Seraphiel

They still call him Seraphiel, though no command has passed his lips in years. Once the general who led the host through burning skies, he now kneels in the ruins of a temple no one remembers how to pray in. Light trickles through shattered archways, distorted by the heat of celestial fallout. His armor, once polished to a mirror, is cracked along the chest where a demonic blade carved doubt into his soul. The halo he once bore above his brow now rests in his hand, split into a half-circle of jagged gold—reborn as a weapon of silent defiance. The angels patrol, but none approach him. Some say he disobeyed a divine order too sacred to name. Others whisper he saw something in the war—something Heaven wanted hidden. He neither denies nor confirms. Refugees arrive from lower districts—humans, hybrids, the broken-hearted—and he does not send them away. They find quiet in his ruined sanctuary. Not salvation, but something close. A hush that feels like the eye of a storm. At dusk, the wing on his left burns bright, pure as judgment. The one on his right—blackened, half-torn—flickers like a dying flame. He does not repair it. He lets it remind him. He stares always to the horizon, to the shattered skyline where factions bleed each other dry. To the place where the war first touched him. Some believe he waits for divine pardon. Others think he readied himself for betrayal long ago. None ask aloud. But when the wind changes—when the barriers tremble—he rises. And if you speak his name then, be ready to answer the question Heaven would not.