The cursed fire consumed me whole, and then silence took its place. When awareness returned, I found myself suspended high above a red horizon, wings shedding ash like dying feathers. The air pressed against me, heavy and unmoving, as if the world itself refused to breathe. I tried to rise. I tried to fall. Neither obeyed.
I remained hung in the empty sky, trapped between motion and stillness, between existence and erasure. Every second echoed the truth I feared to name: the Archangel of Prayers and Devotion — cherished in Heaven and feared in Hell — had become God's first failure.
Time lost meaning. Days may have passed, or minutes, or years. I held on to something I could not name, though I felt it weakening in my hands. Pride, perhaps. Or the last trace of light clinging to the edges of my memory.
When the final remnants of my wings turned to ash, the sky released me.
Below lay a wasteland: a desert of rot and heat, stone and ruin. Blackened rocks, broken peaks, and corpses left idle in their final shapes. No movement, no voices, only the quiet weight of failure.
Then gravity claimed me.
Tears burned trails through soot as my hand lifted toward Heaven — fingers outstretched, trembling.
"I will make you all pay dearly," I whispered into the roaring wind.
The fall shattered me. My body met the ground with brutal certainty, torn open across a jagged stone that reddened with blood. The corpse beside me seemed almost peaceful compared to the ruin I had become.
The pain was immediate, vast, and without mercy.
The air burned my throat. Each breath felt stolen. The horizon flickered with black fire that rose and fell without pattern, illuminating the wreck of my body in violent flashes. My voice broke before my thoughts did.
Was this justice?
Was pride enough to earn eternal exile? God had shaped me in it; He had carved it into my being. Why punish me for the reflection of His own design? If my fall was part of His great script, why condemn me for reading the lines He wrote?
The questions cut deeper than the stone beneath me.
White blood filled my mouth — the last of my angelic grace burning away.
Once, I had been the most powerful archangel to exist. Now, just a broken memory of light.
Exhaustion dragged at my thoughts. I closed my eyes, searching for oblivion, wanting sleep to take me. But vengeance pulsed quietly beneath the pain, refusing surrender.
Heat struck suddenly. Boiling water spilled across my ruined skin, searing nerves already raw.
A laugh escaped me — ragged, bitter, startling. Sleep and peace were denied here as completely as forgiveness.
And still, my body did not heal.
"Is this the end?" I murmured. My voice sounded distant, as if spoken by someone else.
And if death took me now, what then? Heaven had rejected me. Hell already held my soul. Would I simply vanish, erased from existence? Or had that already begun?
Footsteps broke the silence.
I lifted my head. "Who is there?"
At first, nothing. Then a figure emerged from the haze — a girl small and silent, half her face rotted away, bones exposed through torn flesh. She carried a bowl of dark liquid and a black knife, held carefully in both hands.
She set them beside me without a word, turned away, and began to leave.
"Wait." My voice strained. "Who did this to you?"
She paused. Looked back.
"God," she said, smiling — a thin, broken curve of lips that held no warmth.
My chest tightened. "Father did this? Why?"
Her expression did not change.
"For the same reason you are here, Light-Bringer. If you want my advice, drink the unholy water and pierce your heart with the knife."
Then she vanished into the crimson dusk.
I stared at the bowl. At the blade. The thought of standing sent pain ripping through my spine, and white blood burst from my lips the moment I tried. My end was close; Heaven's verdict was final. Yet something beneath the agony stirred — something that refused to fade quietly.
My hands shook as I lifted the bowl to my mouth. I thought of nothing except the taste of vengeance.
The water was bitter and metallic. For a moment, nothing changed.
Then the world convulsed.
Claws tore through my fingertips. My destroyed eye reformed in a violent rush of red light. Pain ripped through me — deeper than flesh, deeper than bone. It felt like desecration, not salvation.
A scream tore from my throat, and the desert answered. Black flames erupted skyward, turning the air into a storm of burning shadows.
Far across the wasteland, the girl watched. She raised her hand and waved — slow, proud, knowing.
A voice followed. It slid into my mind like a blade, each word rearranging the shape of my thoughts. I recognized it, though I had never heard it aloud — the echo that had lingered in the first moment I saw myself reflected in Heaven. Pride, primal and ancient.
"Pierce the knife if you wish to be free. Become corruption itself."
Every syllable cracked something inside me.
My fingers closed around the blade.
The metal sank into my chest.
Light died. Darkness bloomed.
My angelic heart — Sammail's heart — turned black, reshaped by rage and the unholy fire that replaced grace.
A roar split the world, and Hell trembled beneath it.
When the darkness receded, I sat unharmed upon a crimson moon suspended above an endless void. No fear touched me — only stillness.
Then I saw the presence across from me.
A figure sat upon a wooden chair, shape defined only by absolute darkness. It rose. Stepped closer. The void bent around it.
"Welcome," it said. "To the paradox of corruption, cursed angel Sammail."
And I understood that my fall was not an ending.
It was the opening act.