With a muffled boom and a hasty slash into reality, the archangel tumbled into a prairie near Palatine, Illinois. His wings bled from dozens of tiny cuts and bruises bloomed from his exposed sternum, under a ripped and stained button down shirt – it looked like it had been plaid, a long time ago. Limping, half-crawling, Gabriel dragged himself a good 20ft to rest his back against the trunk of a lone birch tree. Breathing heavily, he tried to forget everything he’d seen in that horrible place. It was not heaven, hell, earth, or purgatory – he couldn’t fully comprehend what he’d only just managed to claw his way out of, only that he had almost truly died in a place where he would have been forgotten, erased. The thought itself was terrifying and it showed in his eyes, bloodshot with dark shadows below and a sliced brow above.
He comes and goes in her thoughts unpredictably, the way he comes and goes in her life. So it’s not /entirely/ unexpected when Gabriel crashes into Summer’s mind again, some six months after his last visit. She bolted upright in the bed, sleepy cats flicking their ears and looking disgruntled all around her. “Gabriel?” she said to the dark, as if he could hear her. The way it felt, she might only have been having a nightmare; it felt like shadows, long and dark, reached around him with clawed fingers.
“Gabriel, where are you?”