Ascension: A PL&DE Novel (SVTFOE Fan Fic)

Recollection

The trip from the prison to the courthouse was about a twenty minute walk. Where many other ongoing angels flew, I walked. Even Comet and James walked, though they could've flown, yet they remained close to each side of me.

While the Above held many angels, the Underworld harbored even more, all of which had fallen with their sins one way or the other.

Yet, the more I gazed up to catch a glimpse of the Above's citizens during my travel from my dark, cramped prison cell to the courthouse, I found not even a single ascended demon in sight.

No protruding devil horns, no noticeable leather-like demon wings, no distinct facial features.

Not even a single sign or trace that a demon had ever set foot beyond the gates.

No demons.

Just all angels with wings.

It was odd to me. To see all the angels all traveling by wing. Even in the Underworld, not all demons have wings. Some don't even have wings yet can still fly.

Not all demons could fly, no. Yet, those wingless were the ones who envied those with wings. Wings meant flying and flying meant leaving. Leaving meant hope for redemption - ascension. Wings were everything. It gave a demon hope. It gave them power and strength and freedom.

Wings were a status symbol in the Underworld.

There is this punishment that the Above gives to those winged demons. It is the most gruesome and most painful punishment I can even think of. It is the most disgraceful act of forcing off a winged demon's wings for trying to ascend.

Clipping.

In the end, the angels find the demon and banish them back to the Underworld, but not before clipping off their wings - a very rare sight to see, yet an unforgettable one.

If you came back from trying to ascend with no wings, it meant forever damnation and humiliation. It meant every demon could laugh at your expense and know that you were tossed back to the Underworld for being idiotic and arrogant enough to try.

I've only seen a few demons in my immortal lifetime with those scars gashing downward their upper backs.

My brother - my former brother - could fly, though he had no wings. All he had was the soles of his feet, his shoes. He flew by fire, not by wings.

Still, the thought of him made me sick. It made my head feel light and then heavy, then spin until I felt disoriented from the world around me. The memory of his face in my mind made my stomach hurl itself into something fierce and uncontrollable.

The memory of the scowl in his mouth as his fang hung down, protruding from his bottom lip, the way his eyebrows scrunched up and his beetroot colored eyes were always set with a sort of judgement. His face was always somehow bent and twisted, coming together from a strange, unjustifiable hatred.

And above all of that I never really understood what had caused him to retreat my side, betray my unquestionable loyalty to him.

He just... left.

No longer my brother...

No longer my friend...

Now he was somehow the villain.

It must've been the old me that did it, whatever I did, creating some sort of preexisting bias of me. It must've been the human me that I can't seem to remember that made Tom break.

Maybe it was the first day we met, though I can only remember fragments of that day - the day when he asked Star to the Blood Moon Ball, I had severed his hand practically upon introduction.