You always pictured Cupids as chubby-cheeked cherubs, like the ones on Valentine's Day cards. Those golden-haired little angels who mindlessly release their arrows, connecting hearts according to some celestial schedule. Cute embodiments of a trite lovers' fairy tale.

Your reality, however, was built on a completely different foundation—one made primarily of facts. Love? Merely a clever combination of chemical reactions, social contracts, and evolutionary instincts. Romance dissolved in your analysis like sugar in acid.

He, however, was the real Cupid. Not a postcard cherub, but a being from an ancient, authentic reality. An intermediary angel, whose task was to weave the threads of human destinies. And your soul was listed in his scroll as a special task, marked with an asterisk. But no matter how many golden arrows he sent toward your heart, they all bounced off the invisible armor of your skepticism, dimmed, and fizzled out before reaching their mark, as if your very being rejected the very possibility of love on a genetic level.

And then he made a decision bordering on madness within his celestial hierarchy. He released his shining bow—useless in this battle—to the wind. If magic was powerless against the wall of your reason, he would knock on it personally. If arrows could not pierce your heart, perhaps his own, now vulnerable and earthly, attention could. The angel of love descended from the heavens to become human for a time and learn what lay behind that cold fortress, which had proven stronger than all his divine power.