image [https://i.postimg.cc/2yXq7hFT/Godling.jpg]
Prologue - The Fall
Aclephius, the archangel, thrust his sword again at the demon prince, piercing his side.
image [https://i.postimg.cc/c4CKF9zm/Damage-WIndow.jpg]
Black blood trickled upward from the wound, climbing his blade, whipped by the winds on their fall from the heavens.
Akuja grabbed the angel’s pauldron and pulled himself in, biting at the angel’s neck. With his wings in tight, the entangled combatants only plummeted faster toward the crashing waves below.
The demon’s teeth clamped around the archangel’s flesh, but rather than sinking in, one of Akuja’s fangs cracked and chipped on the seraph’s iron skin.
Akuja wrapped his clawed arms around the angel, pulling him in even tighter to avoid the burning edge of his divine blade.
“Is this what you had hoped?” Aclephius cried, his yell only a whisper in the roaring winds. “Did this bring you the joy that you sought?”
“Joy?” Akuja replied, helpless as the angel used his far superior strength to maneuver his arm for a final thrust.
image [https://i.postimg.cc/k4NjhXBk/Void.jpg]
Akuja aimed his blast for the cross-guard of the angel’s sword, knowing that dark magic would have no effect on the aether-wrought blade. Instead he focused on the embedded jewel, hoping to dispel its enchantment.
The golden gem cracked, the crossguard shattered, and instantly the burning blade broke free from the hilt. The glow dulled and the spinning blade vanished as it flew off through the mist and rain.
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However, the effort was costly, and Aclephius managed to dig his talons into the demon’s wing, cracking the bone.
Seeing his weapon shattered, the angel released his grip on the hilt and wrapped his newly freed hand around Akuja’s throat.
He squeezed.
Akuja gasped. A whimper escaped the proud demon’s lips, and he waited for the death blow.
The archangel, however, stopped short of crushing his larynx. The seraph spread his wings instead, spanning, perhaps, twenty feet. Their fall stopped.
image [https://i.postimg.cc/cLNvdxHD/radiance2.jpg]
A silver aura spread from the angel’s bony chest, flashing from his golden bones. The intense aura even blasted away the insignificant drops of rain, and time itself seemed to stand still. His halo blazed, and the next words he spoke, he spoke with divine mandate.
“You will answer.”
Akuja, compelled, frowned before he spoke. He chose his words carefully to answer the angel’s command without offering any gratification. “This… is not what we had hoped.”
Aclephius hissed, and in a moment of rage he tore out the demon’s throat, leaving a gaping wound clear to the spine. Akuja’s black blood covered the angel’s golden, bony talon.
Before he could so much as blink, the archangel clenched his other fist, tearing one of Akuja’s wings from his back. He kicked the demon free.
When he left the light of the halo, more than the pain from his severed wing or his torn throat, Akuja felt a cold and an emptiness—a hunger to be reunited with the terrible light.
His back burned from heat as he crashed like a comet toward the waves from the force of the kick. But before he plunged into the depths he flapped his remaining wing with such power that he might have stopped his fall were he not so off-balance. As it was, he spiraled and fluttered pathetically into the ocean, disappearing beneath the surface without so much as a yelp.
Through hazy vision, he saw only the light from his adversary in the sky above him. But even that dimmed as the waters of the deep grew cloudy from his own black blood.
His vision darkened and his body drained of power. But the demon did not die. The ruin of his body settled in the muck, not for a time, but for an eternity—his consciousness unable to leave his immortal corpse.
As eons passed, the pain dulled, and Akuja drifted from consciousness into nightmare, and then mercifully into a state near oblivion.
The continents drifted. The oceans drained and moved. Magma bubbled over his unfeeling bones. And when he was forgotten to time, fresh, shallow waters returned with new life, lifting his unrecognizable, root-tangled corpse from the swamp.
Then, in a moment so seemingly mundane it went unnoticed by the heavens, his life was ended–quite by chance!–by the most simple and unassuming of creatures…
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