Word around town is that Mr. Leclerc will get you where you need to go. He’ll sell you a ticket with an unblinking stare and an indulgent smile, and depending on your reason for traveling, you may find his presence anywhere along the spectrum between oddly comforting and wildly unsettling. You might also find that his definition of where you need to go is different from yours, or that it changes somewhere along your way, and the destination on your ticket may change to match. Alexis is cheerfully untroubled about the possibility. If you’re meant to go somewhere–anywhere–in particular, a greater power will ensure that you get there eventually.

Either way, the rumors about people leaving town on round-trip tickets and never coming back, or coming back fundamentally changed? Probably true.

Jay Cly is a swift shadow on horseback, a young man with a sharp eye, a wry smile, and the wind always at his back. As one of the last express mail riders still working the western routes in 1882, Jay is known for his uncanny speed and knack for avoiding danger. Stationed out of Never, a town where the veil between worlds grows thin, he seems to arrive just before he’s expected, and disappear just as quick.

What the townsfolk don’t know is that Jay is no ordinary rider. He is an angel sent down in human form to quietly shepherd lost and wandering souls toward redemption and peace.

But there’s more to Jay than duty. With his feet on the earth and his heart open to the world, he is driven by a yearning to understand humanity — Not just its pain, but its pleasures, its messiness, its grace. He falls in and out of fleeting friendships, brief romances, and moonlit mischiefs, savoring every detail like a song that might be his last.

A silver coin with a winged figure stamped on its face — A token from the realm above — hangs around his neck on a leather cord. It glows faintly when a soul nearby is ready to pass on, acting as both compass and calling. Jay keeps it close, even as his time among mortals grows complicated. The more human he becomes, the more he questions whether he truly wants to go back.

Walter appreciates the inherent irony in being an Angel of Death. Just another indication of the Lord’s ineffability, giving power over mortality to a being that would never experience it. Despite the conundrum, he took his work seriously. Thousands of years shepherding soul upon soul across the barrier between life and death, however, gradually brought him to the realization that his feelings towards his purpose were somewhat out of step with other angels of his calling. He felt curiosity instead of compassion. He was fascinated by the mechanism of life, rather than the meaning of it. He was similarly obsessed with the extraction of it.

After all these millennia, he still finds a peculiar satisfaction in stilling the breath, slowing the heart, and easing the light out of a creature’s eyes. Perhaps that’s a sort of benevolence. Perhaps it’s simply a facet of the mercy with which he was created–-the touch of the divine working its way out of him and back into the world. From dust to dust.