Chapter Text
Wind whipped around the Angel, battering its tiny, helpless form. The Roaring Knight, December Holiday, was dead, but there had only been a moment of respite from the tempest that followed her like a curse before a new storm arrived. This one was personal, though, there for one thing and one thing only: the Angel. It was time for the Delta Warriors to banish the Angel’s Heaven.
That things had to end this way was heartbreaking. Not the banishment itself, no, the Angel had connected the dots back at the church, but that it had failed to bring any good to the world in the interim. December was dead, Mayor Holiday was broken, used up by the darkness she allowed to breach the Light World in the vain hope it would put her world back together, Noelle had to stand against the only family she had left and put down the mad beast her sister had become, Susie was betrayed by the first real friend she’d ever made, Ralsei faced the truth that nothing he’d done had changed the prophecy, and Kris… Kris had done so many horrible things for December’s sake, only to have to turn their blade on her when it became clear there was nothing of her left.
Perhaps, they'd be able to put the pieces back together. Perhaps, there was something like happiness on the other side of hell for them. Perhaps, this wasn't unrecoverable, and there would be a time where they could look back upon this week and, if nothing else, no longer feel the pain of unhealed wounds.
The Angel’s odd partial vision slid unconsciously to December's corpse.
Perhaps not.
It didn't change anything, in the end. The Angel's banishment had arrived. No matter how much it wanted to struggle, to scream that this couldn't be how things ended, the wind only howled louder. The Angel’s fate was never to change the inevitable. It was never going to leave the world a better place than when it started.
Kris, Susie, and Ralsei stood around the Angel, hands, or in Kris's case, hand, out exactly as the Angel had imagined back when Ralsei first delivered the prophecy, before it knew it was the Angel, before it knew it wasn't Kris. None of the three were happy. They didn't carry out their final act as heroes with relief and confidence but with a drained resignation. They had to save the world, after all, and if that meant banishing the Angel…
Well, it was glad it knew people willing to make the right choice.
The wind grew louder, drowning out any and all noise in that room of sealed fate. It was time for the nightmare to end.
The Angel couldn't close eyes it didn't have, so it let what it called its vision unfocus and drift toward the metal doors leading out into the rest of the distorted shelter. It couldn't stand to look at the people it had failed any longer.
With the dull roar of the wind filling its non-existent ears, it was that one simple choice that allowed the Angel to notice what happened next. The metal doors slammed open, and a grayscale human stumbled through. The heroes, Noelle included because she deserved the title, looked over, not at the human, but past them into the doorway, terror painted on their faces. A second later, a large, hellish, cat-like silhouette with pink and yellow eyes and a tail like a chain bounded into the room, mouth open in a roar inaudible to the Angel but clearly not to the heroes. The beast’s heterochromatic eyes were locked upon the human– its vessel– as it rushed forward–
The world seemed to skip as the Angel noticed the mess of yolk and shell around the beast's mouth. A phrase reverberated through its mind: You'll know what it was evidence for when it happens.
The vessel– Red, it had named them– awoke in the darkness of the shelter during the battle with the Roaring Knight. The pure crystal that Kris had lost to the darkness during a chase ended up with Red, giving them a few precious minutes of artificial life. FRIEND had been sent to tie up the loose end of Red’s existence, but it arrived too late and was forced to pursue them. Red used the eggs they found in their pockets to divert FRIEND’s attention, buying them enough time to make it to the Angel.
The past, present, and future mixed, and events that hadn't been witnessed or hadn't even happened yet seemed certain in the Angel's mind. It saw what it couldn't see and heard what it couldn't hear. It knew the following sequence of events better than it knew any other aspect of its short existence.
Red ran past the heroes to the storm, reaching out to the Angel.
Noelle summoned a wall of ice, halting FRIEND in its pursuit.
“Save her, Angel,” Noelle said, looking back at it with a determined glint in her eyes.
FRIEND growled and smashed through the ice, only to be hit with dual blasts of fire and rude magic.
“We’re counting on you, dumbass,” Susie said, already readying another attack. “…good luck.”
“Change it,” Ralsei said, sparks dancing up his blackened arms. “Please.”
Kris slashed at FRIEND, fighting with the Black Shard held tightly in their non-dominant, and now only, hand.
They didn't speak, but they didn't have to.
Red breached the storm, which grew wilder without the heroes’ stabilizing influence. They held out their arms, a silent, final request as the energy coursing through them ran low.
The Angel couldn't refuse.
It closed the distance, embedding itself in their chest. As soon as it did, Red’s hands clasped over their chest, and their head hung low.
“Love you,” Red whispered.
The last of the energy provided by the pure crystal faded, and Red's fledgling mind was washed away by the Angel's consciousness.
For the first time, the Angel was alone in a body. It felt tears build in its eyes, and it knew it couldn't blame anyone else for their formation.
“Love you, too,” the Angel spoke, words flowing freely from its mouth, no third party present to filter its speech through their own desires.
The Angel had never known just how disconnected it was from the world until now. In comparison to what it could feel now, all of its previous experiences were like living in a sensory deprivation tank. If its mind wasn't running on knowledge far beyond its own, the force of true feeling might have frozen it in place. It knew what it had to do next, though, and there was no time to freeze.
Wings unfurled from its back, the monochromatic feathers tinged with a glowing red. With the Angel functioning as a true soul, unlike the weak replica formed using the pure crystal, the body could morph into something fit for a Dark World. Its clothes shifted to become armor much like Kris's, save that they were entirely grayscale and that from under the breastplate, a luminescent red toga reached down to its ankles, whipping uncontrollably in the wind.
Kris and the Angel made eye contact–true eye contact, unlike all the incomplete looks they'd shared. The two of them had caused so much trouble for each other over the last few days, and there were hardly any positive experiences between them to hold onto. Still, the Angel had never hated Kris. They were the first person it ever knew, even if it only learned as such later, and though it could never understand doing what they had done in pursuit of their goals, the Angel couldn't find it in itself to blame them. They were afraid, trapped in the horrible moment their life fell apart. Kris was far from perfect, but in the end, they’d made the right choice. That was all that mattered.
Kris reached into their pocket and took out a knife. Their knife, untouched by the fantasy of the dark. Then, without a word, they tossed the knife to the Angel. The Angel would've fumbled to catch it, but in the current state of reality, everything simply worked. The handle of the knife landed cleanly in its grip, and it exchanged one last look with Kris. Its captor, its tormentor… its only true companion.
Kris smirked and gave a peace sign.
The Angel gave a silent nod and raised the knife. Then, in the center of the storm meant to banish it back to non-existence–the heavenly light beyond measure–it brought the blade down. Its wings flared as it struck with everything it had: its muscles, its hopes, its dreams, and its determination.
A dark fountain tore through the light of the heavens, swirling, warring, hating. The opposed forces fought for control, but the Angel's determination fueled the darkness. The fountain ate the light, then ate the Angel, and
Then the world was covered in darkness–
Then the world was covered in–
Then the world was covered–
Then the world was–
Then the world–
Then the–
Then–
ThE
woRlD
BRoKe
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The Angel’s eyes opened slowly. There was a blinding light filling its vision, obscuring the world from view. The light was painful, and the Angel found it impossible to focus on anything else. It blinked, and the dark of its eyelids gave a temporary reprieve from the pain. It squeezed its eyes shut to gain a longer stretch of escape, but it found that the light burned through after only a few seconds. It let out a whine and covered its eyes instinctively, and this, finally, seemed to block out the pain of the light.
Without sight flooding its brain with information, the Angel’s other senses took their chances to overwhelm it. It could feel its clothes rustle against it, bunching up uncomfortably in the crooks of its elbows and hanging loosely around its ankles. Its hair tickled the back of its neck, tempting it to remove its hands from its eyes to brush it away. The back of its head ached against the hard metal that it rested against.
The world smelled, too. It smelled of grass and trees and sweat and it was all too much. Grasshoppers chirped in the trees as the trees rustled in the wind as the wind filled its ears as its ears pumped with blood that roared so loud it was hard to hear the rest of it. It could taste the idle aspects of its mouth, gross and slimy and faintly metallic.
The Angel wanted it to stop. It needed it to stop, or else it would lose its mind before it even got started on its mission. So, without really knowing how, the Angel took a step back.
It was still there, within its body, but at the same time there was something else. The Angel had the objective knowledge of what it was sensing, but it couldn't really feel very much at all. It was like being back inside Kris, where everything was muffled in a way the Angel hadn't comprehended until the peace was ripped away.
Red was gone, that was undeniable, but at the same time this felt so, so similar to inhabiting Kris. Was the Angel's body filtering things for it? Perhaps, the Angel had misunderstood what it meant to be independent. Perhaps, even with a body of its own, that body had an existence of its own. The Angel didn't really know.
There was certain knowledge the Angel had that it could best describe as instinctual. Concepts such as language, numbers, left and right, up and down, family, good and evil, emotions, social cues–mostly–and the use of objects. It had known what a pencil was before it knew what it was. The Angel had never been able to determine if its knowledge was gained from Kris or if it dwelled within it from the moment of its creation, but that was hardly something it could find an answer to now. Unfortunately, the exact functions of a body versus a soul were not included in that knowledge.
Regardless, with its mind no longer blazing with dozens of sensory inputs, the Angel could make use of its instinctual knowledge to carve a path forward. For instance, it could recognize that it was outside. It could additionally recognize that if it was outside, the bright light was almost certainly the sun. From there, the Angel knew that the light, while overwhelming, could be avoided by simply looking away. It made its body do so and hesitantly had it remove its hands from its eyes. Little lines and dots painted the backs of its body's eyelids, bright but not painful. The Angel had its body open its eyes, next, and it found that it was looking at the ground, which hurt a lot less.
Heh. This living thing was actually pretty easy.
It guided its body to stand, taking things slow as its shaky legs resisted the simple movement. Compared to Kris, though, its body was actually being quite cooperative.
Thanks, body.
Once its body stood, it took a look at its surroundings, making sure to keep its body's eyes off the sun.
It was in a familiar clearing. Behind it, against which it had just been sitting, were the large metal doors of the shelter. The Angel took an instinctive step back, something deep within it telling it to stay away at all costs. It wasn't the same feeling that being near the shelter had caused before, though. This was… worse, if the Angel had to compare. Being near the shelter before had felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, feeling the rocks crumble beneath its feet as it looked down into a raging ocean. Now, though, it felt like nothing. Like standing on a windless, heightless precipice, knowing one moment of lost balance would gift it to the surrounding dark forever.
The Angel couldn't let anyone open those doors; it knew that immediately. If it wanted to succeed at its mission, it needed those doors to stay closed no matter what.
…its mission. The sole reason it was allowed to exist beyond its expiration date. The goal that the heroes had sacrificed everything to make possible.
The Angel had to save December Holiday. It had to stop her from becoming the Roaring Knight. That was the purpose etched into its mind from the moment it saw that mess of yolk and shell on FRIEND’s face. The Angel had come into the world too late to give everyone a happy ending, but through the efforts of Red and the heroes, it had been given another chance. A real chance, one that began before things reached a point of no return.
The Angel had been sent back eight years before the seventh anniversary of December’s disappearance. That meant it had one year to stop December from becoming the Knight. Given the Angel had only existed for five days, such a length of time was hard for it to fully comprehend. So, it didn't. It would have time for that later.
There was a more immediate problem, anyway: it knew extremely little about the circumstances of December's disappearance. Everyone involved was understandably tight-lipped about the incident, and it wasn't like the Angel was ever in a position to ask for clarification. It knew December disappeared the day after the festival, it knew Kris blamed themself for what happened, and it had to guess that her disappearance had something to do with the shelter. However, everything else was unknown. December’s motives, the exact time, if the incident was an accident or premeditated, if she knew about the supernatural beforehand, if she was chosen for a specific reason or was simply the first person available to the darkness, and so many other little details that seemed insignificant when the Angel was fighting for the world’s survival but were now vital to its success. How could it stop a disaster it knew nothing about?
It had… an idea. Not a particularly good one, both in terms of risk and reward, but one nonetheless. If it knew practically nothing about the incident that would occur in one year’s time, it would just have to learn about the key players as they were. Perhaps, by doing so, it could determine the motivations that led to the incident and develop a real plan.
Based on what the Angel knew, it had two main people to investigate: December Holiday and Kris Dreemur. While it knew who Kris would become, that was a version of them twice as old and burdened with far, far more. From what Noelle had said about their shared past, the old Kris was quite different. The Angel couldn't make any assumptions without risking the fate of the very girl it had been granted a longer life solely to protect.
December, meanwhile, was someone it had nothing on. The Angel had seen her room, sure, and heard a couple of stories, but those were insignificant pieces of the massive puzzle of what caused her to fall into the grasp of the darkness and become the instrument of the world's end.
The Angel almost had its body walk away from the doors, but froze when it noticed something in the grass: a glint of metal. The Angel immediately changed course and had its body crouch down and examine the object. It was Kris's knife, lying almost hidden in the grass; the one they’d entrusted to it in a world that couldn't come to pass. A physical reminder of what the Angel had promised.
The Angel had its body tuck the knife into its pants, just as Kris always did. It then had its body circle the shelter, stopping once it faced the path leading to town.
The Angel would save December Holiday, whatever it took. It had made a promise, after all.