The angel fell from the sky, its arm reaching for the last semblance of hope that remained hanging in the air. It didn’t hit the ground with a deafening crash, nor did the heavens scream as one of its kind was banished to the mortal realm below. Instead, it simply lay there, unmoving, staring towards the clouds, trying to see its home through the blue.

Tears welled in its eyes, but it didn't wipe them away as they fell onto the grass below it. It lay there for days, its spectral white skin slowly turning a stony grey with time. It cried and cried, unmoving for weeks as life unfolded around it. It didn't move as a spider ran across its face, or when a rat decided its foot would make a good breakfast. It only stared upwards at what it had lost.

Weeks turned to years. Years turned to decades, into centuries, as the angel lay there. Its once elegant limbs turned cold, but it was not dead. Its halo, once bright and vibrant, lay still and dark. Flowers grew around it. Moss crept up its stone-cold arms, and still, it lay there.

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It had run out of tears to cry long ago, yet it still gazed upwards. Its soft skin had hardened with time, sinking into the ground after eternities. What was once a loyal, blind servant was now all-seeing, but wished it was still naively following.

The angel that had fallen from the sky now lay, its fate engraved into the very stone of its flesh. It sits, as still as the earth itself, and listens.

The stories fill the angel's mind, filling its consciousness with the twisting narratives of other lives as it lies there. And as it listens, the stories find their way onto the stone, knitting themselves into the already wound tales that lay there.

The angel lies, an intricate statue, carved with time and adventures it had never experienced, and finally, since times that even the angel had forgotten, the stone of the statue cracked, and it smiled.