the ground with small pellets, it was fascinating to look at, and Lina

first looked at this tail for a long time, silvery-blue,

with iridescence, but then she began to wonder what was going on there in

general. It looks like the odd couple was fighting.

Here the creature swung its heavy paw to

strike the man. The blow should have hit him on the head,

but he caught the paw in his hand and jerked it away. The

creature was supposed to swat him into a flatbread,

but he pushed it away as if it were made of cotton wool. And then

an even stranger thing happened: a shiny blue tail,

8

and the paws, and the long ears – all this began to retract

in a monster, and here he is no longer a monster, but an intelligent

middle-aged man with glasses and a gray business suit. He

straightened his jacket, smoothed his hair, and continued to say

something. The man in black responded

by gesturing violently, showing his displeasure with

everything that was happening. Then the gray suit turned and walked toward

the road, and the other man, hands down, remained standing on the

floor. The grass and ground beneath him were almost extinguished, and it was dark again

,but he couldn’t see anything around him.

Lina backed away from the wall, her heart pounding.

She sat down in the corner, pulled the blanket up to her chin, and tried

to convince herself that this was a dream. She remembered that she and co —

boy had a smartphone, and she began to blame herself for stepping

out without filming the strange couple on it. «Yes, that would solve it

my problem, she thought. «Then it would be immediately

clear whether it was a dream or not.» With these thoughts, she

calmed down a little, reached into her backpack for her smartphone – just

in case, as if she really was recording

something on it, when suddenly she was blinded by an unexpected light – someone

was standing next to the entrance.

9

Five hours earlier, a few kilometers south

.

The light of the setting sun shone through the small

basement window. It moved to the floor and moved smoothly

along, illuminating everything in its path:

white walls, simple wooden shelves. And on them —

beauty. Lots of beauty. A lot of work. Tools, brushes

,and paints.

The workshop was a creative mess, but the work was still going on

they were laid out on shelves in

a certain sequence, depending on the stage of production and the degree

of readiness. Some were drying up, some were

at the stage of creating sketches, and some were almost finished.

A lot of boxes of materials, bottles of

special solutions and pigments were here and there,

a hundred different tiny and larger jars and

special shapes – all this gave the workshop the appearance of a

fancy alchemical laboratory with modern

trends from IKEA.

The workshop seemed to be permeated by the spirit of creativity, the energy

of inspiration invisibly bubbled in the air, thin streams

oozed up from almost finished paintings, panels,

tables and decorative dishes. Most of them were

10

they are decorated and painted with natural ornaments:

bizarre plants, animals and birds, mosses and lichens, fungi

and the berries lived their lives on them. All this energy»

lit up» the room, making it stand out from hundreds of others. It was

a feast, not for humans, of course – just for him.

A ray of sunlight touched the angel statue, reflected

off its crystalline texture, and a slight ripple of space, barely visible

to the human eye, began to spread

across the room.

The angel did many righteous things today. The angel can

rest. The invisible essence of warmth and light that he