The gates opened, and the dead rose. They rushed past the veil into the land of the living, and of course he is not among them.
She watches them all with an ache in her throat but a hardness in her eyes, because she is a fool for ever even hoping, and she knows it. She is disgusted with the way her own heart had dared to quicken, how she had half expected him to eventually appear, even though she knows that he never will.
She stands on the desolate shores of the beach, unblinking and statuesque as she stares out to where the waves break and roll against the darkened sands. She thinks, for a moment, how easy it would be to just walk into the sea again. She has drowned twice before, and once by choice. She knows it will hurt. She knows it will only take a matter of minutes but that it will feel like hours, and she knows that unlike last time there won’t be the slightest hope that someone will bring her back. She will rot at the bottom of the sea like the first time, until the magic of Beqanna decides to spit her back out, if it ever does.
And maybe if wings hadn’t erupted from her shoulders she would have.
Maybe if the pain of bones forming and breeching through her skin hadn’t been so blinding, so excruciating that her mind went black that she forgot about her emotional turmoil, she would have succumbed to the sea.
Instead she is broken, again, and remade again. The blood is bright against her porcelain white skin where it drips from where the wings – angelic, pale, and trimmed in gold – had emerged, staining the sand, and the macabre of the blood clashes against the ethereal glow that surrounds her. She is left gasping and confused, trembling with adrenaline and the electrifying pulse of her veins.
She forgets Dhumin, for now, and she leaves the beach behind her and a dual trail of blood in her wake.
She finds herself instead in the meadow, standing at the edge of a small lake. The night is quiet and cold, and the snow that blankets the ground silences nearly all the sounds. The blood has dried, but her sides still ache with the freshness of the wounds and heaviness of wings she wasn’t used to holding. Tentatively, she steps closer to the still water, until her reflection is peering back at her. Except it is not her that she sees. She sees her face, and her eyes, but the halo of light above her head and the angel wings at her sides, they are not hers. They can’t be. “I’m not an angel,” she whispers to herself, confusion glittering in her sable eyes. She can feel her fragmented heart stumble in her chest, when she thinks of all the ways she has sinned.
If she is an angel, she thinks she might be the most broken one the world has ever seen save for the devil himself.
