Still Falling STILL FALLING P3
Daniel's hands found his back when Val was still a Messenger.
Feathers and bone ripped free in a silent scream he could not voice. Blood ran down his spine. Lateresa stood at the memory's edge—witness, frozen, not moving. School faces piled over the pain—playground warmth, screen going quiet, hands linked at lunch—all of it cutting at once.
The pain outgrew thought. Darkness took him.
He woke in the void still falling.
The purple had spread. What had been half his body now crawled past his ribs, hunting the angel half because the wing hollows were open and nothing sealed them anymore. Void-cold bled from the stripped places on his back where Daniel's hands had been. Warm memory could not anchor him here. The stain pulsed—it wanted the rest.
Fear spiked. Then the fall pulled him under again.
Bonds bit skin. He strained against them and his muscles answered with nothing—held against his will, unable to break free. For a heartbeat he was falling and bound at once; then the heat surfaced from his wing roots before he saw her at all, climbing his back like it had always lived there waiting.
The smell of feather and char. Pain he could not finish screaming. Mercy after—flesh knitting while nerves still burned, worse than the fire because it meant he would survive the next round.
When awareness returned he was here again. Heat. Bonds. The same helpless pull against rope that did not give. Laughter somewhere distant—approved, muffled, not close enough to be help.
His vision dimmed.
Impact exploded through his gut—Selaphiel's fist driving the breath out of him, forcing his eyes open.
"Don't you dare pass out."
He choked on air that tasted like ash. The wings burned again before the last cycle had finished leaving his nerves.
Time lost its edges after that—fire, knitting flesh, falling, bound, fire—until he could not mark where one agony ended and the next began. The void bled through sometimes: was he dropping through nothing or tied in a room? Then heat snapped him back.
Herald promotion restored his wings—a small mercy after years wingless. Then the climb accelerated again: Guardian, then ArchAngel, centuries compressed into sensation without numbers. He reached rare height and still received no Division command, still stood outside gatherings that mattered.
ArchAngel tier should have been victory. It was a ledge instead. One month plateaued into dread. Daniel's smile returned in the memory's rearview—the same hunter's delight Val would learn to dread.
Daniel tore all four wings this time—left and right, delighted and careful, as if tearing were an art he enjoyed practicing again. In the corner of his eye he saw Lateresa. He was not sure whether she was crying anymore. The memory blurred under the pain of it and under the void, until even his scream had no sound.
Blackout swallowed him whole.
Falling.
Purple filled his throat. Heat sat under his breastbone where angel had lived, and nothing was left to hold it back—no wings, no mask, no face solid enough to trust. The stain owned almost all of him. The void had no floor.
Then consciousness slammed back—
Daniel stabbed his chest. Devil fire punched into his ribs where angel had lived. A Gate mouth opened in a flash of Mortal Realm sky and swallowed him. The toss was not another dream. This fall was real: two pairs of wings locked on his back and still useless, trapped inside a Void gate whose rules would not bend no matter how strong he became later.
The eternal fall was the frame now—the real one, not memory. Time dissolved. Subjective years piled up until they felt like five thousand and still had no floor.
Inside his ribs angelic light warred with devil energy without rest. The battle did not kill him. At some point he was not even sure anymore—when the war had been in him, when the void had taken over, whether he was still fighting at all. He let go completely. The two fires settled into one thing as if they had always been torn in half, with no explanation to accompany it.
Power climbed inside the cage anyway, wave after wave, until something rebuilt on his back—three pairs of wings unfurling where Daniel had left ruin — all white, threaded with light-purple hues along the vanes. A full halo bloomed behind his head—light-purple, larger than his skull, burning steady in the fall. His pupils went blood-red; the whites of his eyes turned black, devil and angel wearing the same face. Strength stacked high enough that the void itself should have cracked—and still did not. He had reached the peak in feeling and remained trapped. Strength was not exit. Only something else was, and he did not know its name.
Faces flashed when the blur thinned—Ashley, Alex, Liz—and the question of why they had gone quiet, why he had walked away. Lateresa after them. He could not tell anymore if he had ever really wanted her, or only clung to her face so something in the fall would stay solid. He had never said so either way. Memory and longing twisted together until he almost let go.
Nothing held together anymore. The void had no floor. His mind frayed—and somewhere in the fray, the male voice from the very start of the fall echoed back. Not words. Just the sound. He did not know who had spoken. It felt familiar anyway, from farther away than memory could reach.
He was one breath from breaking completely—and then he passed out instead. Darkness took him a heartbeat before the last thread could go.
Somewhere in the dark, sound bloomed without source—clean and impossible, rolling through the void:
"Success."
"One hundred thousand years."
"Cleared."
"Reward implementing."
"Rewind."
The void carried the words. He did not.
His body hung limp in the drop—no scream, no orientation, no last thought.
Black.