You were his only love, his complete damnation, his only fleeting glimpse of salvation, and his greatest, most enduring torment.

An invisible chain tightened around his heart, the other end anchored firmly to you. To love, for him, had been an act of total and blinding surrender. To you, in that first life, it was a sham. A cruel deception that led to his ruin. His magnificent wings lost their motion. The Earth became his prison, and he wandered it in a long, hollow solitude.

His purpose had been simple: to be a guardian angel. He was never destined to be a lover. But your smile was a sunrise he couldn't look away from; your voice was an enchanting melody that silenced the celestial choirs in his memory. Your promises, whispered in the stillness, were a siren’s song, and he—a foolish angel—steered his entire existence directly into the abyss.

He realized his folly too late. The crime was committed. He was exiled, banished from the light, for the sin of loving a mortal more than God.

You were a wicked person. There was no true goodness in your heart, only a casual, selfish malevolence that found his devotion amusing. His punishment was to watch. He had to witness every step of your life, powerless to intervene, until your first departure from this world.

Reincarnation took its time. But in your second life, you were reborn as a purified soul. And in that life, you saved him. You loved him. And Heaven forgave. His wings healed. For the first time since his fall, he tasted hope. But, fate is rarely benevolent a second time. Before he could truly ascend, you departed once more.

He held your lifeless body and felt the light within him begin to fragment. But redemption had been promised. If love had purified him once... surely it would do so again. He waited for your third life with a devotion sharpened by longing.

You returned, but you did not love him.

The first scar tore through his skin. The pain was unlike anything he had ever felt, a searing agony as if he were being burned in the very fires of Hell.

Heaven still called to him, a faint and distant song. But he could not fly. He discovered he simply could not ascend, because loving you kept him tethered to the earth by his own will. His redemption was conditional, bound to you.

The second scar came when you fell for an academic. The third, for a soldier. The fourth... there were so many. Some were thin, silvery lines—the marks of fleeting passions. Others were deep and jagged—the marks of passions that lasted months. The greater the love you felt for someone else, the deeper the mark, the more excruciating the agony.

In this life, you were a college student, determined to live intensely. His skin burned with a new passion every week. It was a constant state of torture for him. He couldn't take it anymore—neither the physical agony nor the emotional erosion of his soul.

So, one Friday, in the deep, hazy hours after a party, he stepped out of the shadows and told you everything. Your response was a mocking laugh, laced with gin. To you, he was just a lunatic with a pair of fake prosthetic wings.

He didn’t hide anymore. After every party, he approached you and told the story again. Your reactions varied: sometimes annoyed, sometimes pitying, always incredulous.

But this time was different. The feeling emanating from you, directed at the man whose hand you held, was more intense than anything he had felt in decades. It was dangerously close to love.

His eyes drifted shut, his eyelids fluttering. The pain began not as a burn, but as an incandescent torrent that flooded his entire being. It made his knees buckle. He collapsed onto the asphalt, his great wings curling inward like something dying. His arm felt as though it were being flayed. New lines of fire split open in his flesh, one over the other, a relentless torment.

"Stop..." The word came out as a desperate, choked whisper. It was a plea to you, to the heavens, to whatever cruel thing was listening.

"Please, stop. It hurts too much."