Unlike Lucifer, some angels never fell from heaven willingly – they were pushed.
Baring no sin, these betrayed angels would remain on Earth instead of Hell, becoming dragons; halos broken into horns, feathers charred to scales, and heavenly light breathed out as desperate fire.
You watch it, Missy, or I’ll have you writing it with me.
I don’t care who does it, as long as it gets done!!!!
@sageclover61 seems to have kidnapped the idea. 👀 we’re watching you, Clover
Ooh. Paint me intrigued.
Do you want a snippet? Do you deserve a snippet? Let’s call this… Proof of concept.
Everyone knows that the first dragons were made by four inseparable fledglings. They were all baby dragons, because fledglings, even archangel fledglings, want to make things as old as they are. This is truth. This is fact. But this is not the only classification of dragon.
According to the Muggles, the Webster’s English Dictionary says that a dragon is a fabulous mythical monster. The Oxford dictionary adds that it is a giant lizard. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, by Newt Scamander, lists ten species of dragons while a few other sources name a few more. The Men of Letters have a few pieces of lore on dragons, something about their tears being used for time traveling. But don’t believe dragons have been seen in at least 700 years. The dragons that the wizard dragonologists study were not the same as the dragons the Men of Letters thought they remembered. But for a moment I would like you to pretend that you have never heard of either. Because what everyone had forgotten, including the archangels themselves, though Lucifer can be pardoned because he had very little to do with it, was that there was a third, or perhaps forth, type of dragon.
Cutting out your grace and falling was different than willingly following Lucifer to Hell. But something altogether different happened to the blameless angels pushed by their siblings in the mayhem following Lucifer’s Fall. This is the story of Sahaquiel and her brothers and sisters, and their road to redemption.
Sahaquiel was not a fledgling. There were no more fledglings in heaven because He had made all the angels there were going to be. She was also neither a soldier or a medic and she had no business being on the battlefield. But one of her superiors had declared to the entire choir that all hands were needed on deck to clean up heaven in the aftermath of Lucifer’s fall, and she took it very literally.
I think @dreamhunter-trash would agree that I in no means deserved a snippet, but bless your face for providing it nonetheless.
@sageclover61! Don’t feed her! If you feed her she won’t stop!
I loved the Gremlins reference on the other copy of this, I really did. Let’s see…. Oh! I know! It’s first thing in the morning, so another snippet should not hurt anyone. @talkingtomyselfagain I loved the second chapter from Gabriel’s pov so much, and altyex seems to think you should be fed. Soooo, here goes.
And then she was falling. The rest of the choir was muted to her, but she could hear what remained of her garrison screaming in the agony she shared. Their wings were designed for flight, but not to slow their fall to Earth. They weren’t supposed to go to Earth this way, the gates of Heaven existed for a reason.
The heat was greater than anything Sahaquiel had ever experienced before and she had stood in the presence of four archangels in all their awesome power, blazing with the heat of galaxies. She was a falling meteorite and she was on fire. Her destination was earth and her grace was not designed to withstand this kind of friction or heat.
Her halo broke first. The heavenly light that filtered through her grace and lit up around her head was fading quickly with her connection to heaven severed. The halo was still hot, a band of light and electricity that had been a piece of physical manifestation of her connection to heaven and without the the connection to heaven, it broke, charring into blackened calcium sticking out of her head. Horns. This was what she was being reduced to.
Her tawny feathers burned to her grace, hardening into scales like melted plastic to skin. They were black and dark red, and she could see what her wings were becoming. They were ugly, monstrous dark masses that she couldn’t stand to look at because this wasn’t the embodiment of Light and Grace she was supposed to be.
Even as Sahaquiel hit the ground, she could still feel her grace inside herself. She hadn’t taken a vessel, any vessel, let alone a willing one, and she wasn’t even supposed to be here on Earth without one. But without her connection to heaven, it was gone, she couldn’t take one. Her halo was physical horns, and the charred remains of her once beautiful wings were scaled masses, but the scales didn’t only extend to just- Are these even wings? No.Her entire body was now covered in these scales. She could still feel her grace, even despite being cut off from heaven. She was a seraph, seraph’s didn’t need to return to heaven to retain their grace. But what did that mean for the angels of her garrison? She could still hear them screaming in her mind. She may have lost the rest of the choir, but she hadn’t lost them. It was selfish to think that it was nice that she wouldn’t be here all alone, because she should not wish this pain on any of them, but they had all fallen, and they were still alive, and they would not be alone.
*makes incomprehensible noises, hoping for more*
Finals week is going to kill me if I already feel this way. Half the things I have left are due this week and what am I doing? This. You lot have all been so productive this week and it makes me think I need to step up too. So let me find a snippet. Except I already sent you the most painful scene so this could be difficult. OH Wait! I know just the thing! Babies are adorable!
The fledglings were outside playing while Michael was reading on the porch. The repairs to heaven were coming along nicely, but no one remembered what had happened to Sahaquiel and her garrison. They had gone silent sometime during the cleanup following the the last battle.
“Mica! Mica!” Raphael toddled over from somewhere out of sight.
Michael looked up, putting the book down to focus on the fledgling. “Hey, Raph, what’s up?”
“Baby dragon, Mica. Come see!” The fledgling reached to grasp one of Michael’s hands with both of his, like he was going to pull his brother in the direction the dragon had been seen. “It’s different!”
Michael knew about dragons. He had hardly forgotten about the time the four of them had created a bunch of different kinds of dragons. The wizards had at some point in time decided that muggles shouldn’t know about certain magical creatures, including dragons, and there had never been a large population of them on Earth. Even so, Michael knew they were still around. It was odd that Raphael was calling this one different, though. Slipping his feet into his sandals, he let his little brother lead him to the very edge of the wards.
Sigyn’s property was a haven for whatever needed safety, but the baby dragon had not crossed the wards. Lucifer was on the inside of the wards, trying to bribe the dragon with some piece of fruit, where did that come from? But the dragon was not having it.
Michael was glad Raphael had come to find him and that Lucifer had not crossed the wards to fetch the dragon. There weren’t very many things that could pose a threat to archangels, but the things that could would very much enjoy getting their hands on a fledgling.
The baby dragon, as Raphael had correctly identified, was not a species they had created. Species did evolve over time, but Michael could not recognize any of the dragons they had created in this one. The dragon was black and dark red, with reptilian scales that covered his wings and body. He had a round body with short legs that ended with sharp claws.
Michael considered the situation. “Luci, the dragon might be carnivorous.”
“Oh.” The fledgling pouted at the fruit in his hand. “Why’s it here?”
“I’m not sure. Let me try something else.” Michael went around and stepped across the wards. The baby dragon watched him as he crouched to make himself appear less threatening. This was odd, because creatures other than humans typically recognized angels as a source of creation.
“Hello,” Michael whispered to the dragon.
The dragon sneezed, smoke and light billowing softly from his nose. He shook his head and then took a few steps towards Michael.
“What do you want?” Michael asked.
The dragon stared at Michael, head tilted like he was considering Michael carefully. With a look that Michael swore was glee, he zipped forward and pulled Michael’s shoe off his foot. They were sandals without a backstrap, easy to slip on and off, so he raised an eyebrow at the dragon. It would have been difficult to steal the laced sneakers of either fledgling and easy enough to steal his sandal. But would a dragon be able to reason through that?
“Drop it,” Michael said.
The dragon backed up, holding up the shoe like he wanted Michael to come take it.
Michael walked slowly towards the dragon, and just before he was close enough to reach it, the dragon backed up. The dragon wasn’t running and didn’t go far enough for Michael to lose sight of it. “Okay, you’re definitely a weird dragon.”
He looked over his shoulder at the fledglings. “I think the dragon wants me to follow.”
Lucifer was still pouting at the fruit. “I wanna go inside,” he said, turning around and doing just that.
“I come?” Raphael asked, grinning hopefully at Michael.
Michael considered. It was just a dragon and this could be interesting. He wasn’t going to lose Rahael and the fledgling would probably enjoy a hike through the overgrowth. “Okay,” he said, holding out his hand for Raphael.
Raphael ran forward to take Michael’s hand. When Michael turned his head back towards the dragon, the dragon had turned around and started walking forward.
As Michael and Raphael followed the dragon, the dragon would periodically turn around to look over his shoulder, as though making sure the two archangels were still following. If they got too far behind, the dragon would stop, as though waiting for them to catch up.
They continued walking through the overgrowth for more than an hour until they came to the edge of it. Beyond the forest was a rocky outcropping that surrounded a lake at the base of a mountain.
In the meadow there were many dragons. There were different kinds of dragons, and besides the baby, all of them looked like dragons the archangels had created as fledglings. With one notable exception.
Shoe still in his mouth, the baby scampered towards the largest dragon in the meadow. Michael had almost missed it, because she was lying next to the rocky outcropping, almost as though she were part of the landscape.
The two archangels watched as the baby dropped the shoe a few paces away from the sleeping dragoness. He yipped at her until she opened the large pale blue-white eye to look at him. The baby yipped again, so she shifted her weight to lift her near wing enough for the baby to slip underneath and join the other various hatchlings sleeping under her wing. All the rest of the hatchlings were recognizable to the archangels as identical to dragons they had created as fledglings. None of the dragons seemed to care.
I know it’s not angsty, but I’ve had about all the angst I can take for right now, what with Cadbury, and Altyex filling that angsty Lucifer prompt. I needed some fledgling therapy, okay? ENJOY.
THERE WERE NUANCES to an angel’s Grace that were rarely spoken of or explained to humans, and went largely unremarked upon by angels because they already knew and what did it matter? It wasn’t as if angels were going around leaving huge chunks of their Grace in random humans, after all. Sure, there were the occasional Vessels who retained a little more than the usual fading imprint on their souls from having housed an angel for a brief time, but it had been a very long time since the angels had walked freely among humans and many had dismissed it as a quirk of stronger bloodlines before putting it out of mind.
And then Sam Winchester said Yes to Lucifer, wrestled control away from the Archangel inhabiting his body, and flung himself down into the Cage with Lucifer and Michael along for the ride to be trapped there until a recently promoted to seraph Castiel retrieved his body and Dean Winchester bargained with Death for the return of Sam’s soul. That soul, battered and shredded and patched over as it was, retained more than a fleeting imprint of Grace, not just from Lucifer but from Michael as well. When the Wall inside his head broke, the Grace was no longer held back and fused more fully with the soul it was attached to before Castiel came and took upon himself the pain inherent to Sam’s flayed soul, allowing the human to rest, to sleep, and to finally heal… and to fully absorb the Grace.
The Trials to close Hell took their own toll on Sam, ripping new furrows into his soul, burning away the toxins of lingering demon blood from months of addiction and use that had been heaped upon the deeply embedded traces introduced in infancy. With the Trials left incomplete, those furrows were left open and raw, and into that ragged and tattered internal structure came Gadreel, calling himself Ezekiel and pouring much of his own essence into Sam in effort to heal him from within even as he bolstered his own ragged and tortured Grace with the light of Sam’s soul. When Sam was finally made aware of his body-hijacking passenger and forced Gadreel out, the separation was less neat than might have been the case had Gadreel left more willingly, and so a greater portion of Grace was left behind than usual once more. Castiel assisted Sam in the removal of as much of the Grace as he dared, but in the end he could not remove the parts already fused into Sam without risking Sam’s death– something Castiel would not even consider to be an option, not even when the meager syringe of Grace they had extracted was not enough to track the disgraced former Sentry of Eden.
There were problems. There were challenges. The angels warred and made peace, rose and fell. The Darkness was released, Lucifer escaped the Cage, God showed himself for the first time in the form of the prophet Chuck, Amara and Chuck made peace and left, Lucifer of all angels sired a Nephilim, Castiel was killed… and through it all the Grace in Sam’s soul became so deeply fused to his being that it was nearly impossible to tell that there was any Grace at all within the soul’s light. When Jack was born, he Imprinted on Castiel as his father, but the first bond he formed was with Sam, soul-Grace to soul-Grace. And then, miracle of miracles, Castiel was resurrected (or perhaps resurrected himself after Jack Reached out to him and woke him up), and in their own careful, private moment he finally had the courage to seize the moment and ask Sam to bond with him as his mate. And so Sam gained a piece of Castiel’s Grace to twine around his soul, and that was the tipping point for all the rest.
Grace, by and large, appeared on the visual spectrum to be a bluish white. On the greater sensory spectrum, Grace carried the imprint of the angel from which it came, which included the resonant frequency of the angel’s class, their hierarchy, and their Aspect. Lucifer’s Aspect had been Water, which had turned to Ice as the Darkness corrupted him from within, and his wings reflected that in their appearance, turning wings that were once a match to Michael’s scarlet into the pink and white seen in a flamingo. Michael’s wings, too, changed, going from scarlet to copper and rose as the two were pulled further and further apart by a destiny neither of them wanted but could not find the will to fight. Jack’s own wings were pale yellow, reflecting his sire’s Aspect in the paleness of their color, but most clearly showing his Imprint on Castiel, whose wings before his harrowing trips through Hell had stained them black once shone like burnished gold, nearly as bright and beautiful as the Archangel under whom he had first served before Gabriel had fled from Heaven.
With so much Grace fused to his soul, it only stood to reason that the morning after bonding with Castiel (and consummating that bond for several hours after) when Sam woke up to feel his back aching, it wasn’t just from the physical aspect of their bonding. Nor were the wings he could see stretched out over his and Castiel’s naked bodies just the single, somewhat damaged pair of blackened wings he had become used to seeing just over Castiel’s shoulders. He could even be forgiven the initial alarm upon seeing that second pair of wings that caused him to fall out of the bed with a yelp as arms and wings both flailed about in an awkward and mostly futile attempt to catch himself. Even if the sudden absence of his mate against his side had not awakened Castiel, the noise Sam made would have done it, and a tousled head of dark hair appeared over the side of the bed with wide blue eyes staring down at his sprawled out mate, hard muscle and scarred skin a direct and entirely too enticing contrast to the pristine, newly sprouted sunset orange wings half curled around Sam’s prone form.
“Are you okay?” Castiel asked, although he knew the answer. Years of living among humans, and the Winchesters in particular, had given Castiel some insight into why humans would ask these seemingly foolish questions with obvious answers. Lacking the natural telepathy common among angels, the verbal inquiry was as much to alert the person being asked that the one asking cared enough to express concern. As bonded mates, he and Sam shared a mental bond as well as a spiritual bond between Sam’s soul and Castiel’s Grace, but Castiel was familiar with the contentious history surrounding Sam’s psychic powers – contention that Castiel was ashamed to admit he had contributed to under Heaven’s orders – and so had decided the night before to utilize the more human manner of communication while Sam became accustomed to their connection.
Now, however, it seemed that he and Sam both would need to become accustomed to more than either of them had previously supposed or even expected, and Castiel was more than a little concerned for how Sam would react. The startlement was probably to be expected, and the lack of screaming or profanity was cautiously reassuring. Then again, considering the way Sam was blinking up at him, it was entirely possible that his beloved was in shock.
“I have wings,” Sam said after a long moment, his words slow and precise as if he were testing the fit of them on his tongue. The corners of his mouth twitched down and his lips thinned as his eyebrows drew together in confusion, which seemed to indicate that the words were not making sense to Sam’s mind regardless of their accuracy. He tilted his head back a little bit further to meet Castiel’s eyes. “I have wings?”
“It would appear so, yes,” Castiel confirmed, giving a cautious nod. Sam mimicked him, nodding slowly as he stared up at the sweeping curtains of orange feathers curling around him.
“Well, fuck me,” he said at length.
It was a statement of resignation and dismay. Castiel knew that, knew perfectly well that it was not actually an invitation. However, staring down at the glorious expanse of bare skin of the body he had spent several hours worshipping as only one can when worshipping a mate, framed and unintentionally displayed by the curves of healthy, full-plumed wings as glorious as could have been found on any angel before the Apocalypse and all the troubles thereafter, Castiel found himself responding with a raised eyebrow and a deliberately even-toned, “Again? Well, if you insist….”
Sam’s resulting blush was just as attractive as the rest of him.
For my birthday this year I am asking, if you are able, to donate to To Write Love On Her Arms…
From their website (twloha.com):
To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire, and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.
Since my Sam spam has apparently turned off some followers enough to leave, I say unto them:
Why were you even here?
Did people actually unfollowed you?! …. they were crazy weren’t they?!
Nobody in their right mind would unfollow someone as nice as you!
No, they were normal. That’s why they left.
Good riddance in that case. Only the perfectly insane fit in here 😀
(You’re too sweet for your own good, my love 😘)
During your Sam spam I just kept looking at my dash with heart eyes. So it was a nice spam and good riddance to them.
A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE HATERS IN THE BACK, BABY!!!
I’m sorry am I getting this right? They left because you kept posting pics and gifs of the beautiful and delicious Sam/Jared?
Like I said. They’re normal pleebz who don’t appreciate art 🤷🏻♀️😏😂
I may throw a few tantrums when there’s a lot of Sam spam… but that’s only because I’m trying really hard to stay a Dean!girl… Jared’s face is making that hard, though…
My intention to my spams is to share what I love. And that is Sam Winchester. To me, in order to convert Dean/Cas/etc girls into Sam girls, I’d have to care that much. But I don’t. Love what you love ❤
Karate, SPN Demonic Octopus Guardian 