Chapter Text
Existence, as far as I can discern, is nothing but an intricate lattice of mankind’s illusions and exigency. To gaze upon a world stained by sin without the thin veil of self-delusion is to perceive a society of causality, sublime and merciless. Joy, whereas almost a hopeless sensation in the world's inexorable rhythm of sorrow, is nothing less than a fleeting, impractical fluctuation of mere infatuation. To see the world as peaceful and happy, is to be ignorant of morality.
Consecrated luminescence did not soften my fall. Coarse pine branches and cool, crackled mud caked the very folds of my clothes. Such a dirty and impure thing clung to me perversely. Nettles and the eddy of the wind tore at my skin, a shameful liturgy of what was to come.
Evangeline.
The very name did not escape to the padding of my mouth, yet it felt sickly to even ruminate. I shuddered. My fellow angel, fellow guardian, someone who I detested yet adored with my very being; skin and all. Guilt gnawed at my marrow. She descended not long before me; yet, no trace of her remains that.. I know of.
Weeks have unfurled since the fall, the cruel refusal of heavens light cushioning me painfully lingers. However, no descent is ever gentle and no exile is without humiliation. Here - if this coarse sprawl of matter and motion may be named “life” - has been a bewildering litany of sensations. The air itself gnaws differently each hour: damp and sour at dawn. Then thick with salt and smoke when men gather in their markets. A strange, little society as I’ll have it, placed comfortably near the edges of the forests brambles and the salty border of the sea. Angels do not hunger, yet the sight of food arrayed on crude wooden stalls tempts me with its audacity. Meat glistens, vegetables bruise and rot in grotesque beauty, bread steams as though it breathes. The town reeked before it revealed itself: brine and slick, smoke and sweat, a stench both repellent and magnetic in my eyes. Towers of weathered wood leaned over narrow streets, their beams blackened with soot and rot. Ships, creaking leviathans of timber, slumbered in the harbor with their bellies fat from plunder or trade - I could not tell which.
I would be lying if I muttered I had not snuck in a few times. I was truly enlightened; their way of life, albeit filthy and ominous at times, was charming. Here, the voices were louder, coarser, sharper than the hinterlands. Men sang drunk and out of tune, others shouted numbers, weights, and coin. I knew not the rules of their commerce, but the frenzy itself fascinated me—an orchestra of desperation. I walked unseen, hooded by scraps of cloth and hidden feathered limbs, though I was not unnoticed. Some humans stared too long, as if my presence unsettled them, as if they sensed something fractured in the marrow of my being.
I turned a corner and froze. A butcher’s stall, its timber blackened with age and neglect, displayed slabs of meat that hung like grotesque trophies. The stench hit first; a rancid, coppery tang that curdled the air and clawed at my senses. I approached, drawn by the absurdity of my own curiosity, and my gaze fell upon the flesh. It quivered unnaturally in the heat, mottled with bruises and streaked with dark veins, as though it had been brutally beaten. My stomach, though angelic and unaccustomed to hunger, recoiled. There was something in the sinews, in the cruel, human way it had been butchered, the rotten viscera flaking beneath the knife’s careless cruelty.
A man on a bench beside me bit into a hunk of meat wrapped in a dirt-stained paper, his tongue slick with saliva, eyes glazed with hunger’s indifference.
And I understood then, with a cold and terrible clarity, that even the most wretched dogs of this world devour the weak—and that I had fallen among creatures who did not pause to question the source of their sustenance, nor the cost of their survival.