The tavern smelled of sweat and cheap vodka. The laughter of men filled the room, but Alexei sat alone in the corner, hunched over a scrap of yellowed paper. His fingers trembled, ink blotting the page as he scrawled words only he would ever read.

“Knowledge… knowledge is light, and yet—what use is light if one is too poor to afford a candle?”

He stared at the sentence, the letters bleeding, as though mocking him. Around him, the world carried on: clinking glasses, drunken songs, women’s laughter. Not one soul noticed the thin man with hollow eyes and an untouched glass before him.

A sudden cough wracked his chest. He pressed a handkerchief to his lips, and when he drew it back, there was blood. He laughed quietly to himself — a dry, bitter laugh — and scribbled again:

“Even my body betrays me before my mind does. How cruel, that the only part of me worth anything is trapped in this ruin.”

The bartender shouted at him, told him to buy another drink or leave. Alexei folded the scrap of paper carefully, as though it were scripture, and slipped it into his worn coat. He left into the snow, the cold biting his skin. Alone under the streetlamp, he tilted his head back, staring at the white flakes falling from heaven.

And for a moment — just a moment — he whispered like a child:

“Maybe I was meant to teach the angels instead.”