Still Falling STILL FALLING P2
Val woke in the void again.
Primary-school faces smeared at the edges of his vision like wet paint. He was still falling. His teeth clenched until his jaw ached. Something tasted rotten under his tongue, and his mouth was empty. The light in his ribs flickered once and would not steady. Nothing he remembered held it back while he hung here. He was one breath from breaking and there was nowhere to put the break.
The void pulled him down again—fear spiking, then release into the next layer.
The office was fluorescent and ordinary.
Cubicle walls. Keyboard clatter. Microwave dinners eaten over the same cheap table every night. No adventure, no drama—just the grind of a working-class life that asked nothing of him except to keep showing up.
Years compressed into the same desk and the same commute. Birthdays came and went without cake. Promotions happened on paper and did not feel like victory. There was no girlfriend, no family in the room, no calls that mattered—only Chris's occasional empty ping that never turned into a visit.
At sixty-one the ceiling was hospital white. No visitors sat in the chairs. Val listened to machines breathe for him and understood, quietly, that he would die alone if nothing changed.
Light entered the dim room wrong—not bulb light, something cleaner and older. Jacob appeared at the bedside: a tall presence that did not belong to any hospital Val knew, patient in a way that felt too calm for a dying man's room.
"Do you regret your life?"
Val could not answer at first. Jacob warned that death would hurt more unless he chose another path.
"There may be something better."
Jacob said a Human Angel would be looked down on—that standing might matter someday, that rising high enough could change his lot. The warnings read like a country Val had never visited. He did not understand how bad it could get. He only understood the empty chairs and the white ceiling, and that this stranger was offering a door.
The catch came last: take the path and he might never return to the Mortal Realm. Val did not fully grasp what he was giving up. He grasped that staying meant dying alone.
Val hesitated, then whispered, "…Yes."
Promotion snapped through him like being pulled by a hook he could not see. Heaven opened toward City 5. His body lightened the wrong way. He had no words yet for level or gate or rank—only the terror that even a second life might discard him the same way the first had.
On the threshold he still felt replaceable. Fear did not vanish because Jacob had offered a way out. It packed itself into his ribs and followed him into the next memory.
The void woke him again.
Chaotic purple crawled across half his body, alive in a way skin should never be, eating into flesh that had once carried light. Nothing held it back—no wings, no story solid enough to trust. The other half still remembered angel, but phantom wings burned on his back before he had ever grown them, and the stripped places where they would be torn free already ached hollow, blood dried in channels down his spine in a memory that had not happened yet. Val could not tell whether the pain came before the stain or the stain had come first. Time in the fall did not keep order.
The purple pulsed. It wanted the rest of him.
Clean and foul surged at once—light and rot warring over flesh that was already ruined. Ribs, spine, the empty wounds on his back: they fought like the body was a battlefield and he was only the ground it broke on.
The pain outgrew thought. Val passed out again.
City 5 school began with slurs and fists.
Filthy hybrid. Human Angel meant cast out of gatherings and beaten in corridors where teachers looked away. Val learned quickly that promotion had not rescued him from being seen as less.
Jacob arranged housing in the common angel ring and enrolled him in school anyway. Three months in, Val begged him to stay away.
"Please. Stay away."
Jacob respected it, though sneers had already landed on him for helping once. Val told himself he was protecting Jacob. The isolation was still his choice.
At an inter-school competition he saw Lateresa for the first time. White hair, fair skin, symmetry so precise it felt designed rather than born. Courage rose in his throat and died there. He did not ask her out. The regret planted itself where courage should have been.
Her offer moved him to City 2—exclusion instead of violence, discrimination without fists in class. Decades blurred into gate grind and rank climb. He rose through years that wore him down layer by layer, outcast at every tier, never invited into command.