Nicomedia, 310AD
Twenty-seven centuries passed since the floodwaters receded, and Anani had walked through them all, a shadow trailing the early church, bearing witness as Rome’s fury turned against those who bore the name of Christ. She had seen too many believers dragged to their deaths, and each one pulled her deeper into their suffering, binding her exile to their persecution in ways she unexpected.
Water trickled down the cistern’s ancient stones like silent tears, each droplet surrendering to the obsidian pool below with a hollow plunk that echoed through the chamber. A single oil lamp struggled against the darkness. Its flame danced, painting trembling shadows across gaunt faces.
The huddled mass of humanity, weathered men, hollow-eyed women, wide-eyed children, pressed together in suffocating proximity, each breath shallow, each heartbeat a countdown to discovery.
Anani’s shoulder blades burned against the rough stone wall, phantom pain where wings once unfurled. Her hood shrouded her face in shadow as a gray-haired woman’s cracked lips formed words that sliced through Anani like a blade: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
The whispered verse rippled through the crowd, a current of desperate hope. Anani’s throat constricted. These words, once a triumphant chorus sung in perfect harmony around the blinding glory of the Throne, now reduced to fearful murmurs in a dank hole. Her fingers wandered across the scars on her back, mapping the absence where divine light had once poured from her form. The verse that had once been her battle cry now twisted in her chest, a reminder of everything she had lost, everything she could never reclaim.
Yet here in this darkness, she sensed a gentle stirring of grace, like embers beneath ash, a warmth she had thought extinguished since her wings were torn away.
The sound erupted from above. Leather soles grinding against stone, metal scraping against metal, voices barking commands that echoed down the damp walls. The Christians froze like prey scenting predators. A mother pressed her child’s face into her bosom, muffling his whimper with her threadbare shawl. Anani’s lungs constricted as the air thickened with a familiar smell, sulfurous and cold, like a breath from an open grave. Her scarred back burned with memory. Part of her wanted to flee, to preserve what little divinity remained in her mortal shell. Yet she couldn’t abandon these souls.
The archway exploded with torchlight as six soldiers burst through, but their movements betrayed them, limbs twitching at impossible angles, necks craned too far, fingers splayed like claws. Behind their bloodshot eyes, something ancient and hateful peered out. Black veins pulsed beneath their skin as their jaws churned.
“Here they are,” one rasped, his voice layered with a second, deeper tone that made the lamp flames shudder. “Those who betrayed Rome.”
The possessed men lunged forward, weapons raised. The Christians huddled tighter, their nervous hymns rising in desperate counterpoint to the approaching horror.
Anani’s heart hammered against her ribs, remembering the hosts that had once outnumbered her, weakened her, cast her out. Yet she stepped out of the shadows anyway, her voice steadier than her resolve. “You are not the masters of these lives.”
A soldier broke rank, lunging toward her with his sword raised. The blade caught torchlight as it arced downward. Anani’s hand shot up, fingers clamping around his wrist with inhuman strength. The steel trembled inches from her face, close enough that she could see her own reflection distorted in the metal. The soldier’s eyes weren’t just red; they were molten, like coals burning through from some infernal furnace beneath his skin. Black veins pulsed at his temples.
“Cast-down thing,” the demon spat through the soldier’s lips, voice layered with harmonics that made her teeth ache. “You don’t belong here. You have fallen just like us.” His breath smelled of sulfur and rotting meat.
Something twisted in Anani’s chest; a splinter of doubt. Was she so different? Her grip tightened until the bones in his wrist ground together. The phantom pain between her shoulder blades flared, a reminder of glory torn away.
“Then leave what is not yours,” she commanded, her voice dropping to a frequency that made the water ripple in the cistern. The words tasted ancient on her tongue, like copper and starlight.
The soldier’s spine arched backward at an impossible angle. His mouth stretched wide, wider than human jaws should allow, as something dark and writhing tore free from his throat. It shrieked with a sound like metal scraping stone before dissolving into oily smoke that the shadows eagerly devoured.
Another soldier charged, eyes blazing. Anani pivoted, sweeping his legs with a movement too fluid for mortal limbs. As he crashed down, she pressed her palm against his breastplate.
She whispered words that no one had spoken since before Rome, and the metal grew hot as she touched it. The soldier convulsed once, twice, then went still, his face peaceful for the first time in what might have been years.
Hesitation rippled through the remaining soldiers. Their eyes flickered between red and human brown, like lamps guttering in a draft. The demons within them recognized something in Anani that humans could not see, a memory of light that even exile couldn’t extinguish. They retreated, backing into the tunnels with inhuman, crab-like movements.
In the silence that followed, the Christians’ weeping seemed to echo from the walls themselves. A boy, no older than ten, crept forward on scraped knees, his small fingers gripping Anani’s cloak as if it were a holy relic.
“Who are you?” he whispered, eyes wide with both fear and wonder.
Anani looked down at him. The answer that rose to her lips, Principality, Guardian, Singer of the Seventh Chorus, died there. What was she now? Neither angel nor human, belonging nowhere.
“No one,” she whispered instead, forcing a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Just another wanderer.”
But deep in the hollow where her grace once blazed, something kindled, a spark too stubborn to die, a resolve shaped not by heaven’s welcome but by the cries she refused to ignore, a purpose that even heaven’s rejection couldn’t erase.
The next day…The Market of Idols
Marble columns caught fire in the dawn light, their polished surfaces reflecting blood-orange onto the faces of bronze emperors watching from their plinths with empty eyes. Anani’s stomach knotted as she passed another imperial notice nailed to a doorframe. The parchment hung damp with the morning dew. “SACRIFICE OR DIE.” Her fingers brushed the phantom space between her shoulder blades, the scars burning beneath her cloak. The decree felt less like ink on parchment and more like a brand pressed between her bones.
The market press of bodies closed around her, sweat-soaked tunics, the sour breath of hungry children, merchants with calculating eyes. “Fresh bread!” the baker called, his voice echoing through the quiet street. A woman’s voice cracked with desperation as she called out, “From Crete, the finest olives!” Another voice cut through the air, the shout competing with the scrape of sandals and the metallic jingle of marching soldiers. Anani, head bowed under her hood, struggled to spread the wings that were no longer there. Each shouted price and clatter of coin only underscored how cheaply Rome valued a soul.
A scream cut through the market’s din. At Jupiter’s temple, three soldiers dragged a man up the marble steps, his heels leaving crimson streaks. His right eye had swollen shut, crusted with blood that matched the splatter across his torn tunic. They threw him down before the altar, his knees cracking against stone.
“Sacrifice,” growled a soldier, pressing a blade between the man’s shoulders. “Show Rome your loyalty.”
The man raised his face to the sky, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks. “I cannot,” he whispered, then louder: “Christ alone is Lord.”
Silence fell like a blade. A woman clutched her child closer; an old man made the sign of the cross behind his market basket. Others turned away, as if witnessing would make them complicit. But Anani couldn’t look away, not when the soldier’s neck twisted too far as he turned, not when his fingers bent backward to grip his sword, not when his eyes flickered with a crimson glow that had nothing to do with the sunrise. The demon inside him was showing through the cracks. Rome thought it ruled these streets; she knew better. Something older stalked its temples.
One soldier raised his sword, sunlight catching the edge like divine fire. “Then you die.”
Before the blade could fall, Anani lunged forward. Her cloak billowed behind her like phantom wings. Her palm met the descending steel with a sound like a temple bell struck in rage. Blue-white sparks cascaded over her fingers, sizzling against skin that should have split but didn’t bleed.
The soldier snarled, his voice layering into two distinct tones, one human, one ancient and hollow, as if echoing from the bottom of a well filled with bones. “You again? The banished one.”
Gasps rippled through the crowd. The taste of their fear filled Anani’s mouth like copper coins. Her voice emerged steady, though something inside her chest fluttered like a trapped bird against the cage of her ribs. “This man is not yours to claim.”
The soldier’s eyes blazed brighter, not just red now, but incandescent, like coals pulled fresh from a forge. His neck twisted at an impossible angle, tendons standing out like cords as the demon within fought for dominance. “You have no throne. No wings. You walk in exile.” His lips peeled back from yellowed teeth. “Why resist us? You are closer to us than to Him.”
The accusation sliced through her defenses, finding the hollow space between her shoulder blades where glory had once anchored her to heaven. For a heartbeat, she felt the vertigo of her fall again, the endless plummet, the silence from above more devastating than any impact. A treacherous thought brushed the edge of her mind. “Perhaps he is right.” She crushed it before it could root.
Anani’s fingers tightened around the sword until the metal groaned. Blood flowed between her knuckles, its source unclear, mortal skin or something older, remembering war. “Even in exile,” she whispered, then louder, each word a battle standard raised, “I belong to God.”
With a savage twist, she wrenched the blade free and brought it down upon the temple steps. The impact shattered something in her wrist, a momentary, mortal pain, as divine light exploded from the point of contact. Blue-white fissures spider-webbed through ancient stone, illuminating the carvings of false gods from within. The soldier’s scream became inhuman, his spine arching backward until vertebrae cracked. Black smoke erupted from his mouth, nostrils, and even the corners of his eyes, carrying with it the stench of sulfur and rotting graves. The abandoned body crumpled, chest still rising with shallow breaths.
The remaining soldiers recoiled, their armor clattering as they stumbled over each other. One clutched his throat as if strangled, eyes bulging crimson. “She speaks the Forbidden Name,” he rasped, voice layered with something ancient and terrified. “We cannot!” The others dragged him backward, boots scraping stone as they retreated into shadow, leaving dark smears like oil behind them. For all their brutality, even the demons remembered where true authority lay.
Silence descended like a physical weight. The crowd stood frozen, mothers clutching children to their breasts, merchants gripping market wares as if they might shield them. The rescued prisoner shook, blood from his wounds mingling with the dust as he struggled to his knees. His gaze found hers, reverent and afraid.
“Why?” he whispered, voice breaking. “I am nothing. Why would you?”
Something twisted in Anani’s chest, a knot of pride, defiance, and the faint ember of vocation she thought long dead. Her fingers found the edge of her hood, hesitated, then pulled it back. The light in her eyes flickered, not with the full radiance of her former glory, but enough that those nearest gasped and stepped away. She felt exposed, raw, caught between worlds, neither angel nor human, yet somehow both.
“Because your prayers,” she said softly, each word burning her throat like the memory of singing among stars, “echo in places you cannot see.”
Tears carved clean tracks down the man’s dirt-streaked face. He pressed his forehead to the ground before her, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. The crowd shifted, their whispers forming a rising tide. “Witch,” some hissed, while others murmured, “messenger” with trembling lips. A child pointed at her. A priest crossed himself.
Anani’s hands shook as she pulled the hood forward again, casting her face in shadow. The hollow ache between her shoulder blades throbbed, the phantom pain of missing wings. She slipped between bodies, away from reverence and fear alike, both equally dangerous. She could not linger here, not with the scent of heaven still clinging to her skin like perfume. Not yet. But as she vanished into the press of humanity, something kindled in the void where her grace had been, not redemption, not yet, but perhaps its first fragile seed. Since her exile, for the first time, she felt less like she was at an end and more like she was at the beginning of an assignment she did not yet understand.
The next day…The Legion of Shadows
The ruins of Nicomedia’s aqueduct jutted from the earth like broken teeth, silhouetted against a sky hemorrhaging from gold to crimson. Anani’s sandals crunched over shards of marble that once channeled life to thousands. Now they cut into her feet, each step a reminder of her mortality. She felt phantom pain in her shoulder blades where her wings once were, the ache intensifying as darkness pooled in the hollows between fallen columns.
She pressed her palm against the ancient stone, feeling the day’s heat still trapped within. Blood crusted beneath her fingernails from last night’s battle. From so many nights before. Her throat tightened as she caught the metallic scent before she saw them, a dozen Roman soldiers materializing from the lengthening shadows, moving with the terrible synchronicity of puppets on shared strings. Their eyes glowed like embers in ash-pale faces, and something writhed beneath the surface of their skin. The leader’s mouth stretched too wide as he spoke, voice layered with harmonics no human throat could produce.
“Fallen one. Your light dims with each sunset.” His armor rattled without wind. “Yield to us, and He who cast you down might yet remember your name.”
Anani’s jaw clenched until her teeth ached. “He does not send demons to deliver His forgiveness.” The words tasted like copper on her tongue.
Something rippled beneath the leader’s skin as laughter erupted from his throat, sounding like stones grinding against each other deep below the earth. His sword rose, moonlight sliding down the blade like quicksilver tears. Behind him, a dozen more blades lifted in unison, the sound of metal scraping leather sheaths like the hiss of serpents.
The first blow came without warning. Anani’s body remembered what her mind tried to forget: the weightlessness of flight, the certainty of divine purpose. As she twisted between two strikes, her cloak billowed around her like phantom wings; the steel missed her flesh by a breath. Her palm slammed against the blade’s flat edge, deflecting it into stone where sparks showered like fallen stars. Her heel connected with another soldier’s chest, measured; enough force to repel the demon, not enough to crush the human heart beneath.
With each movement, the hollow space between her shoulder blades burned. Sweat or blood, she couldn’t tell which, trickled down her spine as the possessed men drove her backward into the ruins. The air thickened, sulfur coating her lungs with each labored breath. Smoke curled from their nostrils and between clenched teeth, black tendrils that tasted her scent on the air. Their eyes tracked her movements with predatory focus, pupils constricting to vertical slits.
A soldier lunged from her blind side, armor rattling like bones. Anani caught his wrist, feeling tendons and bone beneath her fingers; human, fragile, enslaved. She slammed her forehead against his chest, metal giving way with a sound like thunder. Through the shattered faceplate, a pair of human eyes stared back at her, brown, bloodshot, terrified. For a moment, the demon’s light dimmed, like a cloud breaking, revealing a scrap of sky.
“Help me,” the man inside whispered, his voice cracking like parched earth. Something in Anani’s chest twisted, not the divine compassion she once wielded, but its mortal shadow, painful and raw.
She slammed her palm against his breastplate, the metal hot as a forge beneath her fingers. “By His name,” she commanded, each syllable tasting of iron and lightning on her tongue, “leave him.”
Light erupted from the point of contact, not the pure radiance of her former glory but something wilder, untamed. The soldier’s back arched as darkness clawed its way from his throat, a writhing mass of shadow and sulfur that shrieked as it tore free. His body crumpled, human again, vulnerable.
The remaining vessels converged, their movements jerky like marionettes with tangled strings. Their leader lunged, the blade whistling toward her throat. Anani caught the strike between her palms, steel biting into flesh. The impact drove her to one knee, mortal bones grinding against stone. Blue-white sparks cascaded around her, each one a memory of stars she once walked along.
“You are ours!” the demon’s voice scraped against her ears, layered with the screams of a thousand souls. “You walk banished, cut off, cursed. Your own brethren cast you down.”
Each word settled in the hollow space between her ribs, pressing against the emptiness where wings once anchored her. She remembered the searing pain when Michael tore them away, then the fall through ash-filled clouds, the pearl gates shrinking to pinpricks above her. The silence was profound, louder than any scream, and it echoed in her ears.
Her grip loosened. For a heartbeat, darkness beckoned.
The demon’s vessel leaned closer, close enough that she could see the human trapped behind its eyes, pleading. Its breath crawled across her skin like insects. “Why fight for them?” it whispered, almost tender, “when you are nothing but one of us?”
Something fractured inside Anani; half surrender, half defiance. Her eyes burned not with divinity but with human tears. “Because,” she whispered, the words scraping her throat raw, “He did not cast me away forever.” Her fingers tightened around the blade, blood and light mingling. “He gave me this chance to remember what love is.”
A flicker kindled behind her breastbone, not the celestial inferno she once commanded, but a coal that refused to die. She cupped it in her soul’s hands, drew it into her lungs like a drowning woman finding air.
Her skin cracked with light that spilled through her veins, turning flesh translucent. The possessed soldiers recoiled, their borrowed faces contorting as something ancient recognized her. The demon-leader’s eyes widened with fear, older than human memory. Anani’s voice scraped from her throat, each word burning her tongue even as it cleansed. “You have no dominion here. These men belong to Him!”
The words cost her. Each syllable tore something vital from her chest, leaving her hollow. Yet the soldiers’ bodies arched backward, spines bowing as black smoke clawed its way from their screaming mouths. It writhed against the night sky like dying serpents before dissolving into sulfurous nothing.
The freed leader stirred, eyelids fluttering like wounded birds. Blood trickled from his nose, but recognition dawned in his gaze. “Who… who are you?” His voice cracked, fingers trembling as they reached toward her.
Anani felt her throat constricting. The phantom weight of her severed wings pulled at her shoulders, the memory of divine purpose warring with her mortal frailty. She turned toward the horizon, where stars pierced the darkness like distant promises she could no longer touch.
“Only one who waits for mercy,” she whispered, the words scraping against the hollow space in her chest where certainty once lived.
She slipped away before gratitude could root her there, her footsteps silent on cobblestones still warm with the day’s heat. Behind her, the soldiers’ labored breathing faded. Ahead, Nicomedia’s narrow alleys swallowed her. Tomorrow, the city would bring more Christians to the execution grounds. Her victory tonight was a single raindrop in an ocean of suffering. Yet as she pressed her bleeding palm to her heart, something flickered there, not the blinding glory she lost, but a smaller flame, human and fragile and somehow more precious for its vulnerability. If heaven would not yet claim her, she would burn here, little, stubborn, and unextinguished, for those it still heard.
The outskirts of Nicomedia
Anani’s knees sank into the parched earth beneath the ancient fig tree, its gnarled branches offering respite from Nicomedia’s white-hot sun. Her headdress lay beside her, blood-flecked and damp with sweat. She trembled as she raised her scarred palms skyward, her shoulders phantom aching where wings had once connected to flesh.
“My Lord,” she whispered, voice raw from exorcism, “these hands are so small now.”
The air shimmered, condensing into impossible light that cast no shadow. Anani’s breath caught as the scent of lightning and myrrh filled her lungs. The radiance turned the fig leaves translucent, revealing every vein and imperfection.
“Astrid.” The name flowed from her lips like a prayer.
The being inclined its head, features both ancient and ageless. “You will go to Spain,” Astrid said. “On the seventh day of the seventh month, in the year 1637.”
“The others?” Anani’s fingers curled inward, clutching at emptiness.
“All will come.” Astrid’s form unraveled into threads of gold that spiraled upward until nothing remained but the memory of light.
Anani plucked a fig, its skin splitting beneath her touch. Sweet juice ran down her wrist as she ate, counting centuries yet to pass like beads on a rosary.