All is well… until it isn’t.

Twilight swathes the heavens as Gabriel comes rushing forward, concern vivid upon his features before wrapping his wings around Antares. There isn’t much time left, brother. His voice quivers with hopelessness and fear, tears beginning to softly trail from his eyes. They hold each other and weep in the only way that angels can for what is about to be lost, knowing that it is their last chance to do so.

Pain envelopes them both, striking Gabriel first as his visage crumbles away into a blinding white light. Antares knows that his fate is soon to follow. He holds fast to the collapsing figure of his brother until there is nothing left but empty space. His soft weeps turn to painful bellows as his wings collapse limply in defeat. There is only a moment to grieve before the numbing pain feels more like a spike into his chest and tingling in every cell of his body. He knows it’s coming. The inevitable fall from grace. His body quaking, enraged screams are unleashed with the last bit of life that he has before his appendages turn a glowing white and he slips, aching, into a slumber.

- - -

Sunlight beams down in dapples across his face, warming his skin and glowing beyond his eyelids. It causes him to wake, gasping as if it were his first breath of air and startling into an upright position. His legs tremble beneath him as he attempts to comprehend what exactly is going on. There is nothing but a deafening screeching in his ears that he cannot shake and as he looks around it takes him a moment to realize that he’s in another realm. Memories of what has happened to him begin to flood in as he gains clarity and the realization sends him stumbling backward as if something otherworldly had just hit him full force. He inhales sharply from the impact of such memories, eyes closing tightly as if they physically pained him. He opens them to see beastly paws beneath him, holding him up, and an aching feeling where his wings once were. They were only phantom pains and nothing more.

He tries to scream in anguish over his loss but it comes out as a pained howl, a sound familiar and yet foreign to him all the same. Tears stream from heterochromatic eyes as this reality hits him in waves. Forsaken. Forgotten. Fallen angel.

Around him sounds begin to fade in as the screeching dissipates. Birds chiming and chirping in the vivid green treetops, a breeze blowing through the rocks around him, and distant sounds of others like him. He stumbles a few steps, legs still quivering from it all, but finds his balance moments later and meanders haphazardly away.

His body heaves with sobbing as he makes his way further, mourning the loss of his grace and that of his brothers. Overcome with emotion and overwhelmed with all that is happening, he doesn’t even realize that he wanders into the space of a young girl of the same mortal shell. His eyes steer upward from the ground to see her stepping from between two large boulders to meet his gaze. Desperate to find answers, he speaks to her in his native tongue. “בבקשה תעזור לי. איפה אני? (Please, help me. Where am I?)”