We were not going to win this fight.

How could we know this is what would become of us? All the suffering. The freshly plucked feathers from dead angels littered the ground, it made such a disturbing sight, as the sky of Heaven had finally heralded a newborn, dark night. A bloody night, where demon and angel alike had bodies in gruesome piles, smoldering in the face of the Gates.

All of our dreams, all of our faith was just a polished and well-kept glass inside a mirror, reflecting only our happiness; until it was shattered beyond repair. There is no going back in time. I wanted it to end. The wounds that we carried were beyond that of physical tangibility.

You can't change the past. Was it my fault, that I had brought so many innocents to their deaths? These younglings, who were clean and naked from the sins of their forerunners, was it my fault I had brought them to the gates of death?

No. This was their war, our war, my war. From the day they were born, it was written with their own blood in scrolls dusty and forgotten in our record-keeping. They were only chained to a story, they were only numbers out of the countless numbers of those who had lived, and there would be others taking the same footsteps, breathing in that same rattled, frightened breath--with knowledge that each sight, each sound, might be their last moments to be living.

I was cut off from the world. When it was my time, I was frightened. I knew Ameh was waiting for me, but I was leaving the lives of others, with so many more important futures and more endless suffering they had to endure. Who said it was my time to depart, to enter a long journey in which I would never be able to look back again? But my spirit knew, as any living being does, that things circle through in the end. And the Fallen would rise again, and those who were cleaved by the words of Justice and Peace would rejuvenate.

There is always a knowledge of those who struggle between the Light and the Dark. Those who walk in the light, must be careful to tread around their own shadows, and the Darkness kneels at the foot of Light. Others, who dwell in the middle, see both, and will do nothing about either side.

We all Fall in the end, they say. They told me that life itself will be in ruins, that sin would prevail. But I knew they were wrong. I spread my wings, awaiting the trial of my own life.

With one last sigh, and closing my eyes from my dying body, and I departed from this world.

Azrael's thoughts about the afterlife and beyond.