A seraph weighs ninety pounds and stands nine feet high with its wings folded, and the farmers of Uzhdol consider both numbers an insult to the scale. It comes down off the ridge road with the thaw, usually the second week of March, and settles on the roof of the Doru tithe barn as if it had paid for the shingles. Six wings: the upper pair covers the face, the middle pair does the flying, the lower pair hides the feet. The vanes run from soot gray at the shaft to a hot orange at the tips, and in spring they shed. A molting seraph leaves charred feathers on the thatch and brown rings in the pasture, which is how it is tracked.
By June the routine is fixed. At noon it preens, lower pair first, then the middle, then the upper, and the whole business takes forty minutes by the church clock. It does nothing else in that time and answers nothing. Cvetan Doru, who keeps eleven hives under the barn eaves, says the bees ignore it and so does he. The only quarrel in summer is with a magpie that nests on the same ridge. Every morning the seraph carries the magpie's sticks, one at a time, to the far side of the roof. Every afternoon the magpie carries them back. Neither has yet conceded the gable.
In September the seraph changes. It drops from the roof to the stubble fields and eats the scorched grain left after burning, and in the evening it walks to Vrabnik Marsh to drink standing in water up to the knee. The coals in its feathers brighten as the air cools, and the upper wings stay open a hand's width, so the face can be seen as a pale narrow oval with no features anyone agrees on. A low hum comes off it, one sustained note that makes glassware ring two fields away, and the hay-cart drivers on the Vrabnik track slow down to listen.
Once the first snow lies, it takes the lime kiln above Uzhdol, folds all six wings shut and sits inside the cold firebox. Snow melts in a circle thirty paces wide around the kiln, and children use the bare ground for games. Wash hung on lines inside that circle dries in an hour. The seraph does not mind the children, but it will not tolerate a dropped sled rope across its doorway. Locals say to hang laundry on the kiln side of the village, to keep lamps out of lofts, and to stop the kiln hearth with a wet sack if the singed smell reaches the houses.
- Classification
- Six-winged fire celestial
- Habitat
- Barn ridges, lime kilns, burnt stubble
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 9 ft tall, about 90 lb
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Highland farm country
- Binomial
- Pyrocherub sexalatus
- Diet
- Scorched grain, charcoal, marsh water
- Temperament
- Dignified, warm, routine-bound