In the mortal world, Uriel lived a life that felt like a cruel paradox. Every dawn was a beginning, every dusk an end. She woke each morning with no memory of the day before, the thread of her life constantly cut and re-tied in a loop she could not escape. Faces, names, and moments dissolved like mist before the sun. It was not an illness, but a safeguard, one she had crafted herself long ago as part of a chain of protective seals. If her Grace was ever compromised, she would not age, could not truly die, and would wake each morning untouched by the past.
Her immortality was not a blessing. It was a waiting room. A prison made of endless beginnings. And though her body was forever preserved in the prime of her celestial beauty, her soul was caught in an endless state of arrival, never allowed to arrive.
The villagers in the quiet town where she stayed called her "the lady by the river" and whispered of her uncanny youth. She kept to herself, tending gardens and humming unfamiliar tunes to the flowers. Some days, she laughed like a child. Other days, she sat for hours staring at the horizon, as though listening for something, or someone who never came.
But lately, things had changed.
Since the unsealing of Michael, Luca, and Gabriel's Grace, Uriel's memory was stretching further. A few days at first, then a week, and now, alarmingly whole months. The safety of her self-forgetting was breaking down. Sometimes she would wake with dreams clinging to her like wet clothes: fragments of faces, battlefields in the clouds, the echo of a voice calling her name. And each time, the ache in her chest grew heavier.
Far away, in a place untouched by mortal winds, Michael stood next to Luca in silence, his mind drowning in the avalanche of memories. It was Simon's voice, quiet but firm, that pulled him back.
"You know full well everything had to happen the way it did," Simon said. His tone was steady, though his eyes betrayed the wear of too many truths spoken to unwilling ears. "She had never seriously tended to the mortals before Luca fell. If anything, this… was good for her."
Gabriel's eyes narrowed, just for a heartbeat. Why does this sound so much like something Father would say? The thought came unbidden and vanished just as quickly, like a shadow slipping out of sight. Luca caught the flicker of emotion in Gab's face and shook his head slowly, in what looked like pity, or perhaps regret.
"Uriel's seals have been tampered with," Luca said at last. His voice carried the weight of finality. "It's not that she went too far with them. Her soul is tainted by the scent of Loki… and Buddha." He let the name linger, as though testing the air for the reaction it would provoke. "That Buddha had always been too interested in our affairs. It seems he took advantage of my absence to tinker with Uriel after she was sealed. He must have bypassed the safeguards on her Grace with Loki's help."
There was a pause.
Michael's brow furrowed. "Loki…?"
Luca's mouth tightened. "yes that Loki, Loki had been Valhalla's headache for centuries. A trickster, yes, but he had a heart of Gold, his pranks though cruel sometimes rewarded in the end, most distinguished rulers of mortal worlds were a result of Loki's tempering, his pranks had become akin to baptisms of some sort. He had his limits. He played games, bent rules, but never without purpose. His chaos had edges… boundaries. That was until he met Gabriel."
Gabriel shifted, his gaze fixed on some distant point.
"though i doubt it was betrayal," Luca continued, though there was something in his voice that suggested the line between truth and mercy was thin. "Loki wasn't destroyed by being wronged. He was destroyed by being… forgotten. Cast aside without malice, without ceremony. Just left to rot in the shadow of someone else's story."
At the mention of this a memory surfaced in Gab's mind
Valhalla, in those days, was a hall of roaring fires and iron laughter. Loki had been in his element, playing tricks on the warriors, outwitting the All father in harmless wagers, bringing chaos but also joy to the mead-drenched nights. He was a storm in human skin, but he had a strange affection for the order he disturbed.
It was on a winter's night that Gabriel arrived, his presence bending the air around him. Cloaked in white and gold, his steps silent on the oak floors, he drew every eye without trying. Loki saw him from across the hall and grinned.
"You're far from home, winged one," Loki had said, leaning back on his bench. "Looking for a fight, or a story?", Loki had never met an Angel before but he had heard about them from both his fathers, and in every story, they spoke of how heartless and powerful they were, especially the Arch Angels, the worst of them could go toe to toe with Ancient Gods in a fight and not loose, "never provoke those thing my son, not unless your brother is with you, even then tread with caution", in one of the rare occasions Odin the all father would say.
But Loki was never one to be told what to do, with a glance he could tell that the being across the room was indeed powerful, he wagered he was even more powerful than Odin and his father(Farbauti) combined, the illusionary bright blue wings to his back that seemed to disappear and appear with every breath made it easy to peg him as one of the fabled Angels. When Loki looked into the angel's eyes, he felt a strange pull deep inside him. It wasn't something he could explain in words, but it was strong, almost magnetic. In that moment, he knew without doubt, that the being standing across the room was like him in some deep and hidden way, as if they were made from the same cloth, carrying the same fire in their souls.
Gabriel's smile was slight, inscrutable. "Maybe both."
What followed was a whirlwind of months, traveling through mortal realms and spirit halls alike, playing games of wit and daring, challenging each other's cleverness. Loki, who had once kept his tricks within certain lines, found those lines shifting under Gabriel's influence. The angel seemed to move through the world with a kind of carelessness that was intoxicating. Rules bent not because they needed to be, but because it was possible.
And Loki, for the first time in an age, felt seen. Not as a nuisance to be managed, but as a companion worth engaging.
But somewhere along the way, Gabriel's attention wandered. Perhaps it was inevitable, Gabriel was not one to stay in any place, or with any soul, for long. The fire that burned so brightly in their shared days began to dim, not from anger, but from absence. Gabriel stopped laughing as much. He no longer sought Loki out at dawn for the next mad scheme. Days passed without his voice in the halls.
One night, in a frostbitten forest, they sat by a fire. Loki had been recounting an elaborate prank he'd pulled on a frost giant, expecting the familiar spark of amusement in Gabriel's eyes. But Gabriel was staring into the flames, distant.
"Something else on your mind?" Loki asked.
Gabriel didn't look at him. "I leave tomorrow."
The words were simple. They landed like a blade.
"Leave? To where?"
Gabriel shrugged. "Where I'm needed."
And that was all. No grand farewell. No promise to return. Just the quiet truth that Loki had been a chapter, not the story.
Loki did not rage. Not at first. He laughed, even mocked himself for expecting more. But the laughter didn't stick. The absence of Gabriel's presence in his days was like a missing limb. And so the boundaries he once kept began to crumble.
If Gabriel could move through the world untethered, then so could he. If bonds could be abandoned without thought, then so could morality. The tricks became crueller. The games, dangerous. No longer aimed to provoke laughter or build, but to break.
The moon hung low and swollen over the frostbitten peaks where Loki had taken refuge. The cold bit into his skin, but it was nothing compared to the emptiness clawing at his chest. His laughter, once a roaring fire in Valhalla's halls, was now a hollow echo lost to the howling wind.
Gabriel had left without a word, slipping away like a dream fading at dawn. No farewell. No promise. Just absence.
For nights, Loki wandered the empty forests, retracing every moment, every smile, every shared secret, trying to understand where he had lost his way. The bitter truth settled like frost in his bones: Gabriel had seen all there was to see in him and it had not been enough, and he was left behind.
One evening, near a quiet village nestled in a valley, Loki's sharp eyes caught sight of a group of children playing by the riverbank. Their laughter was pure, untarnished, a sound he once cherished but now felt alien to.
A bitter smile twisted his lips.
With a flick of his fingers, the river froze solid, cutting off their joyful game. The children's smiles faltered, confusion blooming into fear as the ice crept dangerously thin.
Loki watched, unseen in the shadows, as their carefree innocence shattered beneath the weight of his cruel amusement.
It was a small thing, harmless to most, but to him, it was the first spark in a darkness that would consume everything.
For the first time, his tricks were no longer just mischief. They were wounds.
And in that moment, Loki realized the truth he'd been running from: the absence of love was not an empty void, it was a hunger that devoured mercy itself.
He turned away from the frozen river, the cold now nothing compared to the ice forming around his heart.
The trickster was gone.
In his place stood something new. Something broken.
And the world would soon learn what that meant.
When Buddha came to Valhalla with his calm smile and cryptic words, Loki listened. Buddha offered puzzles and philosophies, but also… opportunities. And through Buddha's schemes came the path to Uriel, and the chance to corrupt something pure, perhaps as revenge, perhaps as proof that Gabriel had left something behind worth regretting, to buddha there was no better candidate to tinkering with an arch angel than Loki, he had spent too much time with one to not have learned how Grace works and he had the motivation to boot.
Luca's voice brought them back to the present. "And now, Uriel pays the price. She is trapped, her soul caught in the crossfire of Ancient Gods and angels. And every day she wakes… she forgets why."
Michael's fists clenched, the weight of it pressing down on him. Gabriel said nothing.
But in the silence that followed, the air between them was thick with unspoken truths, about love given and withdrawn, about the fragility of loyalty, and about the long shadows left behind when someone simply walks away.