No Heaven of Mine - A Fallen Angel Quest

1.1 Doubts

The voices, already barely audible and distant, die out in a few moments, leaving you to the quiet you wanted. It is safer that way, you reason to yourself. You expose yourself to no risk, put your quest under no threat. After all, you have time – all the time you could ever need. Fallen or not, yours is still an angelic flesh, barely affected by the passage of years and self-sustaining. Therefore, there is no need to expose yourself at the moment of weakness. There is no need to take seek a shortcut. The mending you need, the mending you require, is just within grasp from where you are.

Yet you do not immediately force it to commence. When your thoughts brush against the scab in your mind that you will have to tear, you feel an echo of what it holds back. And so, you hesitate. Not on purpose. You keep telling yourself that you will proceed to do it any moment now, but there is always another thought follow, something to observe.

Through the cracked shell of the Intruder's body, you watch the clouds pass, focusing on them for long minutes. Then you close your eyes, hoping to unaccustom them from light so that you can take a better stock of your immediate surroundings.

It doesn't work. You never expected it to. It was a distraction from what you have to do.

It is only when the day ends and the sky above turns black and speckled with unfamiliar stars that you finally gather your strength, take a deep breath, and peel away the calcified matter of your spirit. It gives way smoothly and easily, offering you a briefest glimmer of hope that it will not be that bad. And just like that, you are pulled down into an ocean of pain.

Your wounded body collapses onto you. A mindless scream comes out a breathless rasp and if there was a single piece of sinew still holding in your shattered body, your bones would bend and break under the tension of the spasm. You need to flee, but you are motionless, sealed into your broken skin, even the relief of wailing lost to you. The Silence wanted to protect you from this, and you shunned its offer. You chose life. Now, you pay the price.

You want nothing more than to slide into unconsciousness, or failing that to lose control, weep, yell, thrash around like a gutted animal, escape the hurt you've brought upon yourself. But you need the pain. You need to hold that wound open, force the Silence through it, feel the fact that you are bleeding, wounded, alive and not abandon that for the timeless softness of stasis.

Soon enough, all your thoughts, all your senses, all those little things that makes you who you are is scoured clean under this pressure. Only pain reminas. The entirety of your life is reduced to this basest of states, maintained only by your need to survive. If there is anything else beyond that, it is white noise, unregistrable to your fraying mind, unimportant compared to this incontestable truth: you are in pain.

Between you and pain and everything else, there are days, or maybe weeks, or maybe months. There is no time for you, there are no seasons. All that is, all that exists could just as well be a swirl of darkness and you would not notice a single difference.

You relearn it all piecemeal.

You experience it like a newborn slowly discovering that there is a world beyond them. There are moments that the uniform nothingness before your eyes gives way to light and dark, and from their mingling, you slowly discern shapes of your surroundings, once again reminding yourself where you are. You learn to tell apart the day from the night, and from that you once again find that there is time. In the light of the day, you look down - as you have a working body - and discover anew that you are half-submerged and that the water is murky, oily with your blood. Then, with increasing surprise, you realize that you have bones which are whole, and muscles you can move, that there is so much to your body that can twist and change with just a little bit of your will.

It feels like you have been finally washed ashore, onto wet, soft sand. The pain dies down, diminishes and leaves you with the trails of your tears, the sheen of your sweat. The less of it remains inside of you, the more room is made for yourself.

You live, and you are on your way to being alive.

Soon, the pain is faint enough that there is room in your mind to think of other matters, and since you do not want to move, not yet, not until you are sure you are complete, you allow the thoughts to come over you and drag you through their intangible undercurrents. And it is only fitting that now that you have swam through the depths of torment, now that you are still splattered with your own blood and waste, now that you are still half-submerged in a fetid pool, that you think of the only thing that matters, and that is the Heaven.

If you had gone through was the nadir of existence, then the Heaven above must be the zenith. The pain erased who you were and broke you down into a dust so fine that you became nothing. The Heaven does no differently with minds and souls, but when shatters you, it is not fall that it inflicts, but exaltation. If there is a way to speak of it, to describe, you don't know it, and in a way, it is better like that. It is beyond words. The mere fact that you can think with any sort of certainty that there is a Heaven is a blessing beyond reckoning, and if your thoughts could touch it, it would be a sacrilegious in the extreme.

But you still try to encompass it, frame it. Because the Heaven does not leave you, even when your memories of it were wiped clean by the diminishment of your fall. It cannot leave you. To be perishable is to be imperfect, and the Heaven is the shining jewel at the heart of the cosmos, the redeeming mirror of a world of dust.

Perhaps this annihilation of your mind was, after a fashion, a blessing. You have suffered much, and that made you appreciate the world like a newborn, to whom nothing is without importance. No breath was ever as sweet as the one that reminded you that there is existence beyond pain. Likewise, with the Heaven; when you could see it, when you could touch it, you were blind to its importance. You took it for granted and only in losing it, you truly realized just how important it is.

The convalescence offered you by the Silence is long; it stretches into weeks of motionlessness. The basic necessities of having a body are hard to see to, and so to take your mind off the hunger and filth and all the little pains, you instead focus more and more on the celestial notions. An understanding buds and flowers in your thoughts that if there is anything real about existence, then it must be the Heaven. The Heaven indisputably is. Its fundamental reality is beyond doubt: something that perfect can never be counterfeit. But what about everything else, all other facets of Creation? They may as well be reflections, shadows, distortions. Unreal and fake, not any more worthy of consideration than figments of a dream you awaken from. Therefore, it is of utmost importance (and perhaps it is the only important thing that is) that the Heaven needs to be maintained and protected against everything that would threaten it.

The understanding - a revelation, even - does not end there. It continues unfolding, building an understanding that you find hard to dispute: that the Heaven is under threat. Not by the Fourfold War; falsehood, no matter how convincing, can no more hurt the truth than a blade of grass can cut steel. But the Heaven is not empty, it does not keep separate. There live messengers who course between the Heaven and other, less real places, doomed places. Those angels who, through the very act of stewarding the celestial sphere, bind weights to Heaven. Your imagination readily serves you an image that represents it perfectly – a golden city ran by a council of thieves. They may think themselves steward and guardians, a shining bulwark against the ruinous forces, but being one of them, you know now that they are just thieves and imposters. Angelic flesh is strong and resistant, but it is flesh nonetheless. It can be put in pain, ground down until it is a groveling mess of moans and despair. Just break the bones, spill the blood and tear the flesh, and all the purity and perfection is laid bare for the con that it is. The angelic host has death in its flesh. It brought death into the Heaven.

A sense of shame overcomes that you had contributed to this diminishing. This shame is strange, alien, quiet and yet, without a slightest doubt, a part of you.

But there is a comfort in it shame. The injustice you have suffered is only more evidence. You may not remember the exact moment, the break-point, but you harbour little doubt that you were in the right and they were in the wrong. Perhaps you had tried to show them the truth of their failing, convince them that the Heaven would only be protected if the angels ceased to live in it, and they refused it. Perhaps they knew well that there is a horror to the notion that the truth of existence may one day fall prey to time and entropy, tarnish and that it would be their fault - but rather than to act on that knowledge, they opted to silence all the voices reminding them of their guilt.

You think of many like scenarios; perhaps not one of them is true and the reality of your crime was something else altogether, but you grow in certainty that you were in the right, and what fault there was lied with the denizens of Heaven, so blind to their folly. A Heaven infested by them would soon be no Heaven of yours - no Heaven at all.

Such thoughts are like chains. They wrap around your mind and soul, still numb from the anguish of recovery, and promise to bind fast around them, anchoring them to a purpose. Giving a conviction, and strength. But as your mending stretches out in time, you are given plenty opportunity to hold other things on your mind, too. You watch the sky above, the interior of your little dome. The ripples in the pool. The dance of flies and beetles in the column of light. The strange shapes of light-hating amphibian critters, edging close to the bright pillar and scorning it. The growth of moss and mould and all that thrives in the damp gloom.

The life here is unrefined and simple, but nonetheless vibrant and hardy. It surrounds you and integrates you; vines grow around your rebuilding arms, a spider's net bridges between the tip of your wing and a rocky surface. You have become a part of this world and there is something comforting in the fact that even at the bottom of your fall, the world embraces you.

You do not doubt that you were treated unjustly. But you cannot - not yet, and it might well be a proof of your weakness - condemn all else. Not so long ago, you have recovered from a great pain and was born again to the world. The world, unlike the Heaven, did not reject you, even for your obvious imperfection, for all the flaws and cracks in your shell. Quite the opposite. And you would be lying to yourself if you were to say that you were not thankful for that. When the pain cleared out and you once again found that you are alive, and a part of some greater world, you felt only relief, and joy. It was only later when you thought about the Heaven that you were reminded that the world which so readily embraces what is base and wretched must be counterfeit, compared to the perfection which abides by no flaws and which must exist, even at the expanse of everything else.

Those thoughts are in sharp contrast to the ones that came before, and you are suddenly hit by a pang of doubt. Is this understanding of Heaven that you came to truly yours? Can it be reconciled with the world? You are unsure, hesitant. In truth, you can't even tell if this understanding was yours, or if was given to you by something else. Something that may be no less a part of you than your body, mind and soul, but which nonetheless is alien.

You consider and finally, on the cusp of being restored, you decide that...

[ ] The Silence spoke through your thoughts, and you need to try to contain it.
[ ] The Silence spoke through your thoughts, and you will let it.
[ ] You are the master of your own mind. All your thoughts can be only yours and yours alone.

A/N said:

Four days, five rewrites. I apologize if this update is a mess, but it was not just a (single) bitch to write, but a veritable kennel of them.

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