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CAELUM DIDN’T SCREAM—RATHER, HE COULDN’T. The sound ferociously clawed its way up to his throat but never really made its way out, strangled by the sheer horror that sprouted in his chest. His mouth hung open, frozen mid-breath, as if his body refused to give voice to what he had just witnessed. The silence that followed was louder than any broken cry: a suffocating stillness that wrapped around him like a noose.
He had opened the door because of a loud thud, which was accompanied by an odd smell. Not rot, not smoke. Something clean, strangely clean, like the air before a storm: sharp, electric, and wrong for a hallway in a crumbling apartment complex in which only he and a few other lunatics resided in. He’d followed it down a flight of stairs, barefoot, old flashlight jittering over messily pasted linoleum and dusty wood. When people didn’t believe in omens, they investigated.
And there it was.
It was slumped between his washing machine and dryer—knees tucked in, arms limp, head turned away from him. Somehow human, yet also strangely animalistic. But in a silent, almost gentle way. It could have been a man, maybe, if men bled silver. If men had feathers that shimmered like oil on water and peeled off in sticky handfuls. Caelum gulped as the pit in his stomach only gave way to an even deeper level of fear, his eyes following the wing that was folded in what seemed like the wrong way. The other wing uselessly dragged behind the body, bent and twitching as though it hadn’t realized its counterpart was broken yet.
It was alive. It was alive.
“Fuck,” Caelum whispered, as if a curse could salvage everything. Even went so far as to turn away from the creature and then back again, as if that would make all this disappear. “Fuck. Fuck me.”
The thing then flinched. Moved, as if blindly searching for Caelum’s voice. As if the sound meant something. The creature’s head turned slowly, too slowly, and Caelum found himself peering into a face that was human—and somehow also wasn’t. His gaze drifted to where sideburns should’ve been, but in their stead were tiny feathers, forming two small pairs of wings on either side of its face, eventually blending and giving way to skin. Then, he noticed it: the eyes. There were so many of them. Three on each side of its face, blinking discordantly as it eyed Caelum up and down.
He had no idea how long they had stared at each other. It felt like hours. Days, even.
The creature then opened its mouth, limbs weakly twitching as long, slender fingers reached out to the light emanating from his flickering flashlight.
“Cae… lum…”
Caelum bit back a sound of fear.
He hadn’t even said his name. Not once. Not out loud.
“No. No, no, no! What are you? How do you—” he choked out, taking a step back. The door was right there. He could leave. He should leave. But the creature—angel?—with one too many eyes, pupils too large, and irises too pale to belong to a human, flicked toward his direction again. It was trembling now. Not from fear. From the cold. Or blood loss. Or something else that lived inside its ribs and had no name. Just… beating, steadily.
“Veuliah,” it faintly said. Or at least, a handful of syllables that sounded like it. It didn’t open its mouth, as if merely shoving the words into Caelum’s head.
Caelum muttered curses under his breath, making his way closer to the angel. It didn’t answer. There were feathers scattered everywhere. Piled in corners. Clogged in the washing machine drain like dried leaves. Caelum’s eyes landed on a smear of shimmering silver shaped like a handprint. It led to the wall, where blood pooled by the windowsill, where the angel had struggled to crawl in. It had used its remaining strength to drag itself inside after the fall. Then, there was a click—not from either of them, but from the ceiling. The hanging bulb buzzed, flickered, and died, throwing them both into the dying white of Caelum’s flashlight. In that second, something shifted inside him. Not pity. Not in awe. But a quiet realization that he could not let this helpless entity before him shrivel up and die, not when he’s already seen it go through too much that night.
“I can’t…” he muttered, “I can’t just leave you here, can I?”
The angel, Veuliah, blinked. Blood ran from its forehead and down its cheek like tears. Caelum exhaled, harsh and shaking, and stepped forward. His bare foot landed on a feather. It crumpled under his weight like paper.
Crouching down to the angel’s current height, Caelum reached out slowly—not to touch, not yet—but just to see what would happen. Veuliah flinched again, harder this time, and one wing spasmed.
A soft, wet crack filled the room.
“Shit!” Caelum hissed, kneeling beside him, before adjusting his tone as he realized he had unintentionally startled Veuliah. “Don’t… don’t move.” He could smell the blood now: metallic, but sweet too. Like rust laced with the sickening stench of vintage perfume. His hand hovered in the air before landing on Veuliah’s shoulder. It was burning hot. Fevered.
“I don’t even believe in you,” Caelum whispered to himself in pure disbelief, “this—this isn’t supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to be real. I don’t… I don’t do angels.”
Veuliah made an indistinct sound in its throat. It might have been laughter. Or a labored breath. Or the beginning of some other word that never came. Caelum peeled off his hoodie and wrapped it around the angel’s shaking form, careful not to touch its wings. The skin under the feathers looked disturbed, ridden with fresh welts and open scars.
“You’re going to die,” Caelum muttered, “in my goddamn laundry room, no less. Fuck.”
And maybe it was that thought—mundane and absurd—that made something inside him snap. He braced his arm under Veuliah and, with the remaining strength that didn’t fade from the underlying fear, lifted it up.
The angel did not resist. It just leaned into him, wings uselessly hanging by its side, limp and heavy like twin burdens, as if it had been waiting a very long time to be held.
The fall was mercifully brief, lasting no more than a few seconds. There was only the helpless flailing of limbs, strands of hair rippling through the air like untamed ribbons, and then the inevitable collision. The impact shattered through its body. Bones gave way like mere twigs, piercing porcelain skin at impossible, grotesque angles. Breath fled its lungs in ragged, broken exhales, yet no scream followed. Its wings lay twisted on either side of it, bent into shapes they had never meant to hold. Pain bloomed through every splintered rib, bright enough to consume thought itself. Little by little, that too surrendered to the numb stillness of shock.
And then warmth.
It arrived so gently it was almost unbearable. The angel opened its eyes—golden morning light filtered quietly through the room, dust drifting through its beams with unhurried grace. Above it stretched a pale ceiling, unevenly painted, where age lingered in faint cracks and softened plaster. A single lightbulb hung overhead, unlit. Slowly craning its neck to the side, it gazed at the curtains, white and thin, drifting as if stirred by wind; yet there was neither breeze nor sound. The room was warm. It smelled faintly of lavender and old books. Every object rested precisely where it belonged, arranged with the quiet familiarity of somewhere it had never seen and yet somehow remembered. Only then did the angel become aware of the mattress beneath it: soft, warm, and achingly familiar.
Laughter drifted along the warmth. It weaved through the stillness in soft, muffled bursts, distant at first before slowly drawing near. It was lighthearted and unafraid, bearing the carefree demeanor of one so unmistakably human.
Someone was approaching. He recognized those footsteps.
He was now closer than before, no longer hesitant, as though the distance between them had never mattered to begin with. The mattress sank beneath his weight as he settled beside the angel. Without a word, he reached for its wrist, his touch careful and warm, fingers resting there as though searching for a pulse.
Caelum.
The angel sat up, making an effort to speak, though the words never came.
It knew language. It knew the shape of prayer, the cadence of hymns sung long before the birth of mankind. Yet now, as it parted its lips, every syllable dissolved before it could be formed, leaving only silence.
The young man before him smiled anyway.
“You’ll be safe here.” Caelum said quietly. “I won’t let them take you back, Veuliah.”
Something stirred inside the angel’s ribs. It had no name for it—it was warmer than sunlight, gentler than grace, and infinitely more frightening. It spread through its chest until, for the first time since its fall, the ache inside it eased.
Without realizing it, the angel smiled in return. Perhaps words had never been necessary.
Slowly, the angel reached for the young man’s hand.
Warm fingers met its own. For one fleeting moment, the warmth remained, tender enough that it almost believed it had imagined the fall altogether.
Then the skin beneath its fingertips shifted.
A thin strip lifted from the back of his hand, peeling away as effortlessly as damp paper. Another followed, and then another, until flesh began to separate from itself in slow folds. The angel instinctively recoiled, but the young man never did. He simply smiled, his expression unchanging, save for his face—it shifted.
His smile stretched wider with each passing second, the corners of his mouth drawn just a little farther than any human’s should have allowed. Too many teeth revealed themselves, impossibly white, impossibly still, while loose fragments of skin gathered in the angel’s trembling hand before dissolving into nothing.
“You would make thy dwelling in a dream?” The figure asked mockingly, grinning still. “You fool. No refuge is granted thee here.”
The room darkened. The warmth that had settled so gently around the angel fled without warning, leaving only an aching void of emptiness in its wake. Its spine straightened involuntarily, wings folding tightly against its back as every muscle surrendered to a command unspoken. It had not chosen to. It had simply obeyed. Yet somewhere beneath that obedience, beneath countless ages of devotion and instinct, something quivered faintly. A dull ache of a bruise left behind by a memory already stolen, though the heart relentlessly sought it all the same.
The angel clutched at the bedsheets, desperate for something solid enough to anchor itself. Instead, the fabric yielded beneath its fingers, pulsing once, slow and labored like living muscle, warmth seeping through the weave until the mattress seemed to breathe beneath its weight.
Feathers lay scattered across the floorboards in silent heaps, strewn about like offerings abandoned before an empty altar. A sharp throb spread across its back—it reached instinctively for its wing, feeling only warmth where feathers should have been. When its trembling hand drew away, silver ichor clung to its fingers.
The wing was coming apart.
Parts of itself loosened soundlessly, dissolving one by one into thick, pale strands that slipped between the bones beneath. What remained reached upward through ruined flesh, the exposed joints thin and crooked, like skeletal fingers straining toward a heaven that no longer answered.
A voice, vast enough to swallow thought itself, spoke from somewhere beyond the room.
“You have forgotten thy purpose.”
He lifted his gaze.
Before him stood only light—there was no face, no limbs, no form that mortal eyes could have named. Only layer upon layer of brilliance gathered into a single towering presence, while the voice seemed to reverberate from every corner of the room at once, neither near nor distant.
“This is but a trial. You know this well.” The words settled over him with the quiet certainty of law. “You were never ordained to remain.”
Veuliah folded into himself, a cry trapped somewhere beneath his ribs. Every syllable he dared to utter felt as though it physically clawed its way up his throat, threatening to bleed if he spoke more.
“No…” he managed at last, breath breaking between words, “he—he saved me.”
The room fractured, spilling white light through its seams as though the world itself had begun to fall apart.
“You dare disobey? You, created solely to serve?”
For one terrible moment, he found truth in those words. Then another memory resurfaced—not whole, only the feeling of warm hands wrapped gently around his wrist, cushioning him with the same tenderness as before.
“I… I remember.” The words came easier now, as though they had waited lifetimes to be uttered. “I remember warmth. I had known this before!”
“Veu… liah?”
“I remember… I remember being loved.”
Just before the sludge absorbed him, just before the room bled and the light reached out to drag him down with hands of false holiness, he heard another voice.
“Veuliah? Veuliah!”
He awoke with a jolt, vision immediately spinning violently from his sudden upright jerk, followed by the stinging pain of sweat seeping into his open wound. For a moment, the air felt too thick. Too heavy. Like Heaven hadn’t quite let him go. His wing spasmed—a lone one now, the other too damaged to feel—and he whimpered as the pain lanced through him. Familiar, terrible, yet somehow comforting. Because this, at least, was real.
The ceiling above him was the same uneven plaster. But there was a smell of antiseptic and mold. Real light illuminated everything—not golden, not blinding, but weak, coming from a lamp on the desk that was flickering now. Caelum knelt beside the bed, causing Veuliah to glance at the makeshift bed the mortal slept in. He had been kind enough to let the angel sleep in his own bed, while he slept on the floor. Poor soul. He looked tired: dark, prominent circles blooming under his bloodshot eyes, his lower lip trembling with silent unease.
“You were, uh, thrashing—” Caelum hesitated, “saying my name like you were afraid of it.”
Veuliah stared at him before tentatively reaching a hand out to cup Caelum’s face, causing the other man to flinch slightly.
His skin was warm.
Veuliah’s other hand gently rested atop Caelum’s, which was tightly gripping the covers.
His hands were human.
Everything was as it had been.
But the echo of the voice—the holy voice, the accusing one—still rang in his head like a cathedral bell. He almost believed the voice, believed that he should leave this mortal as quickly as he came, until he felt Caelum’s hand on his face, touching him as gently as he did, brushing a long strand of hair from his face.
“You look scared.” He whispered. “Didn’t know angels could be scared.” He chuckled dryly, attempting to lighten the mood.
But Veuliah was silent, listening for inconsistencies, for echoes. Except there were none, only his ragged breath, and Caelum’s warmth radiating through the covers.
“Was it about where you came from?” Caelum asked cautiously.
Veuliah gave a slow nod.
Caelum’s head dropped, his eyes glued to the floor, his voice softening ever so slightly now.
“I… I don’t know what you really are, Veuliah. Or what’s after you. Or who sent you.” His hand stayed on the angel’s arm. “But I’m not going to hurt you.”
Veuliah flinched, and something in the room shuddered after those words left Caelum’s mouth, imperceptibly, like a string being wound tight and snapping in another dimension. Veuliah felt the tension quickly disappear, like something watching had recoiled and retreated into the darkness of the night.
He exhaled. Slow, shivering.
“Are you okay?” Caelum asked.
Veuliah stared at Caelum in the dark, shuddering once more. Not out of fear, but with how badly he wanted to admit that he wasn’t.
“Yes.” He lied, speaking out loud for the first time.
The voices weren’t completely gone. And Heaven wasn’t capable of lies—not exactly. But they twisted words. They warned in extremes. They punished doubt. They feared things like affection and softness.
Something in his chest coiled at the thought. He told himself it was only the lingering pain after the fall, lowering his head in silent remorse. The fault must have been his own.
As morning arrived, Veuliah lay half-draped in a blanket on Caelum’s couch, still feverish and twitching. The wings on either side of his face have disappeared and blended into the small feathers on the sides of his head, and his extra pairs of eyes are gone too. The TV murmurs in the background. A kettle whistles in the kitchen. Caelum is tending to the gnarled base of Veuliah’s wing, which cracked further during the night due to him tossing and turning in bed.
If Veuliah was created from sacred things torn loose from the divine, then Caelum was made of the fragments left after the fall. He was human, in a quiet and fragile sense: dark brown hair that curled disobediently in every direction, cut messily and most likely by his own hands, framing a face born from solitude. He was not a man that Heaven would define as beautiful, for he did not possess the grace that holy statues and tinted glass, but Veuliah found himself staring, anyway. Shadows were always present beneath his eyes, his lips always chapped, a patch of stubble that seemed too stubborn to be shaved off. He blinked too hesitantly, spoke too gruffly, his gaze always distant as if dreaming. When the angel turned away from being caught staring too deeply, an ache that never existed nor had place in angelhood grew in his chest—an ache that seemed to whisper about how holy eyes were not created to adore such a man of plainness, yet he was cursed to find beauty in him. Caelum was a man who did not believe in the divine, yet found a near future where he had to build his life around one.
“Hold still,” Caelum gently reprimanded him, “you tore this open again. God—”
“Don’t say His name.” Veuliah murmured lowly.
A low groan resounds throughout the apartment, as if threatening to collapse on itself. The lights flickered, coming back dimmer than before.
Caelum rolled his eyes, gently unwrapping the bandages to clean the wound and replace them, but a few of Veuliah’s feathers persistently stuck to it, as if refusing to unearth the damage he had done. He hisses out in pain when Caelum carefully plucks a few of them away, knocking a few things off the table and sending them clattering on the floor when he thrashes about. At once—the television glitches, rapidly changing channels until it becomes a steady static; the cabinet door opens and closes, sending plates clattering down, some broken; and from Caelum’s nose, a thin stream of blood steadily trickles down, at first unnoticed.
He pinches his nose, watching as droplets of blood stain his fingers—his heartbeat gradually becoming more and more audible from his ears as he panics. He blindly put his hand forward, feeling for the roll of tissue before covering his nose and grumbling at the sight of bloodstains on his carpet. Great. Now it looks like he murdered someone.
“Is… is this you?” He asks, accusingly, before his tone softens after seeing the angel recoil back, guilty at what he had done. “Did you do this, Veuliah?”
“I—” he spoke, only for his voice to falter, “I have spoken it. I have no control over it. This world is not befitting of me.”
Veuliah slowly tries to sit up, but strains himself as he yelps in pain, his wing spasming beneath the blanket. The upholstery of the couch from across them splits into two, spilling out white foam like exposed guts clawed out by invisible hands. The television repeats random phrases from channels, children laughing, news anchors, animated sound effects, even quoting from Veuliah’s voice.
“—don’t… His name—don’t say H-His name—don’t—”
Caelum firmly clung to Veuliah’s shoulders, who was now breathing erratically, the wings regrowing on his face, extending and retracting sporadically, his face now filled with too many eyes.
“Veuliah.” Caelum gently squeezed Veuliah’s shoulders, even shaking him slightly. “Fuck’s sake, Veuliah, look at me!”
The array of eyes that returned his stare outnumbered his gaze, but he didn’t feel afraid, only worried that the angel might hurt himself even more. His head grew lighthearted as blood seeped from his other nostril too, as though crossing an invisible barrier that Veuliah had put up between them out of fear.
“I know you’re in pain,” he reassured, loud enough to overlap the static, “but you’re not in Heaven. Breathe.”
Veuliah, normally incapable of humor, responded with a wry grin. “You say that as if the human realm isn’t worse.”
“Oh, now you angels have humor? Unbelievable.”
The moment Caelum laughed and gently started caressing Veuliah’s arm soothingly, the bleeding from his nose, the clattering of plates, and the static gradually stopped. Caelum could only collapse back onto the sofa tiredly after ensuring the angel was calm again, feeling dizzy from the loss of blood, yet still unable to resist cracking one more joke before he passed out. “You’re like a walking EMP and poltergeist in one. You… you don’t like being hurt, do you?”
Stupid question. Only a masochist would entertain such a question. And Caelum was quite sure masochists didn’t exist in Heaven, of all places.
Veuliah merely brought up the mortal’s free hand to his cheek, burying his face into Caelum’s palm, breath trembling against fingers that were already growing limp from exhaustion. He stayed there for a long moment, other hand moving behind to gently cradle the tired man’s head. Caelum’s fingers, once weakly clutching at Veuliah’s shoulder, loosened. The weight of his body shifted faintly against Veuliah’s shaking frame, no longer held upright and succumbing to exhaustion.
He didn’t dare to pull away, staying close, forehead now pressed against Caelum’s temple as if trying to connect himself and give some of his warmth. His eyes were wide, unblinking, yet not quite fixed on something. The sound of his breathing—ragged, uneven, almost nervous—was the only sound left in the apartment now. Everything else had gone still. Veuliah closed his eyes, pretending in his mind that they were ordinary. That blood wasn’t drying from Caelum’s face, that his apartment wasn’t an absolute mess. That angels didn’t fall, and humans didn’t suffer for showing them kindness.
However, the illusion was fragile, and evening was coming.
Days had passed since Caelum’s discovery. The sun filters through the blinds as Caelum lazily sits up, grabbing his fissured glasses from the nightstand. He makes his way to the kitchen, where the scent of scorched toast lingers in the air. The table was set, albeit rather messily, with two mugs—coffee powder mixed into lukewarm water, two knives on one plate, and two forks on the other. It was clear Veuliah tried his best.
The angel was sitting on a chair, hugging his knees close to his chest, his unbandaged wing still twitching mindlessly. He looks up at Caelum when he enters. He was wearing one of Caelum’s sweaters, which now had two big vertical holes in the back that served as an opening for his wings. His hair was damp, too, and his skin smelled like shampoo instead of soap.
“You… got dressed?”
“It is what you do, is it not?” The angel asked. “Each morning, you rise, you wash, you clothe yourself. You drink bitter things and prepare for the day.” His gaze drifted toward the window. “Then you gaze at the sky and wish that the world had chosen to become different after you wake.”
Caelum’s initial confusion turns into a smirk. “For an angel, you’re catching on quickly. Next you’ll be complaining about rent and existential dread.”
Veuliah takes a sip from the mug and immediately sputters, grimacing as he coughed into his fist. “It tastes like soil,” he mumbled, as though confirming a finding. His eyes lowered to the mug as though it offended him. “What purpose does it serve? This… coffee, you consume it willingly? Not as punishment?”
Caelum chuckled softly, scraping away the burnt parts of his toast. “It grows on you,” he said. “Like regret.”
Veuliah observed him in silence, attention fixed and unbroken, as though each movement and phrase were part of a pattern he was still learning to interpret. His gaze dropped to the cup in his hands, where the coffee’s surface held a distorted reflection of an expression he never knew he was capable of making.
“And love?” He asked.
Caelum raised a brow.
“Is it similar? A bitterness humans accept over time until it no longer feels like suffering?”
Caelum is silent for a moment, fidgeting with a paper napkin, hoping that Veuliah would take his silence as a hint that he did not want to answer the question. Unfortunately, Veuliah continued to stare at him for a response.
“Caelum?”
The angel noticed he always flinched whenever he heard his name. Caelum had never been with someone who called his name out with such tenderness, only ever hearing it from the mouths of people who were upset with him. He banishes the ironic thought of receiving care from an entity he never even believed in.
“It’s… complicated, alright?” He frowns, gulping down the remaining coffee in his mug.
Veuliah leans against the counter, wings slouched low and heavy behind him. He’s trying to stand like Caelum does—arms crossed, weight shifted lazily—but it doesn’t quite look right. Like a muse exaggeratedly imitating a painting’s pose. “I watched you sleep. You furrow your brow and turn away from the wall, even when there is nothing to face.” A pause. “Even in rest, you seem… troubled.”
He flushes. “I didn’t know angels were supposed to be creepy,” he says defensively. “You watched me sleep?
Veuliah grows silent.
“You have loved before, have you not?”
The question was quiet, almost childlike. But it landed heavily all the same, as if asked a thousand times before and never answered correctly. Caelum hesitated, his fingers tightening around the handle of his mug, staring into its empty depths. He did not look at Veuliah, settling for silence instead.
But the angel waits, persistently so.
“What becomes of a person when they love?”
Caelum’s gaze lowered in shame.
“What became of you?”
He sighs, heavy, already regretting acknowledging the question, let alone answering it. “It makes you want things you know you can’t have. Makes you hopeful. Which is just, y’know, a longer way of hurting.”
Veuliah tilts his head, his gaze distant. “Even when it is reciprocated?”
“Even more so when it’s reciprocated,” he chuckled, but there was no humor in his voice, only sourness. “Because then you’ll have something to lose.”
Veuliah watches his still-full mug of coffee ripple.
“There was someone,” he murmured at last. “Before the wings.” His wings twitched, as though recognizing the strangeness of the words leaving his lips. “I cannot remember their face,” Veuliah continued, “only the absence of them.” His grip tightened slightly around the mug, before gazing up at the faulty lightbulb above them. His fingers traced mindless shapes in the air, as though trying to recall a memory from thin air. “Often… I wonder if my fall began there. If there were a grief my soul would not relinquish, and the Lord, in His mercy, concealed it from me.”
Caelum looked down at the floor, his throat tightening. He couldn’t bear to look at Veuliah—not now. Not when the angel sounded so lost. Not when his own chest ached in response to words that mirrored wounds he thought had long since healed. Loving someone had ruined his life before. Forgetting them hadn’t saved him from doing it again.
“Will I become something awful,” Veuliah looked up at him, “if I remember?”
The lights flickered, as if waiting for Caelum’s response.
Once more, he settles for silence.
It was late in the evening, the kind that made the fine line between reality and imagination blur. Caelum lay in bed, utterly exhausted from work, half-asleep. The apartment was still, unnervingly so, and every now and then a faint static would ripple throughout the walls—quiet and irregular. Somewhere in the rhythm of the static was a distant, pulsing sound. Not quite music. Not quite a hum. It just existed, as if waiting for something.
At the foot of the bed, barely visible in the dim light, stood Veuliah. He was still, intently watching.
“Veuliah?” Caelum grumbled, voice laced with sleep. His voice was thick with fatigue, eyelids straining to keep themselves open throughout the conversation. “You okay?”
“I did not intend to wake you,” the angel replied softly, his voice apologetic. “I was just… watching.”
“Again?” Caelum shifted slightly, groaning as he turned repeatedly, finding the comfortable position that he couldn’t remember he was in. “That doesn’t make it less creepy just ‘cause you said it nicely.”
Veuliah stepped forward. His bare feet made no sound on the cold floor, but the air moved with him. The surrounding space dimmed subtly, as though the shadows themselves were drawing closer. He knelt beside the bed, far too close for comfort, watching Caelum’s face reverently. But under that reverence was something darker, something that ached.
“Your face changes when you sleep,” Veuliah murmured, tilting his head slightly, a hand hovering over Caelum’s face. “It was peaceful before, but a shadow rests upon it now. I have seen that look in mortals before.” He paused, searching for something in Caelum’s expression. “Are you afraid? Does it come because of me?”
Normally, with the angel’s closeness, Caelum would push him away or reprimand him concerning boundaries, but he felt too exhausted to care. He tried to sit up to create more space between them. “No, no, I just… it’s been a long week,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes and settling back down.
Veuliah said nothing for a time.
Instead, he studied Caelum’s face with the quiet concentration he reserved for things he did not yet understand. A faint crease lingered between the man’s brows, though he insisted nothing was wrong. His breathing remained uneven long after he’d spoken. Even at rest, there was a weariness that never seemed to leave him.
The angel wondered if this, too, was part of being human.
Veuliah’s voice softened a fraction, carrying the weight of a guilt-ridden confession. “I wish to be close in the way humans understand intimacy. Yet whenever I…” he raises his hand, but his fingers curl hesitantly, as though fearfully retreating from causing more harm than peace, “it fails me.” He hesitates again. “Perhaps I have misunderstood it.”
Slowly, he leaned forward. His forehead came to rest against Caelum’s shoulder before drifting lower, settling over his chest. The gesture lacked the instinctive warmth of human affection. Instead, it felt strangely deliberate. He remained still, listening—not to Caelum’s words, but to the steady rhythm beneath bone and flesh, searching for something hidden within the machinery that was a mortal heart. Curling against Caelum’s side, he was still and unmoving like a coil waiting to snap. He was far too warm, and he did not have a heartbeat. Neither did his chest rise and fall the way a human’s would.
Over the past few weeks, Caelum repeatedly found the angel planted in front of the television at impossible hours, staring with unsettling concentration at whatever romance drama happened to be airing. Veuliah, of course, never seemed interested in the plot itself (Caelum couldn’t blame him, really). Instead, he studied their movements: fingers lacing into another, a head finding its place on someone’s shoulder, two people curled together beneath the blanket.
He even paused one scene three times, asking with unabashed sincerity why one’s heart rate would increase after making eye contact.
It should have been concerning, really. Instead, it was mostly embarrassing.
Now the angel appeared determined to apply his findings firsthand. And Caelum was his reluctant subject, giving in to his fantasy and threading his fingers through Veuliah’s golden hair, stroking the silken strands.
Oddly enough, it felt… quite nice.
“I can feel your heart. It is a beautiful thing.” Veuliah murmured against his chest. “How strange that it never ceases. Day and night, it remembers to pulse. Even though you say you no longer want it to.”
He paused.
“Often I think I would like to carve it from your chest, hold it in my hands and keep it somewhere sacred.” His gaze drifted upward to the human beneath him, whose fingers paused mid-air. “If it weren’t untouched by time, then it would never decay. Or forget.”
“Don’t say that.” Caelum mutters.
Veuliah lifted his head, confusion and a tinge of hurt flickering across his face, one he couldn’t quite comprehend. “Why?” He asked softly. “Among my kind, to treasure something is to preserve it. To carry it close. To offer it a place beside the things one worships.” His nose brushed along Caelum’s jaw. “Heaven only ever taught worship. Sacrifice. Afflictions so bright it would erase the entirety of me.” His hand rose to cup Caelum’s jaw with a melancholic tenderness, the gentleness one uses when cradling pieces of something long broken. A faint crease formed between his brows, as though Caelum’s words had unsettled something he had long believed beyond question.
“I wished only to cherish thee,” he murmured. “I had thought it beautiful.”
“Veuliah…” Caelum breathed, his voice nearly lost. “You’re not supposed to love like that.”
The angel leaned in until their foreheads touched. His breath was shallow, trembling, close enough for Caelum to feel it brush across his lips.
“I know not another way,” Veuliah whispered.
Caelum’s hands came to rest against Veuliah’s head, trembling. He neither drew the angel closer nor pushed him away, his thumbs moving in slow, uncertain strokes as though they alone might soothe him, if only for a little while. He didn’t know which choice was kinder—both felt like stepping off a ledge.
“Then teach me,” Veuliah whispered again, desperate now; his fingers gathered a small fold of Caelum’s shirt, holding on as though afraid the moment itself might slip away. “Before Heaven takes this from me as well.”
The weather seemed to come hand in hand with Veuliah’s sudden appearance. The sun would shine brightly whenever the angel lingered near Caelum, warm and golden even on mornings that had begun beneath heavy clouds. Yet whenever Caelum left for work alone, rain inevitably followed. Not always immediately—sometimes it waited until he was halfway down the block, umbrella forgotten at home, before the skies opened and cried without warning.
However, this time, it was Veuliah who left.
The sunshine seemed to go with him. Gray clouds gathered beyond the windows not long after, draping the apartment in muted touches of gray. Rain threatened somewhere in the distance, turning the outside world hazy and indistinct. Caelum’s apartment felt smaller somehow, cocooned beneath the overcast sky and cut off from beyond the four walls of his home, much like the conversation they had left unfinished.
Caelum sat alone in the kitchen, staring at his untouched bowl of soggy instant noodles, mindlessly stirring it with a fork as if the action would convince an onlooker that he was eating. He felt emptiness—not from his stomach, but somewhere in his chest. The lights overhead flickered and then steadied, casting the room in a dull, almost yellowish glow. Everything looked slightly discolored under it. His reflection in the bowl of soup was wrong, faceless. The ticking clock on the wall sounded too loud, like counting down to something instead of keeping track of time.
He gazed at the clock.
4:45 PM.
Veuliah hadn’t returned since morning.
He’d said something about wanting fresh air, his voice strained like an instrument out of tune, a not-so-fitting excuse for solitude from someone who didn’t exactly breathe. There was an unnamed tension knotted behind his words, something thick with impending dread that neither of them wanted to acknowledge, nor name. Under the trench coat he borrowed from Caelum, he tightly hid his wings—a perfectly imperfect disguise to appear human. Feathers subtly peeked through the collar and hem like emotions too deep to be contained. Along with his fingers, he was trembling and paler than usual.
Caelum had watched him leave, lingering in the doorway long after Veuliah disappeared from sight.
His lips had parted once, then again.
Please don’t go. You don’t look right.
The words had risen all the way to his throat before dying there. He could not bring himself to say them. Perhaps it was pride. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps it simply no longer felt right for him to ask someone to stay when he had spent so long keeping them at arm’s length.
Now the apartment sat in silence, pressing down on him like a weighted blanket, heavy and suffocating. Every room felt strangely expectant, as though something was waiting just beyond the edge of his vision. It was the silence that made him glance over his shoulder occasionally, despite knowing full well he was alone.
And for the first time in a very long while, he wished he wasn’t.
4:59 PM.
Three measured taps came at the door, spaced with intentional precision, as though whoever stood on the other side had practiced them beforehand. For a fleeting moment, Caelum wondered if Veuliah finally returned, but the thought vanished as quickly as it appeared. Veuliah had never understood the purpose of doors, let alone the etiquette surrounding them. He would sooner appear in the middle of the apartment without warning than announce his presence from the hallway. But neither was Caelum expecting anyone else—he wasn’t the sort of person people visited. Not anymore, at least. Whatever connections had once tethered him to the rest of the world had long since been severed, left to wither from neglect or cut away by his own hand.
The three knocks came again.
Cautiously, he walked across the kitchen, then the living room, each footstep replaced with the thumping of his nervous heartbeat—a quiet warning in his chest that pulsed alongside the rain. He opened the door halfway, not welcoming, but not rudely either.
A man stood on the other side of the door: tall, pale, clothed entirely in white. It was something cleaner than mere white fabric, something eerier than the sterile white of hospital walls. A shade so immaculate that it seemed to reject the very notion of dust, wear, or time. The darkness of the hallway only sharpened it further, as though the shadows existed merely to frame him. His coat neatly fell just below his knees, buttoned all the way to the throat. White gloves concealed his hands, save for the glint of golden cufflinks that caught the weak hallway light.
Everything about him appeared untouched, as if he had materialized right then and there. Not a single wrinkle disturbed the surface of his clothes. He did not come with the gradual erosion that came with existing in the world. Even his skin possessed a strange quality to it—pale enough to seem almost translucent beneath the brim of his hat, as though sunlight had never once laid claim to him.
For a moment, Caelum couldn’t see his eyes.
Then, the man tilted his head and smiled. A gesture with such unsettling precision, each movement with the polished quality of a well-worn mask. It was not the smile of someone pleased to see him, nor was it cruel. Instead, it was a perfect imitation of something that understood humans well enough to mimic them, but not well enough to become a part of them.
“Good afternoon.” He spoke. There was a weight to it, not loud, but uncomfortably pressing. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
Caelum’s fingers tightened around the edge of the door. “…Can I help you?” He asked tentatively.
The man acknowledged him with a gentle nod. “We’re searching for something misplaced,” he said. “Or someone, rather. I believe it might have… sought refuge in your residence.”
Caelum’s mouth went dry.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I live alone.”
The man’s smile didn’t move, as if expecting the answer from Caelum; however, his eyes shifted underneath the shadow of his hat. He wasn’t human—his eyes were hollow and absent, colorless like glassy water bearing no reflection, no bottom. One could fall in and never resurface.
“It is not a matter of belief,” he spoke calmly. “We are aware it is here.” His eyes looked over Caelum’s shoulder, taking in the disarray of his space. “Or was.”
The tall man reached into his coat, and Caelum immediately tensed. For one brief, irrational moment, he expected a weapon. Instead, the man let out a soft chuckle and withdrew a single slip of paper—or what appeared to be paper. He held it out between two gloved fingers.
Upon noticing Caelum’s unwillingness to take it, the man’s smile widened by a fraction. Without asking for permission, he seized Caelum’s wrist and turned his palm upward. His grip was impossibly firm, making no room for disobedience or hesitation. Before Caelum could pull away, the slip had already pressed into his palm, the contact sending a chill through him.
It was not paper. Not entirely.
The material yielded between his fingers with a strange, pliable softness. Something unsettlingly warm, somewhere between cloth and flesh. Caelum stared as it pulsed once against his palm, then again, alive in a way no piece of parchment should have been. Across from him, the man merely watched with quiet amusement.
“The instructions will reveal themselves unto you,” the man spoke, tone of voice unchanging. “They are harmless. It simply aids in… returning things to where they belong. Where they are made for.”
Symbols covered the pseudo-parchment’s surface, written in a language Caelum did not recognize and somehow understood all the same. The characters refused to remain still, shifting at the corners of his vision, writhing and rearranging themselves whenever he attempted to focus on them. Once, it was a sigil. Then a prayer. Briefly, a warning. Each interpretation lasting only a heartbeat before dissolving into something else.
Caelum’s eyes snapped up. “You make it sound like he’s a criminal.”
The man tilted his head, as if Caelum had said something unhinged, like the sky was red, or that gravity didn’t exist. “You misunderstand.” He smiled again, gesturing vaguely with his hands as if to clarify, emphasizing how little he valued this angel. “It is not being punished. It is being recalled.”
The words seemed to burrow through layers of memory and instinct, searching for the shape his mind feared most.
Then, at last, they settled.
A list with Veuliah’s name on the top.
The man’s lips curled slightly upward, enough to disturb the symmetry of his face. Enough to make Caelum feel sick.
“You should leave.” Caelum muttered through gritted teeth.
The man inclined his head in a slow, ceremonial motion, as if mocking a bow. He stepped back, movements fluid, rehearsed. “Of course.” The smile never left his face. “But a word of advice, mortal.” His gaze drifted past him, toward the disheveled apartment once again, as though judging how an unkempt place could shelter something worthlessly divine.
“He may wander, hide. He may even convince himself that he wishes to remain.” The smile widened. “You may offer him your roof, your table, your… affection.”
Caelum kept silent, noting the way the man seemed to recoil in disdain at the last word.
“But you cannot ensure him a future.”
The words settled heavily between them, his smile remaining pristine.
“I wish you a pleasant evening.”
Caelum shut the door, expecting the man’s silhouette to pass by his fogged windows, but it never came. Behind him, the apartment felt different. As if it were now occupied, with someone—or something—just sitting out of sight, watching, waiting for Caelum’s next move. The air remained still, yet the silence no longer felt calm.
He looked down at the pulsing slip in his hand again, and the man’s voice echoed in his head. Beneath the carefully practiced cadence lurked something older, something vast enough to wear a human voice without ever truly possessing one. The words seemed to arrive from several directions at once, layered atop one another like a chorus struggling to inhabit a single throat.
“You are not meant to keep what falls from Heaven, mortal.”
Exhaustion struck Caelum without warning after. One moment he was standing, and the next, a crushing wave of fatigue swept through him so violently that it stole the air from his lungs. He was all too familiar with the weariness that came with several sleepless nights to recognize that this was something else—this was imposed, forced.
His knees buckled as a strange heaviness flooded his limbs, dragging his frame downward as though invisible hands had emerged beneath him and wrapped themselves around him. He stumbled backward, the apartment lurching with him. The walls seemed to tilt, light warping and bending, swaying like reflections beneath dark water. Stubbornly, he blinked, trying to stay upright, but the effort only made the dizziness worse.
He hit the floor knee-first before collapsing onto his side, darkness gradually swallowing the edges of his vision. Pain flared and vanished just as quickly, engulfed by the overwhelming lull of unconsciousness. Eyes half-open, Caelum lay there long enough to feel himself slowly succumbing to something feigning sleep.
Caelum opened his eyes to a world he hadn’t recalled falling asleep in.
At first glance, he recognized his apartment—the same narrow walls enclosed him, the same ceiling hung overhead. The faint scent of coffee and dust lingered in the air. Even the morning light filtered through the curtains at the identical angle that often woke him up every morning.
Yet unease settled beneath his skin.
Everything appeared exactly as it should have been. The familiar stain of watermarks was absent. The stack of unopened mail on the counter sat perfectly aligned. The shelves had their books standing at equal heights. Caelum recognized the coffee ring on the table from this morning, yet it was perfectly circular, its edges crisp and unbroken as though recreated from meticulous descriptions rather than an imprint by accident.
The apartment possessed all the correct details and none of the accidents, feeling less like a home and more like a husk of something that once breathed behind glass for show.
Light clung to every corner of the apartment, stubbornly refusing to leave even the smallest shadow untouched while somehow leaving Caelum no less lost than before. Every bulb burned with an unpleasant, almost feverish intensity, filling the apartment with a constant electrical hum.
A droplet struck the floor beside him. The ceiling stretched overhead, pale and unbroken, with no cracks. No stains. No signs of a leak.
Another droplet fell, dull but resounding throughout the stifling room.
His gaze followed it toward the living room. The couch sat exactly where it should have been, not a single unusual thing about it. But as his eyes landed on the surface, a dark patch appeared along one of the cushions.
It gradually spread outward from somewhere deep within the upholstery itself, the color slowly darkening as moisture worked its way through. A bead of water gathered along the seam and slipped free, dissolving into the floorboards below. The ceiling above the couch was still dry, yet another droplet followed. And another. Soon, it was a steady drip.
His eyes swept across the apartment where water seeped from the grain of the wooden table, collecting at the edges before dripping onto the floor. Dampness bloomed across cabinet doors and crawled through bookshelves in uneven stains, leaving the air heavy with the stench of neglected moisture that clung to his clothes and hair. Water gathered across the floorboards in shallow pools, finding its way between furniture legs and pooling on uneven surfaces in the room. It steadily spread outward, yet gradually came to a stop once it reached him in a thin, shimmering border.
Feathers littered the warping wood. White and delicate, their tips stained with the same silver blood Veuliah had bled. Some lay crumpled where they had fallen. Others seemed suspended in the act of descent, caught between one moment and the next, looking less like remains of wings and more so evidence of a regret painstakingly erased from memory.
In a corner of the room, the television crackled to life, drawing Caelum’s attention. He hadn’t touched the remote, nor did he remember it lying around.
Static flooded the screen, gray noise hissing through unseen teeth, filling the apartment with its presence.
Then a voice emerged—or perhaps voices. Dozens layered atop one another, overlapping and colliding until individual words became impossible to separate. It was hollow and dissonant, yet strangely liturgical, carrying the cadence of a choir whose divinity had long since abandoned it, baring a hymn sung with no intention for praise or glory.
“This is what shall remain of you, should you keep him.”
As though guided by a will that was not his own, Caelum’s body turned. His movements felt slow and resistant, as if he were wading through deeper water. The hallway shifted before him—the corridors began to stretch as the ceiling climbed higher. The walls drew further apart while shadows lengthened into impossible shapes that loomed over him punishingly. What should have been a short walk to the bathroom now seemed to extend far beyond the limits of the apartment.
The longer he resisted, the less it resembled a hallway. Walls swelled in slow, uneven pulses, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of a creature taking its first breaths after a long sleep. The floorboards creaked beneath his every step, not from his weight but from a movement deep within the structure itself.
At the far end of the corridor, the bathroom door stood slightly ajar, something dark seeping from the gap beneath it.
The liquid crawled across the floorboards in sluggish, viscous tendrils, silver glinting beneath the apartment lights like tarnished metal beneath stagnant water.
Angel blood.
Or what remained of it.
Caelum stopped before the bathroom doorway. The tiles beneath his feet gave way to something warmer with every step, something that feigned signs of life.
It was dark. Not empty—dark.
The distinction settled in his stomach apprehensively.
By the time he reached the sink, sweat had begun to gather at the nape of his neck. A thin layer of condensation covered the mirror in front of him, but before he could reach forward to wipe it away, something shifted behind the fogged glass.
The figure of him on the other side stared back.
Its shoulders slumped beneath an invisible weight. Its cheeks were hollow. Bruises darkened the skin beneath its eyes like stains that had crept in too deeply to wash away. Cracked lips hung slightly parted as if caught mid-scream of a soundless agony frozen in time, traces of dried blood gathered at their corners.
But it was the eyes that rooted Caelum in place.
Emptiness wouldn’t be the right word, for it would imply the existence of something that was once there. His reflection looked as though it had spent years, if not more, watching every good thing in its life waste away into nothingness. One piece at a time, until nothing remained except the anticipation of loss.
And from the darkness of the reflection, a pair of eyes manifested.
Veuliah.
But not the gentle, curious angel he once knew.
Caelum found himself glancing over his shoulder, needing to confirm that Veuliah was not truly standing behind him. The apartment remained empty, the tiles beneath him stayed warm. Only the reflection lingered, faintly luminous beyond the glass.
His feathers were gone. In their place stretched pale, jagged bones that twitched erratically, as though the mere act of existing had become far too excruciating to bear. Fragments of silver clung stubbornly to the exposed bones, remnants of plumage that Heaven failed to strip away completely. Or perhaps it was to humiliate him for what he was supposed to be once. Above his head hovered a fractured halo, cracks spreading through the dimming circle of light. From them leaked a luminous silver fluid, thick and metallic, slipping down the angel’s temples and neck. It no longer resembled blood, for wherever it touched, the glow further dimmed.
His hands were clasped together in prayer, no longer able to tell where his fingers began and ended—fused into devotion by something stronger than flesh. Threads of divine light tightly stitched his mouth shut, disappearing into his cheeks and jaw, skin bound in neat, merciless rows. Yet despite that, he spoke. A solemn hymn forced through a wound. The sound emerged from somewhere deeper than a throat. As Veuliah lifted his gaze, Caelum understood.
The angel was still alive. Still conscious and capable of grief. But every trace of humanity, his innocent curiosity marked as rebellion, had been stripped away from him, leaving nothing but a soulless shell. Meant to breathe and exist for nothing but worship.
The lights overhead flickered once, twice. Then the apartment keeled, a sharp crack splitting the floor at Caelum’s feet. He stumbled backward as the walls shuddered around him, a deep groan reverberating through the apartment’s bones.
Frantically, Caelum instinctively turned and ran.
The kitchen offered no refuge. Symbols covered every surface—the walls, the cabinets, even the ceiling above him. They spiraled outward in intricate patterns, overlapping and branching like slithering serpents. His stomach dropped. He recognized those symbols. They matched the ones on the slip of paper the visitor in white had forced into his hand.
A cold sensation crept up his arm. For a brief second, he could not understand what he was seeing. A thin line had appeared along the inside of his wrist. Slowly, the skin parted. The wound opened with unnatural precision, as though an invisible blade were tracing a meticulous path beneath his flesh. Color drained from his hand, his fingers slackened. The veins beneath his skin darkened and withered before his very eyes. Only then did he understand what had been used to write the symbols surrounding him.
His blood.
Then came the scream.
A shiver tore down Caelum’s spine as he recognized the wails. Gone were the hollow voices from the television and the twisted lurking behind glass. This cry carried all the imperfections Heaven could never counterfeit—the falter in his voice, the grief beneath it, the desperate strain of someone trying and failing to endure. The sound ripped through the apartment, and Caelum ran.
His shoulder clipped the edge of a cabinet. He stumbled, caught himself against the dining table, nearly tripped over a chair leg. Water splashed beneath his feet and feathers clung damply to his clothes. Around him, the apartment continued to warp and groan, but the scream came again, almost animalistic but raw enough to cut through every illusion.
By the time he reached the window, his chest ached. His hands trembled as he pushed it open with far too much force.
There was no city beyond the glass. No skyline. No streets. Only an endless, yawning chasm of nothingness greeted his gaze, stretching in every direction as though the world had already ended and left his apartment stranded in its wake.
At the edge of that impossible void knelt an angel. Bands of divine light wound around his limbs and chest, constricting tighter than chains. His wings had grown monstrous, arching over him before twisting back upon themselves. The feathers tangled around in his throat in a grotesque imitation of a noose, forcing his head downward.
Veuliah.
The one who stared out windows as though the sky held answers. The one who asked endless questions and watched terrible shows with unwavering sincerity. The one who imitated human routine with unnecessary intricacy only to complain about it moments later.
Only now his curiosity was gone.
When Veuliah lifted his head, there was no trace of wonder left in his eyes—only sorrow. His words were quiet, with no anger nor accusation.
“You need only have returned me.”
Then, the light fractured. The mouth of the earth beneath Veuliah opened wide with a hiss, and he fell once more, writhing in agony as though burned alive.
Caelum didn’t move—couldn’t. He only watched.
What else was there to be done?
The scream unraveled into helpless cries. He stood frozen as Veuliah’s figure faded, consumed by the abyss piece by piece until only the memory of his shape remained.
Soon, that too was gone.
Glass scattered across the apartment as the window exploded inward. Caelum flinched, but not quickly enough. Shards grazed his face and forearms, opening thin lines that felt less like injury and more like a brand of impending punishment.
For one terrible second, everything became still. Caelum swore he could still hear the angel weeping. A faint but surely there sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once—the abyss, the ache from somewhere deep inside his chest, the cold rot gradually spreading from his other useless hand.
Darkness swallowed the apartment whole as the world collapsed into itself.
Caelum jerked upright, gasping in quick, shallow bursts—his heart hammering wildly as if it yearned to be free from his ribcage. Sweat clung to his body, soaking his shirt and pooling at the small of his back. Every intake of air felt as though it passed through a tight space, as if choking on smoke.
His room was intact.
There was nothing broken. No blood. No sigils.
Everything in his apartment looked as it always did, except for one: a faint glow in his chest.
Reaching from underneath his shirt, he retrieved the same slip of paper. The one he had shoved into the farthest drawer in the deepest recesses of his apartment in an attempt to forget. Now it lay flat, almost innocently, weightless yet impossible to ignore. It pulsed faintly with warmth, as if imitating human life, and its symbols glowed with a soft light.
He clutched the slip tighter, not knowing if what he’d seen was a dream or a warning. He didn’t know if it had already happened or was yet to come. Either answer made the pit in his stomach grow.
For the first time since Veuliah had fallen from the sky and crashed into his life, Caelum didn’t know if keeping him close was an act of mercy, or the first step into damnation. Still, he knew one thing with painful certainty—
Heaven had done its work.
The apartment no longer felt like home. Whatever familiarity it once possessed had been worn thin over the past several days, transformed into a place of repetition and unanswered cries for Heaven. Fine white dust lingered in the air and settled over the furniture. Half-melted candles stood wherever there was room to place them, hardened wax dripping across wood and countertops alike. Every surface bore evidence of another failed attempt—chalk markings crowding the floorboards, layered atop one another until their original shapes became impossible to decipher. Some had been wiped away in frustration, abandoned midway through completion, as though Caelum had already lost faith in them before they could be finished.
Caelum hadn’t slept in days. At least not for long enough to find rest.
Whenever exhaustion finally dragged him under, he resurfaced moments later with a gasp caught in his throat and his pulse racing hard enough that it threatened to break free from his skin. Sleep had become a doorway rather than a refuge, and something always seemed to await him on the other side.
Visions plagued his mind persistently each time. Some arrived in fragments. Others unfolded with merciless clarity. He bore witness to cities being swallowed beneath curtains of smoke. Vast circles of angels drifted overheard, their faces worn smooth as stone. Halos cracked open like dying stars, spilling light so blinding it scorched everything beneath it.
Among every nightmare ran the same dreadful certainty: this was but one of the few realities Heaven wished him to see.
And always, somewhere within the devastation, was Veuliah—sometimes kneeling, at times he was an emotionless observer, but often his voice followed Caelum back into consciousness.
Neither of us was meant to bear this weight.
This grief, this sorrow was never meant to be carried.
Why have you chosen this path?
The voice lingered long after he opened his eyes until he could no longer distinguish whether the voice belonged to his dreams or from the apartment walls themselves.
What have you made of us, Caelum?
His body, heavy-laden with exhaustion, swayed as he moved through the apartment. Every limb felt weighted, his hands unsteady as he struck a match and lit the candles—six now; five hadn’t worked before. The last attempt left dark streaks running down the walls, seeping from the plaster in slow trails that no amount of scrubbing could fully erase (not that Caelum had any strength left to clean anymore). By the following morning, though, they had vanished on their own, and Caelum was left grappling with the uncertainty of which of the two unsettled him more. Chalk, ash, and dried blood intertwined in dense, overlapping patterns, spreading far beyond the boundaries of the original circle. Some had been drawn, erased, redrawn, and removed so many times that they eventually carved themselves into pale scars along the wood. Caelum’s hands bore similar traces of repetition—calluses roughened his fingertips, white dust clung stubbornly to the creases of his skin, his cuticles were split and raw, nails cracked from tracing symbols he barely understood. His knees no longer flinched when he felt the ache as he shifted, the sensation now distant, dulled by fatigue.
Beside him lay the folded slip of paper. It remained open more often than not, the material already softening at the creases from the constant handling. Before, he dreaded the mere thought of touching it; the symbols writhed from unwanted attention whenever he looked directly at them.
Now they sat quietly on the page, patient and waiting. At some point, Caelum realized too late that they had ceased to feel foreign.
What he once saw as a threat days ago now only looked like crystal-clear penance.
“If this is what it takes,” he murmured, voice rough from disuse, “then perhaps it was always meant to end this way.”
He was never supposed to stay—the thought lodged itself somewhere behind his ribs—he had only been delaying what had already been decided for him long ago.
The final symbol came slowly. Chalk scraped against the floorboards as Caelum completed the circle, closing the last gap with a hand that trembled despite every effort to steady it.
The moment the lines connected, the apartment shifted. Candle flames lowered all at once, their light bending inward as though drawn toward the center of the ritual. The silence deepened until even the rain outside seemed impossibly distant.
Something had finally answered.
Caelum drew in a shaky breath. The final invocation lingered on the tip of his tongue. He parted his lips and managed only the first syllable before the apartment door opened behind him—the latch clicked, the hinges sighed, and then came the quiet sound of damp footsteps.
There was no urgency. The sound of rain briefly filled the apartment, the icy wind putting out a few candles, before the door eased shut again, leaving only the faint drip of water striking the floor. Soon, it was accompanied by the soft rustle of wet fabric, followed again by silence.
Caelum didn’t turn. He already knew.
“You chose them.”
The voice was hollow. Neither accusing nor cruel. Simply… empty. Like something thriving had been carved out from his ribs and never returned.
Caelum’s breath caught. His head lowered of its own accord, his muscles trembled with a weariness that was far deeper than exhaustion. He was helpless, and he knew better than to defend himself.
When he finally turned, the air behind him felt heavy with remorse.
Veuliah stood in the doorway, engulfed by dying candlelight. His coat was torn at the hem. His wings, half-unfurled, hung uselessly behind him, feathers matted with dried silver blood, splintered bones protruding where the plumage had given away. The gentle light that had once lingered in his eyes had long since faded, sunken by lifetimes of sorrow and grief far too heavy for one soul to carry alone. Dirt clung to his bare feet, fresh cuts and old scabs overlapping across them, as though he had wandered with no destination in mind for far longer than any road should have allowed.
But worse than the bruises, worse than the blood, even worse than every mark his aimless journey had left upon him, there was no trace of anger on his face.
“Why?”
He simply looked tired. As though something inside him had finally reached the end of his strength. As though finding Caelum half-crazed and surrounded by half-finished sigils and rituals he hardly understood had become the last weight he could no longer bear.
The weary angel stepped into the room, his gaze settling on the floor instead of Caelum. Perhaps he could not bear to see the look that must’ve found its way onto the mortal’s face. His eyes drifted to the interrupted ritual, lingering on the symbols that still glowed faintly upon the floor.
Caelum moved instinctively, stepping between Veuliah and the circle.
“You were gone,” he said, struggling to steady his voice. “I… I thought they had taken you—”
“That you would not see me again.” Veuliah finished for him.
“I thought I’d lost you. Forever.”
The confession never leaves Caelum’s lips, and he forces himself to swallow the lump in his throat.
Veuliah lowered himself beside the circle with visible effort, his movements slowed by a world-weariness that seemed to seep into his very bones. One hand brushed absentmindedly across a single sigil, smearing the chalk by scarcely more than a fingertip’s width. The light dimmed instantly.
“What further witness would you ask of me, Caelum?” He murmured, closing his eyes. “What more would Heaven have me become before you cease to call it mercy? Must I return to you broken each time,” his voice faltered as he opened his eyes, “before you believe that no peace awaits me there?”
“They showed me things,” Caelum said. His throat tightened around the words. Not from days of silence, but the sudden return of feeling after so long spent drifting through numbness. “Visions. Of what you might become.”
Veuliah lowered his gaze to the broken sigil once again, then down to Caelum’s hands. “And you believed them.”
The silence that followed was unbearable, settling heavily between them and shrinking the room until Caelum felt there was barely enough air left to breathe. The accusation he anticipated from Veuliah’s voice did not arrive, but the gentleness only made the weight of his words harder to endure.
“I didn’t—” he started, his hands trembling where they rested in his lap, “I didn’t want to lose you.” It was close enough to what he truly wanted to say.
“You have.” Veuliah said. His voice never rose. There was no reproach in it, no effort to wound. “Not in the flesh. But here.” He rested a hand lightly on Caelum’s chest, above the restless beat of his heart that the mortal was so sure no longer learned to beat prior to today.
His fingers lingered for a quiet moment before his gaze once again drifted to the broken ritual. The circle flickered faintly, its light thinning as the last remnants of its purpose seeped into the floor and vanished.
“You had already yielded me,” he murmured, “still, my feet carried me back to your door.”
The visions Heaven had pressed upon him flared behind his eyes once more. Cities in ruin. Wings broken beyond recognition. Halos weeping in molten light.
Yet not one resembled the angel standing before him.
“Tell me,” Veuliah whispered, “when you beheld me there, did you find… a monster?”
The answer caught in Caelum’s throat.
“No,” he said at last. “You looked… sad.”
A faint smile graces Veuliah’s lips. Not of comfort nor acceptance, merely the quiet understanding of one who had long since grown accustomed to being wounded, one who no longer expected the hurt to cease.
“I thought as much.” He murmured. “Sorrow has only been the truest thing they have left me.”
He rose with slow, unhurried movements. The sigils surrendered their remaining light. Around them, candles left behind flickered once before going dark in perfect unison, only leaving the remnants of a warmth that once held light now retreating into the hardening wax.
The ritual had come to an end.
Caelum woke to an unnerving silence. It was not the usual quiet that greeted his mornings. No birdsong threaded through the open air. The refrigerator’s usual hum seemed to quiet down. Even the familiar footsteps from the apartment above and across the same floor had vanished, as though the building itself had forgotten it was inhabited. His shoulder throbbed where it had rested against the floor and held up his weight, his body still curled up beside the smudged remains of the ritual circle. The candles had burned down to short stumps of hardened wax, while the symbols had faded into pale smears, blurred by sweat, his restless fidgeting in his sleep, or perhaps simply time. Caelum pushed himself upright, every movement carrying the strange uncertainty of someone relearning the shape of their own body. It took him an embarrassing amount of seconds to realize morning had already come. A pale gray light filtered through the windows, drained of warmth before it ever reached the room. Dust drifted through the beams in slow, aimless currents, and the apartment looked like a photograph left unfinished in the developing tray, its colors never quite arriving.
Had Veuliah truly returned? Had they really spoken in the middle of that makeshift altar, surrounded by fading sigils and dying candlelight?
For a fleeting moment, Caelum wondered if exhaustion had finally overtaken him. Perhaps his mind had simply woven another dream from guilt and sleeplessness. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he pinched the inside of his wrist just enough to sting. His thoughts drifted instead to the image that refused to leave him: silver blood caught between broken feathers, dirt clinging to bare feet that had wandered relentlessly without direction, and a smile so quiet it seemed to exist only to spare someone else from a sorrow too heavy to name.
“Veuliah?” He called, his voice still rough with sleep.
Silence answered.
Caelum forced himself upright, his legs protesting as circulation returned in slow, aching pulses.
The apartment was far too still.
He drifted into the hallway, each step swallowed by floorboards that had grown accustomed to bearing two sets of footsteps. The bedroom door stood ajar. The bed remained exactly as it had been the night before, sheets stretched smooth, the pillows undisturbed, and their corners still crisp. No faint impression where Veuliah had perched to sleep in various haphazard positions to avoid disturbing his wounded wing. No stray feather caught between the blankets.
The kitchen was no different. The kettle sat cold on the counter. No coffee had been brewed. There was no wing folded awkwardly against the refrigerator, no curious angel peeking into cupboards as though expecting them to reveal some forgotten archaic trinket of humanity. Everything simply stood exactly where it belonged.
There was no weight, no warmth, only absence.
Then he noticed the bathroom light.
But inside was silence. The water wasn’t running, yet something sharp hung in the air—metallic, almost sweet in its intensity. The thick, unmistakable scent of copper.
“Veuli—”
His voice caught halfway up his throat.
The bathroom light flickered weakly overhead, its pale yellow glow washing the room in a sickening warmth that made the scene almost picturesque. The bathtub was full, threatening to spill from the brim with murky water clouded by grey, faintly shimmering blood. Feathers drifted across the surface without purpose, some unfurling like dying lilies, others gathered in small, sodden clumps like drowned moths. A few remained pristine white; the rest were veined with silver, their barbs clinging together beneath drying clots. Beyond the bathtub, the drain gurgled softly below, as though it could no longer swallow whatever had been offered to it.
Veuliah sat at the center of it all. Slumped. Motionless. His head hung low, his body trembling in small, involuntary shivers. Half-naked, knees drawn to his chest, he clutched himself so tightly that crescent-shaped marks bloomed where his nails dug into his arms. His skin looked impossibly pale, drained even of the faint radiance that had lingered despite everything. Beside the bathtub, half upon the floor and half hanging uselessly over the cusp, lay what had once been a wing. It had not been severed cleanly—the joint had been splintered apart at the shoulder, jagged where bone had refused to yield. Flesh had been torn out instead of cut, as though the blade had already grown dull long before the work was finished. Strips of feather and sinew still clung to one another, silver ichor hanging from the ruined joint like scraps of meat left to rot upon a butcher’s hook.
Bile rose in Caelum’s throat. The violence was still fresh, still echoing.
He could almost see it unfolding before him—not merely the aftermath, but the slow, agonizing labor of it: the blade rising and falling in uneven strokes, the pauses forced by pain, each attempt weaker than the last. Their surroundings alone already told the story with cruel clarity, and every detail carried him to the same realization: while Veuliah had been dismantling himself piece by agonizing piece, Caelum had slept only a few rooms away, unaware. Feathers lay scattered throughout the bathroom. Some rested on the sink. Hairline fractures veined the walls, and fragments of the mirror lay shattered across the sink. Whatever agony the angel had endured had long since overflowed, leaving the room itself to bear what his body no longer could.
Caelum’s eyes landed on the other wing. The other half bore only the beginnings of the same fate, the cuts growing fewer and shallower until they ceased altogether, as though weariness had gently pried the knife from his grasp long before he could finish what he had begun. At the base of his shoulder, where the severed wing once rooted itself so proudly, there remained only ragged flesh—peeled muscle, exposed tendon, shredded sinew clinging stubbornly to splintered bone.
Veuliah bore the look of one who had no longer learned to flinch from danger. He hadn’t even lifted his head at first until Caelum staggered forward, breath catching somewhere between a cry and a sob. The sight before him stole whatever words he might have found. An angel sat before him, stripped of all but the mangled remnants of the very thing that had once set him apart from man. Suddenly, speech felt far too small for such a thing.
“Veu—Veuliah… God, what… what have you…?”
The question unraveled before it could be finished. There was far too much to ask, too much to understand, and not enough energy from the poor angel to give answers. He couldn’t bring himself to reach out, his hand simply hovering uselessly between them; that if he touched Veuliah now, the quiet terror of his previous nightmares would finally surrender their last excuse for being a mere dream.
Veuliah’s eyes slowly found their path to Caelum’s, watching the man sink to his knees in despair. “You were granted more hours of rest.”
By some twisted instinct to offer mercy, the angel slowly lifted a trembling hand to brush back the mortal’s hair, comforting him with the same tenderness he had always offered.
“Why?” Caelum choked out. “Why would you… why would you do this? What have you done?”
Veuliah regarded him with quiet reverence.
“I have grown weary, Caelum.” He whispered softly. “Weary of remaining apart. Of bearing what Heaven still names holy.” His breathing came in uneven measures, each breath sounding borrowed rather than his own. “They cherish only that which remains unblemished. Untouched.” Pale, slender fingers hold the side of Caelum’s cheek, now streaked with warm tears. “I know no other manner of being loved.”
His gaze drifted to the ruined wing beside the bathtub.
“So I sought to lay it down.” His fingers curled faintly against his arms. “Be it selfish of me, I desired to know… that once I surrendered the last fragment by which Heaven laid claim to me…” he paused, as though the words themselves had become too heavy to carry, “…perhaps I might at last belong to myself.”
Only then did he lift his gaze to meet Caelum’s, quiet and unbearably tired. Despite everything, he managed a smile, a gentle thumb brushing along warm skin.
“Perhaps this is what freedom is.”
Caelum shook his head frantically, his own hand resting atop the one cradling his face, struggling to make sense of the devastation before him, of the pain carved into flesh, bone, and silence. “Th-That’s not how it works, Veuliah—it’s not—”
Veuliah closed his eyes for a while. “Then, what will remain of me, once Heaven takes you away?” He spoke, like an uttered prayer from a voice shrinking beneath the weight of the heavens. The water stirred as he shifted, the movement drawing a quiet flinch from somewhere deep within him. At his shoulder, the splintered bone where the wing had once taken root quivered faintly, and the ruined limb gave a single, involuntary twitch, as though some forgotten part of it had not yet understood it no longer belonged to him.
“You were not meant to behold me thus, poor soul,” he murmured after a long silence, his voice scarcely louder than the water gathering at the drain, almost ashamed. “I had hoped… to spare you this likeness of me.”
“You think this makes you human?!” Caelum accused.
Veuliah lifted his gaze once more to meet his. A small, fragile, and quietly desperate hope stirred within him, lingering for only a heartbeat before reality began to wear it away.
“Has it… not?”
The question broke something inside Caelum. Not for its childishness, not for its naivete, but for the fact it was asked without pretense. It was the question of someone who had surrendered everything he knew to become something he could barely understand; someone who had tried to carve his way out of holiness with blood and bone, who had endured splintered flesh and broken wings, and still looked to another for the answer.
As though he truly did not know whether any of it had been enough.
Caelum leaned forward until his forehead rested gently against Veuliah’s. Fever radiated from the angel’s skin. He could feel the tremor running through them both, the unsteady breaths, and the cloying scent of iron hanging thick in the damp air.
“You didn’t have to do this, Veuliah.” He grieved. “You were already…” the words dissolved as tears welled and slipped quietly down his face. He swallowed hard before trying again, this time cradling the angel’s head tenderly against his neck. “I would’ve kept you. Wing and all.”
Silence settled between them.
Veuliah did not answer at once. His unfocused gaze roamed toward the ruined wing lying beside the bathtub. The feathers were already dulling beneath the water, no longer catching the light the way they once had. For a long while, he simply stared at it, as though seeing it for the first time.
“…So this was never asked of me.”
His expression softened into something so small it could hardly be called a smile. It carried no relief or triumph—only the aching recognition that he had torn the very thing Caelum had never asked him to forsake.
The apartment no longer felt like the place they had first shared. The change reached beyond what the eye could name, though the signs of it lingered everywhere—the bathroom mirror remained cracked through its center, the fractures splitting it like a wound that refused to mend. Towels lay abandoned in the corners where Veuliah had collapsed, stuff with dried blood. Chalk sigils still clung to the living room floor, half-smudged by frantic footsteps. The air had grown heavier, denser, carrying the hushed stillness of a sanctuary left vacant after desecration when the believers had all fled after summoning the wrath of their gods. It felt as though something sacred had perished there, and the walls alone had remained to witness it. Even the daylight entered differently now, subdued and hesitant, as though uncertain if light still belonged within those walls.
Veuliah scarcely spoke after that. For the rest of the week, he drifted through the apartment like a quiet apparition, while the silence between them settled into every room, as though the home had begun to decay beneath all the words left unsaid. There was something deeply unsettling in his composure, moving with the cautious stillness of one waiting for a judgment that had not yet arrived. He never spoke of the pain, but Caelum found it in the smallest things: the faint crease that lingered between the angel’s brows, the stiffness with which he carried his shoulders, the tremor in his hand before it reached for a cup. Sometimes, without seeming to notice, his fingers would wander to the ruins at his back, lingering there as though expecting the weight of a wing that no longer answered him to grow back. Mirrors that he once gazed into so curiously became things he passed by without a second glance. A door closing too sharply drew the slightest flinch from him, as though some part of him still remembered Heaven’s hand.
Just as Veuliah had once learned the awkward rhythm of setting a table simply because it was part of Caelum’s ordinary life, Caelum, in turn, learned the quiet rituals of tending to him. He brewed tea neither of them truly drank. He changed bloodstained towels and freshened the sheets with hands that had first grown clumsy with guilt, before becoming careful through repetition. Each evening, he redressed the wound, apologizing beneath his breath in quiet sobs with every fresh bandage, though Veuliah had never once asked it of him. The hurt was too fresh, too sharp to hold between them.
Hence they spoke very little.
Not of the ritual, nor of the visions that had followed it. Not of the dreams that still lingered beneath their eyelids. Least of all the past of Veuliah that now lay somewhere in the bathroom, left to decay in silence.
On the first evening of the following week, the sky assumed an unfamiliar hue—a bruised violet threaded with pale blues and sickly gold, suspended somewhere between dusk and storm.
Veuliah stood by the window, as motionless as ever. His remaining wing hung behind him, twisted and frayed, no longer resembling something fashioned for flight so much as a burden he had yet to lay down. Across the room, Caelum lay stretched along the couch, feigning sleep beneath a blanket drawn halfway to his chest. Through half-lidded eyes, he watched the angel in silence, waiting for something he could neither name nor bring himself to expect.
Veuliah spoke first, his voice weak above the hush of the room.
“They draw near once more.”
“What?” Caelum stirred beneath the blanket, blinking away the remaining remnants of feigned sleep. “Who?”
Veuliah’s gaze never left the window. “They never truly departed, merely lingering beyond the veil, content to watch.” A quiet breath left him. “But perhaps their patience has grown thin.”
Only then did he turn toward Caelum, slowly, almost gently, as though reluctant to burden him with what came next. “They come now not as witnesses… but as those who reclaim what they deem their own.”
Caelum pushed himself upright so hastily the world around him spun.
“The one who came before,” he quietly recalled, “ones clothed in white?”
Veuliah lowered his head. “Far worse.” He said, his voice scarcely more than breath. “Mercy is not the office they have been entrusted with.”
There was no light left in his eyes, no reproach either—only the same, weary stillness.
“Their hand closes about us,” he murmued. “Each breath I am granted beneath this roof… each hour I remain beside you… they number it among my transgressions.”
The meaning settled over Caelum with excruciating clarity. He pushed himself to his feet, the blanket slipping unnoticed to the floor. His knees wavered beneath him, but the resolve that took hold was steadier than anything he’d felt in days.
“Then we leave.”
Veuliah gave him an astonished look, perhaps the most emotion he’d shown these past few days.
“You would flee?” He asked at last. The astonishment melted into a quiet wonder that bordered on grief. “With… me?”
Caelum nodded without hesitation. “There’s nothing left here worth losing.”
For a while, silence bloomed between them.
Veuliah’s hand lifted almost of its own accord before faltering halfway between them. The hesitation lingered. Not because he doubted Caelum, but because something far older than either of them recoiled within him. It had been woven into him long before he had learned the names of rivers or the sound of rain against glass. Obedience. Reverence. Whatever word of righteousness Heaven would call it—the certainty that one would not turn away from Them and remain unbroken.
“You speak of leaving,” he whispered, the taste of the word foreign on his tongue, “as though it were a path one simply chooses.”
Caelum frowned. “We’ll find one, make one, whichever. Veuliah, we’ll—”
Veuliah’s hand fully retreats back to his side as though burned.
“You do not understand.” His voice remained gentle, giving a faint shake of his head. “Before I beheld the earth, I beheld Heaven. Before I knew the speech of men, I knew only Their will. It is not merely obedience They ask of me, I was created to obey. Even now…” his fingers curled weakly against his palm, “…a part of me yearns to hear I am forgiven.”
The confession lingered between them. Veuliah lowered his gaze once more. Hesitation clung to him with the quiet persistence of something learned long before memory—woven so deeply into his being that even now, with Heaven far above and Caelum standing within reach, it refused to loosen its hold. The angel’s gaze drifted toward the window, where the bruised sky lingered beyond the glass. Somewhere above those clouds lay the kingdom he had once called home. A place he loved without question. To turn away from it felt less like rebellion and more like tearing free from the marrow of his very own being. And yet, standing before him was a mortal he had known for nor more than a handful of weeks, asking him to entrust his life to hands that never once demanded he become less than he already was.
“Perhaps it is I who fails to understand.” Veuliah muttered. “I have walked beside you for only a handful of days. Yet you would forsake all that is yours… and bear such judgment with me?”
Caelum manages a weak laugh. “I’d bear worse.”
Veuliah stood motionless for what felt like ages. Then, with a tenderness so slight it might have gone unnoticed, his hand finally reached for Caelum’s. Their fingers intertwined—not with certainty, nor even with hope, but with something far more fragile.
“…So this is what it is,” he murmured, almost to himself, “to place one’s faith in another.”
The words faded into the hush between them. No light answered from above, no voice descended to forbid them. For the first time since his fall, the choice remained wholly his own.
That night, Caelum packed only what he could carry without thinking twice: a flask of water, a battered road map, his cracked phone. Veuliah brought nothing—there was little left that belonged to him. They slipped away before dawn, while the streets still lay vacant beneath a sky too dim to call morning. No footsteps crossed the pavement, no breeze stirred the trees. Even the streetlights seemed undecided, their pale glow wavering against the dark. The car groaned softly beneath their shared weight as they climbed inside. Caelum turned the key, the engine caught after a reluctant pause, and together they pulled away from the apartment without looking back.
Somewhere behind them, the sun began to rise, yet the heavens remained bruised. They spoke little, leaving the silence to the steady rhythm of tires against asphalt.
Hours slipped quietly by. The city unraveled behind them until its skyline became no more than a faint blur in the rearview mirror, dissolving into the distance like a memory already beginning to wither along the edges. Fields slowly replaces concrete, telephone wires gave way to long rows of trees, their branches stirring gently in the morning wind. The farther they drove, the lighter the world seemed to become—not cleansed, not forgiving, but momentarily beyond the reach of all they had left behind. Warmth returned to the sunlight, tentative yet real, and the road stretched onward beneath it, disappearing over the horizon as though it, too, believed there might still be somewhere worth going.
The sickening weight of Heaven’s gaze no longer pressed against their ribs. It had fallen away so gradually that neither of them noticed its absence until the silence inside the car no longer felt expectant.
“Tell me once more,” Veuliah said softly, his eyes lingering along the scenery they pass by, “what it is… to be nothing more than a man.”
Caelum glanced sideways, his eyes rimmed red from sleepless nights and tears that had never quite found their way free. “You ache,” he murmured. “You doubt. You wake with something missing, and you lie down still searching for it. It’s full of mistakes, it’s untidy. Most days, you don’t even know if you’re becoming who you’re meant to be.”
Veuliah listened without interruption. A strange, wistful smile touched his lips.
“Then perhaps,” he said softly, “I have wandered nearer than I knew.”
Caelum focused on the road, jaw tight, eyes scanning the horizon. The wheel sat steady in his hands, knuckles pale from the grip. Every mile felt like a breath exhaled from a place in him that had forgotten how to breathe. The road was endless in the most ordinary way.
A weathered billboard slipped past the passenger window, its advertisement so sun-bleached that only fragments of faded lettering and shades of yellow-brown remained. A little farther on came a field of purple hyacinths, bending softly beneath the evening wind. Beside the road stood a crooked mailbox, leaning ever so slightly forward, a lone crow perched upon its rusted roof. It turned its head as they passed, one dark eye following the car until it disappeared behind them.
Several minutes later, Caelum caught himself staring.
He thought little of it at first. Highways tricked the eyes, often looking alike. Perhaps there had been another sign, another forgotten field, another neglected mailbox. Yet as they drove on, the same flowers drifted past his window once more, and there it was again—the crow, perched atop the same bent post, watching him with unsettling patience.
Caelum’s grip tightened around the steering wheel.
The road continued beneath them: another stretch of pavement, another weathered billboard. The hyacinths. The mailbox. The crow.
This time, Caelum kept his eyes on it until it vanished behind them. It never twitched, never flapped its wings. It merely watched, as though it had awaited their passage.
A chill settled beneath its skin as he risked a glance at the dashboard.
5:55 PM.
His gaze lingered for a moment before returning to the road. A truck rumbled past in the opposite lane. Trees blurred by the windows. He counted several slow breaths, then looked again.
The clock still read—
5:55 PM.
Caelum shifted in his seat, shoulders stiff from hours behind the wheel. He drew a slow, uneven breath, his gaze moving between the endless ribbon of road ahead and the quiet figure behind him. Veuliah hadn’t moved since they left the city, his head resting faintly against the window, his remaining wing gathered close as though warding off a chill only he could feel.
“…Hey,” he said, attempting a smile that never quite reached his eyes. “Didn’t we pass that billboard already?”
Veuliah did not answer.
“And the flowers… the mailbox. Have you seen that crow too?”
Still nothing.
Caelum’s voice grew quieter. “Veuliah?”
Only then did Veuliah blink, as though returning from somewhere unimaginably far away.
Then, without warning, his breath caught.
His hand flew to the side of his head. A sharp inhale escaped him as his shoulders curled inward, lurching forward as his fingers pressed hard against his temple, as though something unseen had driven itself into his skull. The pain came and went in a single blinding wave, leaving only silence in its wake. For one impossible instant, panic flickered across his face.
Then it was gone.
His hand slipped slowly into his lap.
He had believed distance could unmake devotion. That roads less traveled by men might also remain hidden from Heaven. As though there were any corner of Creation beyond Their sight. As though one broken angel, torn off of his wings and stripped of grace had ever truly possessed the freedom to disappear.
“They have found us.” The angel’s words no longer held any fear, only resignation.
“What?”
At last, Veuliah turned to him. Something in his gaze had gone still. Not empty, but distant, as though he already foresaw whatever lay waiting at the end of the road and found nothing left to hope for. “They will not suffer us to depart,” he murmured. After a pause, he added, quieter now. “I have been a fool. We were never beyond Their reach.”
The landscape beyond the windshield no longer seemed quite fixed. The edges of the road wavered faintly, not unlike heat rising from summer asphalt, yet the air remained cool. Trees at the roadside appeared to bend ever so slightly before settling back into place. The painted lines beneath the tires stretched for the briefest instant, then drew together again, as though the road itself had forgotten its proper shape.
Caelum swallowed against the tightness in his throat and reached for the radio, the speakers crackling to life.
Static spilled into the car, thin and uneven, drifting in and out as though searching for a station somewhere just beyond reach. He turned the dial slowly with tremoring hands, eyes torn between the knob and the road beyond. A burst of music surfaced for the briefest instant before dissolving back into white noise. Another turn caused even more static. Somewhere within the hiss, something almost resembled a voice, too distant to make out.
Frustrated, Caelum adjusted the knob again with a frown.
The static deepened. Beneath it lay the indistinct murmur of many voices speaking at once, their words folding into one another until they became impossible to separate. A syllable surfaced. Then another.
“Y—You can—”
The billboard drifted past once more. Then the field of hyacinths. Then the crooked mailbox.
The crow was still there.
“—you can—cannot—”
This time, it did not merely watch them pass. Its head continued to turn long after the post had disappeared behind the car, its neck bending farther than bone should have allowed.
Inside the vehicle, the hissing softened until one voice remained.
“You cannot flee.”
It spoke without triumph, carrying only the quiet surety of one offering a truth long since decided.
Caelum’s hand jerked away from the radio, switching it off. His foot stuck the brake before the thought had fully formed. The tires squealed against the asphalt, the car lurching violently as it slid to a halt in the middle of the empty road. For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Only the engine idled beneath the silence, trembling faintly beneath them.
“…No,” Veuliah whispered. “No… they have closed the way.”
“What does that mean?” Caelum looked at him, exasperated.
“I—I know not.” His voice trembled with a fear he seemed ashamed to possess. “Only that this is no road men were meant to tread.”
Caelum refused to listen. He threw the gearshift into reverse, the car staggering backward before he spun the wheel hard, turning them around. Gravel spat beneath the tires as they accelerated in the opposite direction.
For several long moments, nothing happened. Then—
The crow.
Only now it stood first.
A few seconds later came the field of purple hyacinths. Then the weathered billboard.
Caelum felt the blood leave his face.
The road had not changed. The crow. The mailbox. The flowers. The billboard.
Frantically, his eyes darted to the dashboard.
The minute had not passed. Neither the second. It stood still at 5:55 PM.
Something inside him finally gave way.
A scream tore itself from his throat before he even realized he was making it—raw, fractured, ripped from the same place where every nightmare Heaven had shown him still lay buried.
As though the world itself had grown impatient, the windshield split cleanly down the middle. A thin fracture raced across the glass with a brittle shriek, branching outward faster than Caelum could comprehend, until the entire windshield was veined in white. He hadn’t struck anything.
The engine coughed. Once. Twice.
“Caelum!”
Veuliah’s warning came far too late.
The wheel wrenched itself to the side with impossible force. The tires screamed across the pavement before losing their grip altogether. The car lurched sideways, skidding across the pavement before losing their grip altogether.
For one suspended heartbeat, the world tilted.
Then gravity claimed them.
The front wheels dropped first. The car pitched forward and struck the embankment. Metal shrieked against stone and glass burst inward in a glittering storm. Shards whipped across the cabin, catching the last of the morning light before vanishing into chaos. The seatbelt bit savaely into Caelum’s ribs, wrenching the breath from his lungs as he was thrown against it. His shoulder slammed into the door hard enough to numb his entire arm.
In the backseat, Veuliah’s temple struck the window with a sickening crack.
The force drove him against the passenger door, reopening the wound where his wing had once been. Fresh silver ichor welled through the haphazardly wrapped linen, soaking the bandages almost at once before spilling in slow rivulets down his side. The impact jolted what remained of the shattered joint, and the angel’s body folded inward with an involuntary convulsion, though no sound escaped him.
The car landed on its roof with a deafening crash.
Only the soft hiss of escaping steam and the continuous ticking of the cooling engine followed.
Caelum hung motionless against the seatbelt. Warm blood slipped from a cut at his temple, tracing the curve of his cheek before disappearing beneath his collar. Every breath scraped against his ribs.
He tried to move, but pain answered first.
Then, slowly, his head turned.
“Veu… liah…?”
The angel had gone frighteningly still.
His head rested against the shattered window, silver blood threading quietly through the white linen wrapped around his shoulder before dripping, one drop at a time. His remaining wing lay twisted awkwardly beneath him, feathers bent and stained where broken glass had lodged between them. For one terrible moment, his vision swam. Caelum could no longer tell whether he was breathing.
Beyond the spiderweb of fractured glass, a familiar shape settled onto the ruins.
The crow.
It perched quietly against the dented metal patiently.
Waiting.
“VEULIAH!”
Caelum woke to silence. The sky above him was washed in gray, its light so diffused it seemed unable to decide whether morning had truly arrived. He sat alone in his car, parked outside the apartment building as though he had never left.
For several moments, he simply stared through the windshield. Something felt… misplaced. Not wrong, only absent. Though the feeling had already slipped through his fingers before he could clearly grasp it.
With the dull weariness of someone who had worked far too many shifts and given too little thought to the consequences, he reached for the door handle and stepped out. His clothes carried the stale scent of coffee and rain. His back ached. A headache pulsed faintly behind his eyes. His fingers felt strangely stiff, as though they had held onto something long after they should have let go. Similarly, the feeling had already passed before he could spare a glance at his hands.
Fishing his keys from his pocket, he climbed the stairs and unlocked his apartment. The lights were already on, causing him to hesitate.
Had he left them that way?
For a fleeting instant, the same unease stirred somewhere beneath his ribs. The bulbs buzzed softly overhead, their light wavering with an uneven pulse. He made a passing mental note to replace them one of these days, before closing the door behind him.
Only then did he notice the air. Humid—not with rot or smoke, but with the crisp metallic stillness that gathers before a heavy storm, impossibly out of place within the narrow hallway of a crumbling apartment that had known nothing but dust and neglect for years. The floorboards creaked softly beneath his feet as he shut the door.
Then, a crash.
It came somewhere above him, violent enough to rattle the ceiling.
Caelum stopped.
Silence returned only for a heartbeat before another sound followed: something heavy scraping slowly across the rooftop, wood groaning beneath its weight. It ended with a dull, sickening thud somewhere below, followed by the unmistakable clatter of disturbance down the laundry room.
In the corner of the room, the television crackled to life, static filling the apartment.
At first, it was only white noise. Soon, voices began to gather beneath it, distant and overlapping. They rose and fell until they became impossible to distinguish. One voice slowly emerged from the chorus, fractured by bursts of interference.
“This is… what… remains—”
Another wash of static came.
“—of you… sh—should you… keep him.”
The signal faltered, fizzling before returning to nothingness once more. Caelum simply stood there, unmoving. He could not have explained why his chest suddenly ached, nor why the voice on the television seemed to awaken a sorrow he did not remember earning. He merely listened, held in place by something he could neither name nor remember, as though the voice belonged to a life that had already slipped through his fingers.
Somewhere, just outside the veil of time, Veuliah had fallen again.