The Fall

[Yihfilia]

37th of Summer, 427AV

An extreme brightness was cast onto the angel’s eyes. Too bright for even her divine sight to handle. She felt as the light – as if Syna had come to claim her – engulf her and she slipped through its haze. She could feel herself falling. She reached out and tried to grab anything near her, but all she found was the light, ever present and overburdening. She felt as the silk-like cloth that she had suddenly forgotten the name of was ripped from her smooth body. She became bare, but also confused as her fall continued as if for a millennia. The angel still flailed for something to save her, for her God to reach out from his heavenly abode and catch his divine servant. But no help came and she continued to fall. But soon the light began to dim and she started to feel something wizz past her. It was cool and seemed to wrap around her, it lifted her perfect hair above her and cut into her perfect skin. She opened her mouth to scream, and instinct from long ago coming back, only to rather breathe in instead, a kind of air she had not beheld in an eternity. But this air that sliced her skin soon vanished as her now mortal body fell into a substance even colder and this time the woman did scream. Out of her lungs came the air she just took in, they formed bubbles and rapidly rose above her descending head. She tried to breathe again, another instinct that seemed to return to her, but she breathed in liquid instead of gas and choked on the cold, salty thing. Suddenly she felt as if she was dying. It seemed a familiar thing as she had done it many times before. But she was an angel, she could not die. She then realized that she may have returned to mortal form, that her dear Leth had cast her out of his realm for some unknown reason. This thought lingered in the back of her head as her now mortal instincts rose above all else. They guided her limbs to propel to the surface where her head broke the waves and she gasped and choked on air.

She sat there for a moment. Her legs kicked and her body moving with the gentle incoming waves. She didn’t think about much, rather about this breathing she hadn’t done in a forever, or this swimming that she can’t even remember if she ever knew. She thought about the crack in Leth’s realm that she was just sucked through, and what his purpose for his banishment was. But her thinking was interrupted by her foot, down below her, hitting something coarse. It rather felt like millions of tiny things, tiny rough little things. As she was contemplating the evil creature that had just touched her foot and was about to engulf her whole, the waves propelled her up and onto the shore of the beach. There she lay on the sand, for which she now recognized it was, as the small waves poured water on her body. She held her breath as they rolled over her. She was so confused, why had her God betrayed her? She tried to think o what she had done, but found she could not remember. She could not remember what she had done, where she had been. She could not remember what her home looked like. What the other angels looked like, what it was like to even be an angel. She racked her mind for anything, but all she found was what she had just experienced, the fact that she was a servant of the God of the Moon, Leth and her divine name. She whispered the last one into to air. Using her voice for the first time in a century or so. But her name didn’t come out right. At first she figured it was because of the sea water she had just inhaled. She tried again. But it still wasn’t right. Her mortal lips could nor form the sounds.

Desperate, she sat up on the wet sand to concentrate. “Yihfilia”she whispered. That was not right. “Yih-fil-i-a.”That was not correct. The girl began to panic. She could not remember he r life with Leth. She could only remember her name that he bestowed upon her, yet now her mortal lips could not pronounce it. What kind of curse was this? What kind of banishment was this if she could not even try to remember what she did, try to rectify it? How was she supposed to prove herself? How was she supposed to gain entrance back into his realm? “Yihfilia!”She tried, louder. “Yihfilia!”She yelled, panicked. She looked up into the night sky. There she saw her God, round, bright, in power in the middle of the sky. She screamed out her now mortal name to him, hoping her could hear her pain. “Yihfilia!”

And there she collapsed. Back onto the wet sand, as the waves rolled on her naked legs. Somehow the cold water felt warm to her desolate, depressed body. She cried, a new thing once again. Water came from her eyes, rolled down her skin, to her lips where they tasted just like the sea she was just in. Then she thought, what if she had changed Gods? What if Leth traded her to the God of the Ocean? And she had become a part of it? But of course that was silly, and she soon realized it was just her panicked thoughts leading her way. She could recall a distant memory of a human woman, crying. She could not remember why the woman was crying, but she remembered feeling the very same tears roll down the face and into the woman’s mouth, where they tasted like the sea. She was not a servant of the sea, no, she was just plainly mortal. And that killed her even more.

Word Count: 993

[Yihfilia]

As she sat on the beach for what felt like forever, she watched at Leth danced across the sky, getting nearer and nearer to the horizon. She used this time to curl up into a ball, hugging her knees to her bare chest and thought. She soon gave up on trying to remember what it was like in Leth’s realm. Her mortal mind could not comprehend the very few images that she had contained. She knew for sure that they would not leave her; she would remember them but now was not the time. Instead she thought on about what she knew of the mortal world. There were few images from a past life that helped her recognize things for what they were. Like the sand and the ocean, how to swim and why she needed to breathe. Why she felt naked and why that was a bad thing. But where was she to get clothing? She was too afraid to leave the beach. She didn’t know what was out there. She didn’t know how far a settlement might be. She didn’t know what would happen to her. She knew nothing of this place and whether or not she could live. She didn’t know what would happened when her God disappeared beneath the horizon. Would the world go black and lifeless? But no, no, the angel could remember that Leth had a lover. The name of said lover escaped her as of yet, but she knew that she dwelled after Leth. But she couldn’t remember what she did. The world could still go black and lifeless for all she knew.

She tried not to cry, tried to be strong, like the angel she was. She had gone through many lifetimes, that she knew even if she could not remember them, she had faced these kinds of hardships and have lived through them. She had earned her right to serve Leth. Even if her master had taken it away. But now, with no memory of any of her lifetimes, including her divine one, she had no choice but so cry. And she hated it. She hated feeling weak and she didn’t know why. What was she to do anyway, besides be weak? She didn’t know what to do. So she sat, curled up on the sand as the water slowly receded away from her. And all she thought about, all she tried to think about was, what did she do to deserve this? What did she do to deserve to become mortal again? But no matter how hard she thought, nothing would come back to her.

Just as Leth moved above the horizon, and one who could read the moon and tell its time would say that only a bell and a half remained of Leth’s rein until dawn broke, the fallen angel heard a sound. It was a gurgled kind of sound, almost like someone drowning, but it was accompanied with the sound of sand moving. The sand moved in slow, dragged steps and the woman whipped her head towards it. What she saw frightened her, it was a man. This man was dressed in silks and fine wools, many jangling chains and loops hung from his body. A normal being would know that this man looked rich, but the woman only recognized him as a man, a mortal heading straight for her. He had disheveled black hair and stubble along his jaw. He was mumbling to himself, too low for her to hear, and she didn’t suspect she knew his language anyway, being an angel with their divine language that she couldn’t even pronounce anymore. His ragged steps and the swaying of his body as he walked hinted that he was intoxicated, but the woman had yet to understand what that meant, let alone looked like. She stared silently at the man, hoping he would pass her by, unseeing. In a fleeting kind of hope she wondered if maybe she was invisible to the man. She knew the Gods chose when the mortals saw them, maybe as she was an angel, fallen or not, she could do that too. So she prayed desperately and silently to her God, ‘make me unseen, make the mortals eyes unable to be cast upon me.’ But whether or not her prayer was not heard or ignored, the man stopped and turned his swaying head to look directly at the naked woman curled upon the beach.

The drunken man smiled a yellow toothed smile that only caused the woman to whimper and dig herself deeper into the sand. It was a creepy smile, not one of friendliness; even she could see that it did not hide good intentions. But she was frozen, even though any normal being could know that even the fattest of men could outrun this drunken one, she did not know this. She did not yet even know how to stand; she had only swum, sat and lay. She sat and watched, cowering as the man chuckled at her and continued his walk along the sand. Although this time he had changed the direction his feet took him and now they were pointing towards her. As he came stumbling towards her he spoke, “Now what do we have here, a pretty little thing!” The drunkard would say in Common. Shocked, the woman on the sand would only whimper in response. She was both frightened, as his voice was not nice, but predatory, and shocked at the fact she could tell what he was saying, she could understand it. At first what went through her mind was that the man was speaking the divine tongue of the Gods, but she knew that no man like this would ever be favored by any God or Goddess. That is when she came to realize that her divine language she once knew had been changed into that of the humans, of that of the mortals. She could no longer speak the divine language as she had tried before, because she no longer knew it. She was truly and utterly mortal.

Word Count: 1,015

[Yihfilia]

She needed more time to process being mortal. But she didn’t, this man, this monster, was coming towards her and all she could do was stare. That is until more mortal instincts kick in. They told her to escape, in any way she knew how. And the only way she knew how was back the way she came. Using the palms of her hands and heels of her feet she pushed against the moving the sand back towards the salty water, back towards her almost grave. But the woman was not standing nor did she know how, she could not run or even walk away from the stumbling, drunken man. She herself was stumbling against the wet and dry sand that surrounded her, and even a rich, drunk man was faster than her. He soon caught up to her, smiling his yellow smile, chuckling, burping and all she could do was whimper. “It looks like you’ve been waiting for me haven’t you, sweetling?” He said to her, examining her naked body. He laughed, a throaty, gurgled laugh as he leaned down and caught her by the arm. The girl cried out and he pushed her down and he kneed down on the wet sand, not seeming to care about the bit of water of his expensive looking knickers. The woman thrashed against his grip but all he did was put one knee on her inner thigh to restrain her moving. He used his free hand to unbuckle his golden belt and then unbutton his silky slacks. The angel did not know what was going to happen. She could not recall what this meant. All she knew was what her instincts told her, and that this was bad, that this was dangerous. So all she could do was fight. But the big man overpowered her, he made her weak and she closed her eyes, she had given up and that’s when he took her. She tried to imagine that maybe this was all a dream, that maybe it was some sort of trick, a sick one, but a trick that Leth was playing. Or maybe that this was all a dream and she was still the human Anne.

Suddenly she saw a flash of light behind her closed eyes. It was some sort of memory. She saw a man, she recognized him but she couldn’t place him. Then she saw Anne, and the two of them were doing this thing that this man was doing to her. But she felt an emotion, she felt the love Anne felt for this man, something she did not feel for the man on her right now, nor did she suspect the man felt like this about her, seeing as they did not know each other. But as she thought this, as she tried so hard to ignore the grunting and chuckling and mumbling of the stranger on top of her the man suddenly grunted and got off. The slowly opened her eyes to a slight nasally snore beside her. As she looked to her side she saw her assailant, on the sand, snoring. He had gone to sleep. He had passed out from his intoxication. That was when the fallen angel realized that the man had been drunk. She connected the pieces, from his stumbling and his burping and the smell on his breath, to his sudden passing out in the middle of his…. business. Her hidden memories of her past life gave her this knowledge and she understood. Although she still did not know why the man did this to her, what his incentive was or anything. She just looked at him, trying to make sense of this world, of herself. But she knew that would not happen anytime soon. So instead she watched him as his chest rose and fell.

After a while she thought more on herself, she examined her body, felt the horns on her head and her hair that when down to her breasts. She felt the size of said breasts and the rest of her body. She realized that after the encounter with the man she felt dirty, as if she needed to bathe to she crawled to the ocean and did just that. She had to figure it out, but bathing was rather simple. Although it hurt, the salt water in her wounds from the scratches from the sand and from the rest of her body where the man had violated her. She bore through it though, and when she was finished she felt more confident. She realized she had been through her first battle on this new mortal world and she was ready to go find out how she needed to live. So she went back to the sleeping man on the beach, thinking that studying him may give her some clue on where and how to start.

Word Count: 812