FFM23: Small Changes
Hope’s Rebellion was over two thousand years ago, by the Third Heaven’s watch. Many of our kind were killed, in battle after battle. Battle fields were constructed from sacred places of all beings, forged in blood and splintered bone. In the end, it is told that they were so filled with the fallen, that the heavens could no longer bear the weight, and many of my kin fell to the earth below, before the final casting.
I wonder if perhaps, they looked like shooting stars, to anyone facing the cosmos. Maybe the early mud-men father was so attached to thought that were were asteroids, heated rocks made to crush holes into their tiny little lives. I wonder if the mudmen thought our fathers’ anger was all he could display.
I wonder if they ever got a proper burial.
I can not but wonder, it was before my time- or that of many angels. Only Joshua speaks of it now, quiet whispers to fledgling angels as final rounds are completed and the watch changes shifts.
Sometimes, I listen. It is against our way to eavesdrop, to speak of things without a high degree of accuracy. We are a race who asks questions, confirms, triple checks and then checks again. I dare not ask such questions...
Gabriel was there, Michael tells me. He talks a lot. Gabriel was there and he was a key component to crushing the rebellion, and silencing those who stood in the way. He says it with a far away look, and I try to forget.
Uriel says that Gabriel always clung to Michael and Lucifer’s coattails, he could never stand to be away. He says it in the way one would say an octopus is only looking for a hug, curling prey up and underneath itself, and then he goes back to sorting paperwork for the academy with a sigh.
My duties require that I shadow Michael during his time in the Heavens, and it’s hard to miss the way he looks. It’s the way a human would express emotion, Hope II says. She is always reading things about them, and I take her word for it. There’s not much else she can offer.
Lucifer was kind, he says. He followed each and every rule like it was the only way to do anything. He did not falter- until the Rebellion. Michael looks sad, almost in a way that stings with regret. He continues anyway.
Hope was a tiny girl, a graduate with St. Faith, and St. Charity. Her skin was like Charity’s, peppered with scorch marks, from their times as a human. Charity had been taken in by Raphael, and together they healed. Hope was not so lucky.
She pursued knowledge, following in Harahel’s footsteps. Michael would shake his head and say he didn’t know what went wrong, only that the next time he would hear of her, it would be among the injured on the battlefield.
He would hear of how she had stumbled upon something too great for any being. How she had taken it, with clear intentions to help everyone who was suffering. Michael would tell him that angels aren’t meant to know such power, that it weakens our bodies and corrupts our emotions.
Michael would stop there, and pluck stray feathers from the greying scar in his wing. He would say that corrupted emotions lead to the fall of an angel. It lead to the fall of someone he really cared about, he would say without really saying anything.
I leave him alone, and stay away, towards a pillar. It gives me time to put the details together.
Hope was never unwound. Her soul returned to the reincarnation stream before anyone could stop it, and it’s said not even a god could change someone’s fate then- except Fate himself. It was a tiny secret, no one was supposed to know. His god had confirmed- Hope was dead, and would not return.
I trust my god. With every fiber of my being, I have known nothing different. I push down the dread rising to my throat when Hope II passes. She is my sister, one of knowledge, with a sickly condition that allows her little in the way of change.
She knows a lot about everything, and Gabriel dots on her like no other. We are close, as many siblings are. We are alike, having known only this world and rumors of other, far away lands. No one speaks of the deformed wings brushing at her shoulders.
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