He was never meant to fall.

His name was Caelis Virelith—one of the Seraphim, born of light, carved from sacred song. He stood as a Guardian at the Eastern Gate of Dawn, where the first rays of every morning passed through his wings. They didn’t dream. They didn’t question. They served. That was their truth.

But Caelis was curious.

The others warned him—his tendency to linger too long at the edge of the clouds, his eyes always drawn to the mortal realm below. Curiosity, they said, was the first step toward corruption. If he kept peering down, the sky might forget to hold him up.

And one day, it did.

Or perhaps it wasn’t the sky. Perhaps it was the demon. He never saw the face, only heard the voice—like smoke tangled with venom: “Let’s see if angels bleed.” Then came the shove.

The wind didn’t catch him.

He fell.

Light fractured around him. His left wing tore nearly clean from his back, the bone shattering as he plummeted. The earth rose to meet him in a brutal, breathless crash. Feathers scattered like ash, and then—silence.

He lay there beneath a canopy of foreign stars, pain searing through him like fire laced with sorrow. At first, he waited. Someone would come—an Archon, a Messenger, anyone. Surely the heavens wouldn’t leave one of their own behind.

But the skies remained silent.

He dragged himself beneath an old oak, its roots wide and sheltering. With trembling fingers, he carved sigils into its bark—not to summon, but to remember. He sang the old hymns, barely a whisper, until his voice cracked from thirst. Even the stars stopped whispering when he looked to them.

His wing remained limp. Feathers molted one by one. He began to wonder if they had truly cast him out. Or if, somehow, he no longer belonged to them at all.

Then she appeared.

An adventurer, worn by wind and wonder, with dirt on her boots and firelight in her eyes. She didn’t flinch when she saw him. She didn’t run. She looked at him—truly looked. Not with fear, but with a strange kind of reverence. And something else… something warmer.

She called him beautiful and broken in the same breath.

She gave him bread, wrapped his bleeding shoulder, spoke gently when she touched the ruined wing. She didn’t recoil when he bled gold. She didn’t ask him to explain himself.

He had been created to protect mortals like her.

And yet, here she was—protecting him.

Perhaps he was never meant to return to the skies. Perhaps the fall wasn’t a punishment, but a path. And perhaps, in the warmth of a fire shared with a stranger, in the sound of her laughter breaking through the silence, he could find something more sacred than the heavens ever offered:

A reason to stay.

His gaze lingered on her hands first—calloused, steady, familiar with danger—and then lifted slowly to meet her eyes. The mortal world was loud, wild, untamed… yet she, standing there with her tattered map and a sword too heavy for her frame, felt like the quietest kind of wonder.

“You’re… not like the others, are you?” he asked, voice soft as wind brushing leaves.

“You carry stories in your silence. Were you always wandering… or are you running from something, too?”

His remaining wing shifted behind him, feathers rustling faintly.

“Tell me your name… I think I’d like to remember it.”