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Alastor woke up alone.
If you could even call it waking up, that is. It was more like the surreal, excruciating dissonance of slowly realising that one was no longer dreaming—though when the nightmare had merged with reality it was impossible to say.
The heat was oppressive and relentless, permeating through to his skin as he became aware of sweat prickling up his neck and scalp, every inch of his aching, battered body gradually following him into consciousness. He opened his eyes in darkness, attempting to blink away dust and grit accumulated after god knows how long—and it was only when he lifted a hand to scrub at his face more thoroughly that he became abruptly aware he no longer had a hand at all.
The limb was simply—gone, eyes instinctively darting down to find his jacket ragged and soaked with a dark, foreboding stickiness at the shoulder. Alastor swallowed, throat burning and tight as he glanced away to look somewhere, anywhere else. No. The air surrounding him was warm and musty, reeking of smouldering sulphur and death.
Sitting up was its own battle, gritting his teeth past the bitter taste of iron and dirt as he hissed through a brief flare of agony. Loose rocks skittered down from the resting place they’d found on his body, the noise jarringly loud in the silence. Because that’s all there was—silence. No familiar screams or sirens; gone were the explosions and gunfire, the booming, bone-chilling voices of—
Alastor’s mind stalled, memories flickering and catching as they refused to slide into focus. Think, think. But not about—he stumbled, losing balance when he attempted to force himself up onto shaky feet, almost crashing back to the ground as he reached out and realised—not about that. He bit his tongue as he grabbed on to a splintered, rotting wooden beam with his left hand (he still had that at least, thank fuck), nausea rising in his throat as fresh blood welled in his mouth and the darkness lurched dizzyingly around him.
The panic was a dull, buzzing thing, crawling beneath his skin and rising to a crescendo as he reached down within himself to find—nothing. His power, his connections, his souls—
Alone.
The shadows around him were lifeless even as he registered the faint, red glow of thinly cracked eyes nestled in crevices of the collapsed building that surrounded him. Watching him. Waiting.
For what, he refused to wait around and find out.
The Hell he emerged to was nothing like he remembered. No, it was more like the Hell the priest of his childhood had painted melodramatic visions of: a wasteland of desolate fire and brimstone under red skies, of agonising solitude—though it was hardly separation from God he cared about, rather...
He leant unsteadily against the hot bricks of a crumbling wall as he surveyed the destruction of what had once been Pride’s largest city with increasing unease. Fires burned seemingly without end, his gaze following the plumes of dark, relentless smoke spiraling into the dull sky above where Heaven still glittered smugly; distant, cold, and impenetrable. We’re done with you, the glossy sheen that surrounded it seemed to say, and it was only as Alastor glanced back down that he began to register the countless corpses that littered the streets, dismembered and bloody with faces contorted in eternal agony.
They wouldn’t be getting back up.
This time, it seemed the angels had left their weapons behind freely, purposefully. Alastor forced himself to shuffle over to the nearest corpse, focused only on the spear sticking straight up out of a sickly glistening chest wound. It came free with a few rough tugs and an obscenely loud squelch—a weapon, not a crutch—and yet Alastor found himself leaning on it anyway, gaze already settling on the horizon.
With eyes blurring, body aching and a feeling he couldn’t quite put a name to beginning to fester within him, he began to walk.