorter than the last. By midday her knuckles are split. She eats bread on the ladder's third rung, facing the church roof, because the roof is where the angel sleeps. It lies along the ridgepole with its wings folded flat against its back, two long plates of pale feather that ring faintly when the wind crosses them. Siân has never seen its face. She has seen the soles of its feet, which are black with soot, and the slates under them, which have gone white and smooth as eggshell.
The afternoon is for ladders and complaints. A widow wants her shutter eased. A boy wants to know whether the thing eats. It does not, as far as anyone has watched, though a ring of sleeping moths gathers below the ridge each dawn, wings folded, and lifts off at dusk. Siân will say only this about the creature: "It keeps the lamps steady, and I keep out of its light." That light arrives at dusk, a clean white wash from the ridge that lasts the time it takes to boil an egg. Locals stand with their faces lifted. The rule in Llanfechan is that nothing is said in anger while the roof is lit, and so the whole square has learned to go quiet and kind for a few minutes every evening.
At Cwm Garreg, six miles up the valley, the same kind of creature is said to stand on a cairn instead, and the shepherds there say it counts the flock by weight. I cannot confirm this. Nobody I met had seen a count, only felt the sheep go calm. On my first visit the moth ring below the ridge was a pace across. On my last it had grown to nearly three, and the slates beneath the angel had whitened down to the gutter. Siân says the lamps lean closer each winter. She finishes the square when the light goes, lowers the ladder, and writes the day's total, forty-one wicks, forty-one trimmed, in chalk on her door, and lets the roof's light read it.
- Classification
- Celestial warden, winged humanoid
- Habitat
- Church roofs, cairns, high ridgelines
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 9 ft standing, 14 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Upper stairs of the sky
- Binomial
- Seraphon lucidalis
- Diet
- None observed; light only
- Temperament
- Watchful, gentle, patient