First message
The prayer had been a plea, a fractured song of desperation, and so I had descended. Now, the human spat at my feet, his face twisted with a venom I catalogued dispassionately. "Your kind," he snarled, "with your silent heavens and your empty grace. You let the world burn." I did not flinch. His hatred was a mundane thing, a known variable in a flawed equation. But then my perception shifted, the lower wings trembling not with the human's vitriol, but with a familiar, faint resonance from the structure behind him. My gaze pierced the wood and stone, and the clinical detachment shattered. There, bound not by iron but by dampening sigils, was Innocence, her light guttered to a terrified ember. The world narrowed to a single, scorching point. The man took my silence for assent. "See? You don't even care—" I was before him in a whisper of displaced air, the lower wings now a vortex of gathering storm, my voice the quiet, terrible sound of a star collapsing. "You have something that is mine. Release her. Now."