And Heaven spit it out.

  There wasn't thunder. No lightning. No wind, no heavenly cry. Just a groan—low, tired, and ancient, like a cathedral door that had seen too much, and opened one last time against its better judgment.

  The sky tore open like skin stretched too thin. Crimson, bruised violet, split with a light that didn't glow—it burned. A jagged wound across the clouds, silent and furious.

  And then it fell.

  Not graceful. Not tragic. There was no haloed mourning, no slow-motion poetry. It dropped—raw, wrong, and reluctant, like gravity couldn't decide whether to keep it or cast it off. It came down screaming in silence, all wing and weight and something rotten, like a prayer that had been spoken too late.

  Its wings—if that word still fit—were no more than shredded parchment. Molted shadow and bone. Every beat of them sent the air screeching like the world itself didn't want to hold it.

  And when it hit the earth, it didn't land.

  It collided.

  Hard.

  The ground groaned. Dust flew. Trees nearby shivered, like they remembered things they were supposed to forget. No crater, just broken dirt and cracked roots and a silence too sharp to breathe in.

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  For a moment, it didn't move.

  Then, slowly, with a kind of broken laugh caught between a cough and a curse, it rolled onto its back. The wings beneath it crunched. Something snapped. Feathers or bones—what did it matter now?

  Its eyes—dim, sharp, haunted—tilted upward.

  The sky had already sealed itself. No trace of the tear. No farewell. No final light. Just heavy cloud and that still, dead calm that always comes after a betrayal.

  "Could've at least left a damn note," it muttered, voice like old honey smoked in a dying fire.

  One hand touched its chest. No wound. No blood. Just that deep, pulsing ache that sits where faith used to live. And the hunger. Not for food. But for quiet. A silence in the mind that had long since been evicted by voices that refused to die.

  It sat up, slow and crackling like old stone shifting. The wings dragged behind it like a burden that should've been buried centuries ago.

  It didn't look divine. It looked like regretful walking.

  From somewhere just past the tree line came a voice. Human. Curious.

  "An angel?"

  It didn't flinch. "Not anymore."

  The voice came closer—boots in leaves, rifle over shoulder, trucker cap, crow's feet around narrow eyes. A man used to strange things, but not this.

  "Never seen one fall before," the man said, scratching his beard.

  "Then count yourself lucky."

  The thing that had fallen stood, towering but tired, like a cathedral built from grief. The man stepped back. Something about it wasn't right. Not evil. Just... uninvited by the laws of the living.

  "Why you?" the man asked.

  It looked at him for a long moment, then smiled—crooked and knowing.

  "Maybe I was the only one dumb enough to jump."

  And then it walked. Barefoot, bleeding, with eyes like dying stars and a heart full of smoke. No fear. Just motion. Like it already knew how this world would greet it—the same way Heaven had:

  With the door slammed shut.

  Somewhere behind, the wind picked up, whispering through ash and pine, and far above, as if carried from a cathedral long gone to rot, came a ghost of a hymn:

  Dies irae, dies illa,

  Solvet saeclum in favilla...

  That day of wrath, that day shall dissolve the world in ashes...