No Heaven of Mine - A Fallen Angel Quest

[Gargulec]

​

You fall.

Air keens past your ears. Your blood-clotted hair buffets your face, and tears are pulled from your eyes. The ground spins far below, an indistinct brown-grey blur growing more detailed with every passing second.

To dive is not new to you. All your life, air was your element. Even now, age-old instinct tells your wings to spread open, to find a gust to glide on, to stop the plummet and fly. It only brings pain; they are broken and punctured. Every aborted flap, every twitch, every attempt to slow your descent ends in hurt.

You are – were – a bearer of the Oriflamme Sacrosanct, the golden-threaded battle-standard of the Celestial Host. From that purpose, you were called to being. You stood against the Great Enemies of Creation; the banner an incandescent beacon which lead the children of Heaven into the fray. It was an exalted duty, a glorious duty and once, it was all you were. If you could only speak of it, your lips would spill forth psalms and battle-hymns that could stir the coldest heart to righteous war; but such beauty is not for fallen lips to speak, and so you have only memories, too bright and painful for your stained soul to bear.

You lessen.

A fall from grace is more than just a plummet from the heights. Seven spheres separate the base earth from the pure Heaven. At each crossing something is ripped away. Onto members of the Host many gifts are piled. They are ground down, one by one. It feels like fading, diminishing, being made smaller. Your body is rendered weaker, brittle: mortal. Worse still, this destruction is not limited to the flesh. Your soul dims and your mind dulls, the clarity that had once filled it dissolving into doubts and weaknesses. The inviolate angelic spirit cracks, and new emotions flood into the fault-lines. You learn, one by one: despair, and fear, and the powerless anger of the broken and cast aside.

Only one part of you is left alone, and so as you shrink, it grows. The brand of your corruption, the bare truth of your failure. You wish you could remember what you did, why you took such a thing into yourself. But your memories are like an ancient scroll, seemingly whole and yet crumbling to ash under the weight of your thought. All of them but one. One thing you cannot forget, one thing even the obliteration of your soul cannot erase.

When your corruption was made apparent, your sin displayed for all to see, you were brought before a tribunal of your peers. You pleaded guilt, you displayed shame, you promised expiation. But your words might as well have been silence; they could not see past the betrayal laid bare them. They declared that you were doomed to have your sin grow and consume you, and this Heaven could not forgive; and what they cannot forgive they must reject. And so your fellows took up sacred implements of justice and – weeping, for they found no joy in your breaking– they bent and pierced your wings, and dragged you over Heaven's edge. From there you would fall to the earth below, where all vile, petty things are doomed to spend their bounded days.

The air thickens around you, heats up. You burn. You scream. Soon, your fall will be complete. Soon you will crash upon the soil below. This is not fair. This is not right. And this is not over. Before the last thread connecting you with the Heaven above severs, one final thought burns inside you with all the unquenchable zeal with which you once held the Oriflamme Sacrosanct:

You will have vengeance.

You were given no mercy. You were spared no pity. Your torturers may have cried as they mutilated you, but those were not tears shed for your pain and for your failure, but for the stains on their hands. A Heaven so concerned with its own perfection is no Heaven at all. A Heaven that unjust cannot be forgiven, and therefore it must be rejected. And for the sake of this rejection, you will claw your way back up, no matter the cost, and scream your injustice in the face of the wretched Host.

---

Character Creation:

The number of the Great Enemies of Creation is four, and as such the struggle against them is known as the Fourfold War. It is on one of its four battlefields that you fell, accepting the poisonous gift of corruption from the hands of those you were made to destroy.

That battlefield was…


[ ] The Wasteland of Ash, in the Southern War against the Infernal.

The Infernal are bound to the precept of total autonomy of self. "Do as you will" is their sole commandment, and for the sake of it they seek to topple the Heavens and destroy or corrupt the Celestial Host. If they have their way, they will abolish all order and thrust the Creation into a flurry of chaos and predation, ruled only by naked power. Thus they are called the Hellbringers, for Hell is what emerges in their wake.

They wield the black fire, which burns the substance of things, but not their form, and the Stygian ice which ensnares and taints. The angels that fall to the Infernal can be told by the black in their eyes and ichor in their veins. The ones that fall all the way through become the cavaliers of Hell, corruptors of nations, sowers of discords and heirs to the disordered cosmos.


[ ] The Celestial Firmament, in the Northern War against the Intruders.

Lurking in the void beyond the dome of the sky and animated by an unceasing hunger, the Intruders are the great cosmic parasites. Like ichneumon wasps, they seek to inject their essence into Creation, so that it grows and devours it from within, until the time comes for it to hatch, shattering the now-hollow world. Until they can achieve this ultimate act of parasitism, they infest and devour what they can, be they things of the base earth or the Celestial Heaven.

They are the masters of flesh, their forms protean and undulating. As they disregard the laws of Creation, so too their bodies care not for petty limitations of sinew and muscle. The angels that fall to the Intruders can be told by the rippling of their flesh, a cancerous, but deep well of power. The ones that fall all the way through become incomprehensible horrors with no set form; they wear infinite masks and shells, but the only truth of them is hunger.


[ ] The Tangle of Notions, in the Eastern War against the Primordial.

Born in the darkness before the light of the sun, original gods of Creation, deposed in the coming of the Light and defeated by the Celestial Host, the Primordial survive and seek to restore what they have once lost. Their aim is to snuff out the sun and lash the dance of stars back to their will, claiming mastery over fate and base matter alike. Their victory would be the severing of the link between the Heavens and what rests below them and the guttering of the Light.

They claim dominion over the four elements, and all things untouched by the Sun. They are the lords of the mad and the wild. Although they no longer rule over fate as they used to, they are nonetheless masters of prophecies and secrets, knowledgeable in matters that even the Celestial Host had not fully understood. The angels that fall to the Primordial are adorned with antlers and cloven-footed. The ones that fall all the way through become kin to the old gods, their equals and successors.


[ ] The Hadean Plain, in the Western War against the Silence.

Offended by life in its vibrancy and motion – the tell-tale signs of entropy - the lords of Silence hopes to preserve Creation like an insect drowned in amber. They style themselves as the Last Kings, who will reign motionlessly over a quieted cosmos, for all eternity to come. If that is impossible, they will bring it to the final annihilation, so that all matter is rendered back into the perfect uniformity of non-existence. They are the champions of death and abolishers of rebirth.

Their power is entropy and death; with one hand they still the hearts of the living and with the other, they raise the dead to their will. They know the anti-language, the dissolution of understanding and shredding of mind. They are known as the Peacebringers for they follow the path of ultimate quieting. The angels that fall to the Silence can be told by their pallid demanour and merciful aspect. The ones that fall all the way through become gaunt monarchs of the dead, as inimical to life as they are exalted in death.


[ ] A different battlefield, against an unknown foe [write-in]

Although the number of the Great Enemies of Creation is four, it is by no means the complete list. Minor abominations, short-lived mad powers and other hostile forces emerge and disappear all the time. The Celestial Host destroys most of them and others fade into obscurity; but when the opportunity arises, they do not hesitate to offer corrupting gifts to their oppressors.

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Hello and welcome to Gargulec Attempts To Write A Quest Again!

The idea of the quest is, I hope, quite obvious: you play a fallen angel, corrupted by a force hostile to the world and cast down by her fellows to a base earth of which she knows very little, if anything, now seeking to avenge herself on them. Of course, the matter is made more complex by the corruption she carries – it is up to you whether you embrace it all the way through and become a Great Enemy of Creation, or rather if you seek to slow its growth and perhaps find a way to purge it or at least put it under your control. Both paths are possible; if you reject the Heaven's judgment, you also reject the permanence of your sin – if you so desire.

The Quest will be narrative in nature; I do not want to mechanize power and corruption, for as interesting as it would be, I have no mind for rule-systems and I think they'd detract both from my commitment to the quest as well from its overall construction.

One thing that I want to note before anyone asks is that this quest was born out of casual flicking through Magic the Gathering art, as well as a bunch of other, equally schlocky sources. Therefore, I will be making little if no attempt to tap the rich resource that the Judeo-Christian (or any other) angelologic tradition is; this is not a Pseudo-Dionysius Quest; it is something both less ambitious and more accessible, or at least such is my hope.

With that said, I hope you enjoy the quest, with all the sin, redemption and revenge it seeks to contain.

Click to shrink...

 

[Gargulec]

0.1: The Remains of Your Power

Waged beyond sunset, the Western War is perhaps the least explosive of all the Fourfold. The Silence practices patience and consideration and the expanse of the Hadean Plain is such that not even the eye of Heaven can survey it all. It is acknowledged that in its far reaches, vast armies lie in stasis, waiting for the Final Kings to step down from their bleached-stone thrones and lead them against the battlements of Creation. Such assaults are things of nightmares. Extinct nations rise in entirety and march to war and hundred times-slain beasts are again animated and smashed into the bulwarks of the Celestial Host, not stopping until the heavenly fury melts them down to slag. Yet, such adversity would be nothing if not for the power behind it; over the eerily silent armies, mellifluous voices of the Final Kings spread far, promising peace and liberation from the failings of motion. Their lure is such that not even the angelic minds are fully proof to it: you are an evidence of that. But it is not enough to reject their bleak gift; in their dread presence, common life is snuffed as easily as a candle and immediately brought under their command in death. Those who – through their celestial nature – resist this deathly command are still weighed down, rendered sluggish and susceptible.

However infrequent the incursions by the Final Kings are, there is no predictable pattern to them; sometimes an aeon may pass between them, and sometimes they happen in rapid succession; it is as if the flow of time is no obligation to the Lords of Silence. Therefore, the Western War is not incessant struggle, but rather an uneasy, unending vigil, day after day of watching the light-less horizon for signs of the enemy. The angelic sentinels turn their backs to the sun on this watch, and therefore grow pale; but the feathers of their wings gain a golden tinge that they wear as badge of honour. Both of those distinctions you still maintain, although in an unmistakably shifted form. The sentinels are pale, but your skin is snow-white and just like snow, there is no warmth to it. Although blood still blows through your veins, the heat of life had all but drained from it; it is like ice-water. The gilding of your feathers hold, but likewise paled and dimmed – it is not the shine of the vibrant sun, but rather of precious death-mask, unchanging and dull.

You wish you could remember how it came to be that you acquired those traits, that you agreed to take into you the life-shredding sacrament of the Silence. But the memory is lost to you and only the fact of corruption remains. There is a lacuna in your life which something else now fills. But this lessening is not without its gifts.

---

As all who fall to the Silence, you are absolved from decay. As you are no longer entirely alive, it is far more difficult to kill you than it would be otherwise. You survive wounds that are normally mortal and given enough time, if not utterly destroyed, you can restore your form back to its original state. This should not be seen as healing, and more as reversal of damage: the immutable, eternal form of the Final King slowly reasserting itself over the temporal, base matter.

As this power develops, so too will its potency. At higher levels, it will allow you to come back even from the brink of obliteration and revert catastrophic injuries in moments, or otherwise exist even if it should be blatantly impossible: the Final Kings care not if there is a heart in their chest or blood in their veins.

Furthermore, you gain one of the three signature powers of the Silence (and the ability to learn the other two at a latter date):

[ ] The Left Hand, the Gesture of Quieting.
In your left hand, there is the power to still life with a mere gesture. Although not yet developed enough to instantly slay mightier mortals and beasts of the base earth, it extinguishes weaker life instantly and without protest. Those who submit to its power painlessly pass away into silence. Against mightier opposition, it is not without its use either: when performed against an enemy it cannot outright kill, it will instead slow them down like a leaden weight and cloud their minds with hopelessness and despair.

As the power develops its deadly potential increases: more and more beings fall under its sway, and even greater is the strain it puts on the survivors. The masters of the Left Hand can use it to quiet more than just life: they know how to pull things outside the flow of time, rendering them into perfect stasis, safe from existence and safe from entropy.

[ ] The Right Hand, the Gesture of Command.
In your right hand, there is the power to bring the dead under command. With a gesture, you summon forth the bodies of the slain as mindless servants, wholly obedient to your will. There is no limit to how many such servitors you can summon at once – other than available bodies – but controlling large numbers of them (or especially powerful ones, such as animated corpse of a mythical beast) requires heavy concentration, blocking you from performing other intensive activity, such as fighting or spell-craft.

As the power develops, the number of servants you can control without focus increases, and you gain the ability to call forth more than just mindless creatures, instead summoning undead champions, sentient but nonetheless immortally loyal to you.

[ ] The Spoken Silence, the True Language.
You know the basics of the anti-language of the Silence. Although impossible to understand by living creatures – including, for the time being, yourself – it nonetheless holds immense power to strip down convictions and minds. Spoken in response to a speech of zeal, it dissolves it into doubts. Said in a prayer, it rots religion. Weak mortals cannot resist it, and even the mighty find themselves cloud with doubt, hesitation and fear when exposed to it.

As the power develops, its mind-breaking potency increases. Instead of summoning doubt, hesitation and fear, it renders thoughts and voices into nonsensical glossolalia and dissolves understanding like a cocktail of acids eating through precious metals. Pages containing it shrivel. Stories spoken in it end. Minds exposed to it become empty vessels, well-prepared to receive the sacrament of Silence.

---

However, your angelic nature is not fully erased and even cast out, you still carry in yourself a splinter of Heaven, as hard to dislodge from an angel's heart as corruption from your soul. Therefore, you still partake in one of the following boons (and, with good fortune, stand to regain other in time):

[ ] The Seraphic Steel, a Celestial Weapon.
Forged from star-silver, quenched in the Well of the First Rain, honed with stellar whet-stones, it is the weapon that the Celestial Host wields against the Great Enemies of Creation. Although yours was broken when you were cast out, a shred of its power lingers. Diminished as it is, it is still easily equal to the finest mortal steel, mundane iron no more of a barrier for it than mundane silk.

Yet, such weapon is more than just a sword or a spear. It is a fragment of your soul externalized; if you manage to restore it its former glory, it will sever more than flesh and bone; it will cut through enchantment, spellcraft and deceit alike, dealing mortal wounds to even such enemies which are seemingly impervious to harm and slaying.

[ ] The Heavenly Anthem, a Battle-Hymn of the Host.
A war-song of angels, once heard, remains a part of the listener forever. You still remember how to sing it, even if in a warped, diminished form which, however wretched, can drive those loyal to you to acts of ultimate bravery and safeguard them against other dread powers which would seek to weaken their minds. It turns indifference into friendship and friendship into zealous dedication.

But if you cultivate it, restore the song to its full form, you will learn how to move more than just mortals with it. Inanimate matter will respond to the hymn, rising in your defense and ultimately even the sky itself will abide by this glorious anthem and fight as your ally.

[ ] The Sovereign Utterance, a Word of Command.
The lore of the angels suppresses mere magic and other paltry attempts at manipulating the real. Instead, it commands the world, and the world responds. Although you have forgotten most of those great utterances, you still remember the Utterance of Rebuke, a single, blazing word which unravels curses, splits spells in twain and subjugates enchantments. Mortal magic is hopeless against it, and even the mystical craft of the mighty is severely weakened by it.

It is possible that you will recall more of such utterances, each of them giving you access to a word of command that binds the reality to your angelic will and ultimately allow you to speak your will into existence as if you were its sovereign.

 

[Gargulec]

1.0 Impact

Although you belong to the Silence now, your thoughts during the terminal stage of your fall are a cacophony. Regret and anger, despair and determination – all in equal measure, all mixed so much that you don't know where one begins and the other ends. But the ground closes in fast and you can tell where you are headed – a vast wood, mottled with spots of chalk-white, hills or domes of sort – and the nearer you are to it, the less you think and the more you fear.

The fall should not kill you. You should survive. But are you unsure. The last moments – where through the corona of flame surrounding you can see that you are going to smash into one of those chalk-white domes – are a flurry of a single thought repeated over and over again: the image of your body splattered on the pristine surface, a red, ugly splash.
You scream in terror, briefly. Your body smashes against the surface, shoulder first, and there is a terrible, cracking sound; but before you can tell if it is your bones or the dome, the pain of the impact quakes through your mind, knocking it out. Mercifully quickly, so you don't even have the time to wonder if that is how death feels like.

Darkness takes you.

***
​

The pain that wakes you is eerily distant, so much so that your first thoughts as you lift yourself from the unconscious haze are confusion if it is pain at all. Vaguely, you can recognize that your body is broken, but there is a disassociated kind of clarity to this understanding, almost as if you could see yourself from the outside, watch the ruin smitten on your corporeal form and appraise it like an impartial judge. You recognize that you lie half-submerged in a fetid pool, and that you can't remove yourself from it, as all attempts you make at motion end in the same sort of helplessness. You are aware that multiple of your bones are broken, some of them almost powdered by the strength of the impact and that you should be right now at the limits of what even an angelic body can take. But you are like certain that you are not dying, likely not even close to that and that although the damage you suffered should render you into thoughtless, world-shattering agony, what you are experiencing is a cold, detached numbness. A slowness, yes, that's the word you are looking for. Your thoughts, your heart-beat, your breath, the oozing of the blood from where your skin is punctured: it is all slow, paced. Quiet.

The details of your surroundings come in one at a time, as your eyes move away from the hole your fall punched through the carapace above. The realization that you know what that carapace is unfolds gradually. At first, it is a sense of familiarity that then, through attempts at focusing your sluggish thoughts, develops into understanding. You are looking at a shell. An external skeleton of some great, now dead beast. A beast that was not fully born, not fully formed. An aborted, leviathan Intruder, slain during the period of vulnerability as it was bursting out of whatever it had been parasitizing. With that size, it had to be an entity of power, perhaps a minor, old god, a hero of ages, maybe a body of timelessly brilliant poetry. The angels beset it during its birth, through spears into its soft flesh and killed it, allowing the bulky corpse to plummet down to the base earth, where all things discarded and rejected come to rot. You look through the old wounds and, sure as that, you find them. Minor punctures, where the spears of the Celestial Host pierced the flesh of the young Intruder. Now, rays of light fall down through them, insignificant when compared to the bright column you have allowed with your plummet. The water you are sprawled in must had come through them. Years and years of rain slowly pooling in the cracks and services of old, brittle bone, becoming home to mosses and algae and all manner of little, light-abhorring creatures: eyeless fish, translucent-skinned water-serpents, pale-fleshed newts. Briefly, you regret that this is where your fall brought you. The crack in the shell that you have caused will allow more light inside to seep inside Now, more light will come inside, and this dark world will be forced to adjust and change, or else perish. You wish it wouldn't be so. You wish that your disruptive act could be reversed and the dark, dank realm preserved from mutability.

There is something odd about this thought, and so you do your best to brush it aside. Considering stasis and change will do you no good now. Instead, you try to look around some more. It is the best that you can do, given how you don't think you could raise your arm now even if you tried to. But with the light directly shining onto your face, the gloom beyond the bright pillar is all but impenetrable. Resigned, you slump back into the water.

As much as you wish that it would go away, a thought comes over you that now, unable to die, you will stay like that forever. An angel's shattered form, half-drowned, with vines and moulds growing over it, amphibians nesting in crooks and cracks of its body, bleached into salt-whiteness by the sun's direct shine. Perhaps only the slow movement of your eyes will betray that there is still some semblance of life inside, but maybe with the help of time, even they will finally freeze in place. You picture that – a figurine-like quality to your body, bound in place with underground vines growing as thick as steel ropes. You note that the mental image fails to horrify. In fact, a part of you sees it as perfect. In this emptied carapace, no one will ever find you; you can hope that with time, even this sluggish, subterranean life around you will ossify and quiet. Thus, you will be freed from all burdens and be given to the never-ending stillness until even your enduring mind will forget what motion is.

It takes some effort to convince yourself that it is not a state you should seek and exalt, and even more to convince yourself that even if you were to wish for it, it is not likely to happen. Those who are touched by the deathly power are not easily broken and even more difficult to keep broken. In time – days, weeks, maybe months – your body will mend itself, the damage reverting until you can walk again, raise yourself from the murky pool and see what the base earth has to offer to you. Therefore, you should brace yourself for a long quiet.

As you think that thought – a living, vibrant thought – a jolt of pain shoots through your mind, bright and warm. Curiously, you focus on the sensation and find another pulse shock you, drawing a stifled, anguished groan from between your lips. The heart in your chest skips a beat, then accelerates; fresh blood gushes from your wounds.

Your mind reels back from these bodily sensations; a fleeting sense of abjection overcomes you. This base shell, this perishable skin and those breakable bones, wrapped in a soft weave of muscle and flesh which, in their time, will give way to decay. This death you have narrowly avoided. It is all disgusting.

The revulsion brings comfort. Your heart once again grinds to an almost-halt. Blood ceases flowing and returns to oozing, so slowly that it might as well be tar. The pain quickly fades back, becoming nothing but just another fact of your existence – such that you are an angel, that your wings are broken and that your left elbow-bone is a shattered smear. The last part, in particular, draws some detached worry – such damage will take a long time to revert and heal.

Once more, the thought is met with a sharp sting of pain, becoming only more pronounced as you linger on it. It is like there is a scab somewhere in your mind, covering all that hurts, all that lives and that you are picking on it. You shouldn't. It only brings hurt. It only brings change.

It is then that you realize, in full, perfect clarity, that it is what you have to do. Scrape this wound open. Keep it open. Force the Silence's restorative power to work through it, instead of doing what it wants to do the most: preserving. Freezing. It is not going to be pleasant. In fact you know it is going to be a sea of helpless struggle that you will have to endure if you ever want to drag yourself out of this pit. You take a mental equivalent of a deep breath, and take read to tear the scab open. But before you can, you hear something that should not be here. Voices, a number of them. Men or women or other living things. Not close, but nearby. Somewhere outside.

Instinct orders you to quiet. The base earth crawls with scavengers, bone-pickers that devour what falls from higher realms, and with only your voice to defend yourself, you would not be the most difficult of prey. Your mind, always at the ready, serves you an image, gory and vivid, of how you could become a feast for them. It is not often that such wretched creatures feast on the bodies of angels.

Next, however, you think of the ocean of pain you have to swim through, and think of mortal medicine; simple help which allows the body to mend and heal. A slightest bit of it would be of so much help and would spare you so much. So much effort, so much time. So much torment. Not all that lives on the base earth is vile, you reason. Some beings are good of hearts, other can be reasoned with, can be bribed, can be convinced. Worst comes to worst, you still have your voice. It can help you.

With that thought alone, you almost raise your voice and call out. But you hesitate. It is a risk. You don't know how major. But there is much to be won.

[ ] Call out to whoever is out there.
[ ] [Absolved from Decay] Stay quiet, wait for them to pass, and force yourself into mending.

 

[Gargulec]

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.

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.

Click to shrink...

 

[Gargulec]

1.2

There is a malign strain to your thoughts. You would be a fool to not recognize the alien whisper in your ear, soft and pervasive. Months of motionless recuperation accustomed you to it, and had you been less careful, less focused, it could had blended itself into your own notions so closely that it would impossible to separate them from the will of the Silence. But you were a warrior, and the long vigil against the enemies of Heaven had made you as wary of foes from within as without.

The thoughts you had about Heaven, about life and stillness, about what is right and what is wrong – they do not have their source within your mind and within your soul. They flow from somewhere else. By the time your body is almost done with its mending, you are clearly aware of that. You section those thoughts, keep them apart, take good care not to let them mingle with what makes you you.

There comes a day when you feel you can finally stand. Shake off the dirt and dust of your long stillness and march out into the foulness of the base earth. It makes you consider vengeance. It hasn't occupied your mind that much over past months. While the Silence whispered into your mind, you were less concerned with the slight done to you and more with the stain on Creation that the Celestial Host had become. Now, however, indignation returns.

It is a different sort of anger. Not like the rage that made you scream promises of retribution as Heaven cast you out. There is no hot passion to it. Such feelings, however potent, no longer seem to suit the landscape of your soul. The mending was a lesson in temperance and patience, virtues that you now think of putting to use.

There are many paths vengeance can take. Some of them are straight, a fiery trail blazed straight into the heart of the sun. Such are the paths of those who scream "liberty or death", but in truth want both. Others are crooked. They have many turns and meanders and take years to traverse. They are taken by conspirers and plotters, and their ultimate aim is equivalence. They seek to respond to treachery with treachery, as if that was to restore balance in the world. And then, there is also the sort of vendetta that is like an underground river. It flows hidden and concealed, unseen by all until it bursts through the surface and sweeps all in a single devastating wave. This is the path of those who would have retribution rather than justice. When they finally rise against, they are decisive, destructive and leave no future for anyone. Not even themselves.

You smile at that thought, viciously. Yes, it is retribution that you want, more than anything. Break them like they broke you. Or perhaps – and there is glee when you consider that which you know to be yours and yours alone – break them harder. They rendered you impotent – you will return the favour. You will make them like insects drowned in amber. Worthless on their own. Valuable only as ornaments in something infinitely greater than they could ever be. And you know that you have an eager ally in that quest.

You allow the Silence in, and it rewards you.

For a second, there is a ringing absence of sound around your still body, as if you were suddenly put in a void. It passes, and when it is gone, you are oppressed by quiet. No water drips. No insects skitter. Not even wind, not even air. Everything is perfectly still.

You stand up from the pool you were submerged in, and the water does not flow back into space emptied by your body. It remains as it was, motionless and inert. A small, white frog watches this from the edge and you know that it will sit there waiting for the motion to return until the world breaks, and perhaps longer still.

You make a few steps into the shadows around and find, without surprise, that the entirety of the Intruder's carcass is now this perfect diorama. You touch a moth, stilled mid-flight; it is cold under your fingers, like a splinter of ice. Lifeless. But now eternalized. There is irresistible beauty to both the fact and the notion. You can't help yourself and for a moment – maybe an hour – you lose yourself in this perfection. And there is so much more of it!

It is only after you finish marveling at the unyielding moss, unbreakable stalactites and all the little wonders of life preserved for all time to come that you finally take stock of yourself. Alas, the perfection of the Silence is not yet something to accept, and so your flesh, with its beating heart and flowing blood, is still malleable and perishable. But you are past desiring to shed this temporality. You have a Heaven to deal with, first.

Your clothes – a simple penitent's robe – are a mess, half-rotten and fraying. From beneath them, your porcelain-white skin peeks, all color drained from it so that it looks like the fine, bleached sand of the Hadean Plains. But you look to your sides and notice that the tips of your feathers are still tinted gold. The proof of service is still there; there must be more color to you, you concur. Perhaps in your lips and your eyes? You would need a mirror for that, and the still water refuses to reflect anything that is temporal.

For a moment, you wonder how will you be able to free yourself from within the carapace-dome; you could probably punch through its walls, but that would disturb the perfection you have created, and that is a deeply disturbing notion. But an opening soon presents itself to you, as if the Silence had anticipated and planned for this.

There are droplets of water dripping from the opening you punched in above you. A remnant of a rain. They went down from above, one after another, until whatever reservoir was there drained fully. But now, it will not be facing such depletion. Instead, the small points of water are frozen along with the rest, motionless and steady. You can close your fist around them and hang your body from them and they will not budge. They are a ladder out. You take it gladly.

***​

The base earth reveals itself to you as an endless expanse of green and white. The Intruder's corpse is just one of many – dozens, maybe hundreds – smashed into the landscape of a rolling, ever-green forest. Even half-buried into the soil, the mighty carapace-hulks tower above the tallest trees. This stretches as far as you can see. Only on the horizon's edge, you can see something else – a massive, grey shadow, barely cutting itself against the pale-blue sky. Mountains?

You sit on the carapace's edge. The Intruder you were locked inside was small compared to others, and so the branches of nearby pines are almost within grasp. When the time comes for you to descend, they will provide a secure, if unpleasant way all the way down. For now, however, you observe the vast woods and ponder where to go next.

In time, you pick out more details from among the pine sea. There is a place where columns of smoke rise towards the sky; at first you took them for a mist, but quickly enough you realized that they must come from a settlement of sorts. One of the simple mortal races. Humans or something similar. Weak, unremarkable and plentiful. Easily awed by a celestial being such as you, but not very useful in the long run as anything but the simplest, most basic minions. On the other hand, unlikely to pose a threat of any sorts.

There is also one of the larger Intruder corpses, which appears weirdly-pock marked. As you focus your attention on it, you notice that there is a lattice of constructions – scaffoldings and terraces – woven around it, and multiple large openings pierced through its surface. A number of creatures circles it from the sky, as if nesting inside. One of the winged mortal races, perhaps? You envy them the flight taken from you. But the fact that they can fly – something which is not yet possible for you – would make them very useful, to say the least. However, such creatures, as far as you can remember, tended to be of more savage nature, not to mention that reaching them would not be nearly as easy as finding the human settlement.

Between the trees, you also find a wide strip of white – a road, leading somewhere far, beyond the horizon's line. What lies at the end of it, you can't tell, but such a magnificent, paved tract must have been built by a powerful force. Perhaps a mortal kingdom of renown? Or some other power? You don't know, and it could be nothing. A relic of an empire long-gone, or just a result of someone's mad fancy. Still, it looks promising enough, if you are interested in taking the unknown path.

And finally, there are the distant mountains. As you watch them more closely, you noticed that ever so often a surge – like a far-away lightning – seems to occur between the peaks. That it is visible from such a distance away is in itself a proof that there must be some great power contained there. One which would provide you with a great start for your quest for vengeance. But the nature of it is unknown to you, and the trials and tribulations on the road there could be many. Besides, such might is rarely left unclaimed, and whoever holds dominion over it must be at least a minor figure of might and leadership that would loathe to share it or part with it. All in all, there is a great risk in going there straight away – especially since you have nothing on your name and you are not even sure how mighty you are anymore. But on the other hand, if you can just claim it... You watch another surge arc from summit to summit and smile. Such power is anything but base.

You spend some more time on the carapace's edge, and then finally decide that your first steps will take you to…

[ ] To the human settlement.
[ ] To the winged creatures settlement.
[ ] To whatever lies at the end of the road.
[ ] To the mountains.