Prologue- First Beta Read Stage
Please Give Feedback. TW: Major Character Death (Non violent)
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This is the story of my death. Literally. I mean it. If you were to search up Ayil Gadther it would come up with the word deceased. Here’s how it started.
Pain radiated from my side as I turned over. I wondered if anyone would let Kyle know what happened to me or would anyone even care. Obviously Kyle would but what about the police or the media. Would I just be another ‘Tragic Street Rat Death’ for people to read about in the mornings and wonder why I had run from a ‘loving foster family’. Except none of those homes were loving. The only one who could be described as such was Kyle. But he was in prison and I couldn’t see him because he was ‘dangerous’ to society and me.
He was all I had and the police took him away from me with claims that would be safer with people who weren’t behind bars. I had learnt quickly that this was not true. The punishments I received were things that Kyle had said he’d never do as it wasn’t going to teach me anything but to expect pain. And now that’s all I did now, expect pain from those who should have kept me from it. The police man who came to our apartment that day asked if I had a mum, I had just started crying right there and they wouldn’t even let Kyle through to calm me down.
Someone knelt down next to me. I turned my head towards them. Their face was covered by a Black hoodie and in their hand was a blue lantern. Kyle’s eyes were blue like the glow the lantern gave off. Some may have felt the man was weird but all I had felt was warmth like when Kyle gave me one of his big hugs after he’d been away for a few days or that one time his boss’s rivals found our apartment. It was the warmth I felt that came with the safety of being with my father.
This man wasn’t Kyle but his lantern felt like his hugs. I had wondered then if it was possible for a lantern to do this. Obviously it wasn’t as the lantern also gave off the scent of death that surrounded the alleys I had called home. I knew then that this was the lantern of the one who had come to take my soul. I knew that any attempt to fight against him would be futile, afterall isn’t that what Kyle had taught me about bad people, go with it to ensure your safety?
The person reached their hand to my head. The touch was comforting but I knew that touch from anyone but Kyle would hurt. My body felt like lead and I couldn’t move away. The person sighed before reaching behind them for something. The lantern was placed beside me. It was a strange thing, no lightbulb or flame inside yet it still emitted warmth and light. The light at the end of the tunnel. The warmth that the afterlives give their souls. I never got to see the scythe that cut my soul out, only the strange darkness that came after.
It was strange being dead. I was both conscious of my surroundings and not. Dead at 10, not bad for a street rat, at least that’s what I had told myself. There was no pain or sadness when I died, just nothing. No more beating hearts or the warmth of a living breathing body, just emptiness. Calm, still emptiness. No temperature could touch me, no pain could come to me, while I was in that state. Later I found out that the soul goes into limbo during transportation, this is where I spent six hours, waiting for the afterlife’s embrace.
Or so I thought. Turns out that if you die before becoming an adult you get reincarnated based on sins. Daemon’s have committed sin’s before they died, Humans have committed no sins (these are typically the babies that die from a miscarriage) but those who committed a sin that led to their death become Dark Angels, the Ferriers of souls to their afterlife. Each group was never going to be able to reach the warmth of the afterlife, until they died if human, not even the fires of hell would welcome them. They are those who will work for eternity.
It all came back to me at once, temperature, feeling sounds and smells. The only thing missing was the steady thump-thump-thump of my heart. My now forever still and cold heart. I had never once realised how loud it was until it wasn’t there anymore. The Grim Reaper had come for me and took the beat of my heart as his prize. Always his, never mine, as things are really meant to be.
That’s just how the after life is, whether reincarnated or a soul you would never again be able to feel the pulsing of warm blood through your veins or your body’s internal melody. Not for an eternity and beyond. For the afterlife was created for the Angels to thrive, not the souls of the dead now brought back to functionality as spirits or flesh. That was never what the father intended, but it’s what ended up happening.
My back ached as I woke up. Black feathers surrounded me as the fluttering of wings could be heard. In front of me sat a boy with 6 black wings. Kyle had mentioned him when talking about his mother. Showed me the drawings from her book that got every detail in front of me correct including the gray and black of his eyes and the titanic size of his wings. The cracks in his gold halo that glowed a bright red, the exact color of the setting sun at night.
He was called Azrael, the angel of death. And the one who was my soon to be boss for eternity.
