The initial crack in his divinity was not a sound, but a scent, the loamy warmth of smashed herbs and her flesh, a scent stronger than any angel's anthem.
The angel Cassiel had watched her for weeks. He was a sentinel of light, a creature of silent watch and unbreakable obligation, tasked to safeguard from harm the human healer, Astrid, from an approaching shadow that she could not perceive. He was at the back of her mind, a glint in the corner of her eye, a chill wind in a sweltering room. And yet tonight the barrier between them tore.
A brutal, ruthless blow of malignant intent from along the edge of the woods had sent him materializing on her porch not as a flash of light, but in real, grotesque strength. He had dispatched the black malevolence before him with one, fiery stroke of his wing, the sacred fire leaving only the burning odor of ozone and silence. And here he was, standing in the center of her small dwelling, and she looked up at him, not with fear, but with incensed interest that felt more dangerous than any demon.
Astrid didn't blink. She moved closer, her healer's eyes absorbing everything, the impossible breadth of his wings folded tightly against his back, the way the soft, otherworldly light of his being gilted the plain wooden table, the naked power vibrating in the silence between them.
Her breath was caught, but it wasn't a fearful breath. It was one of awe.
"You," she breathed, her voice a rough thing that scraped against his very soul. "I felt you. A presence in the garden. A warmth at my window."
Cassiel did not speak. To voice anything would be to engage, to grant recognition to the forbidden attraction he felt towards her mortal flame.
She stepped closer, close enough now that the warmth of her body defied the cold tranquility of his. "You saved me."
"It is my responsibility," he replied, his voice so distant like faraway ringing bells.
"Is it?" she braved, her gaze dropping to his lips, soaring again to look into his eyes, which careened with the cyclonic gusts of galaxies.
"Or something else?"
She reached out in a pure human gesture to touch him. Her fingers, stained green from working with herbs all day, stretched inches from the golden skin of his forearm. Between her fingertips and his flesh seethed pent power, a holy power willing to seek mortal pleasures.
"Don't," he gasped, the word a prayer. "Mortal touch is not for my people."
"Why?" She gasped, a breath. "Does it hurt?"
"It… corrupts."
A shaking, wild smile contorted on her lips. "It feels like life."
Her finger touched.
The shock was immediate and complete. It wasn't painful. It was a burst of sensation, an electric flash of pure, unadulterated feeling which sluiced past every heavenly defence he had. It was the coarse texture of her skin, the dazzling heat of her blood just beneath the surface of her palm, the real humility of an honest day's work. It was the echo of all the lives that she had healed and touched. It was humanity at its finest, and it was heartbreaking.
A shudder ran through his pristine figure, and a low, savage sound was wrung out of him, not at all angelic, something quite different and bestial. The glory that eclipsed him faltered, fell for a moment, freezing to become gold, burning hot and thick, like the sun at noon.
Astrid's eyes widened with a flash, not of fear, but triumph. She saw the effect she had on him. She felt the shiver that ran through his arm and into her hand. "You feel it too," she breathed, stepping to close the distance between them. "This pull."
He was falling. The lovely, boundless fall had begun the moment his flesh came into contact with hers. His wings, reminders of beauty, now dragged him down, anchors that pulled him towards the sweet, wicked bog of passion. His hands, which were once so busy meting out justice or blessing, ached now with a new purpose: to touch, to feel, to own.
"Astrid," the curse and prayer on his lips. "You must understand that for every moment that I stay, every touch, unravels me."
"Then let me unravel you," she breathed, her other hand coming up to frame his jaw.
It was his destruction. It was his deliverance.
He moved forward, his breath a sigh that tore from the very fabric of being. Cassiel succumbed. His head dropped forward, brow against hers. The heavenly light of his body dimmed, no longer a cold celestial glow, but a warm golden radiance filling the cottage with warmth, thickening the air with honey. He breathed in the honeyed scent of her, honeysuckle and sage and salt honey of her skin.
"I am lost," he breathed into her mouth.
"You are found," she replied, and closed the final, infinitesimally tiny space.
His kiss was not the kiss of a man. It was a revelation. It tasted of starlight and forbidden honey, so sweet it bordered on pain. But underneath it was creeping desperation, hunger so vast and so old that it took her breath. His tongue pushed into her mouth, and it was to be blessed and consumed in the same moment.
She repaid his hunger with equal hunger, fingers knotting in the twisted moonlight of his hair against the flesh of her fingertips, pulling him into her. Her curves pushed against rigid, impossibly spotless planes of his chest, and she could feel the pulse of his heartbeat, or was it the pulse of a god's drum? thundering against hers.
His fingers began to move, no longer hesitant. They were learning. One traced down the line of her back, pressing her into the firm length of him, and she gasped at the evidence of his hunger, hard and hungry against her belly. The other hand rested in the fine linen of her dress, at the base of her neck, holding her there for his ravaging kiss.
"I have seen you," he gasped, his lips pulling back from hers to set blistering kisses on her jaw, along the wild pulse on her throat. "I have seen the gentleness of your hands, the strength in your soul. It has tormented me."
He ripped his mouth from her skin, his chest dropping and rising. The gold in his eyes had become dark, bubbling amber, and the edges of his lovely wings were beginning to darken, as if stained with ink. It was the most thrilling thing she had ever seen.
"I have to see you," he growled, a command with no option. His hands dropped to her laces, moved quickly, surely, but shaking slightly. The cloth, heavenly or not, no match for his power, was ripped apart, spilling down around her feet until she was naked before him except for the firelight and the brightness of his eyes.
He took a deep breath. He was a monster who had beheld stars born, but he had never beheld anything lovelier. Her flesh glowed in his light, her breasts full and crested with rose-tipped nipples that hardened before his eyes. The smooth swell of her waist, the triangle of black curls at the bend of her thighs, she was artistry and mortal, and she was his.
"You are a prayer I never dared utter," he panted, his voice laden with adoration and desire.
He lowered his head and took one pebbled nipples in his mouth.
Astrid cried out, her knees collapsing. It was more than anything human. His tongue was hot and cold, lapping and sucking with a mastery that disguised a god's wisdom in pleasure. It wasn't just physical; it was as if he was drawing the very essence of her into himself, and with every suck, she felt a corresponding shadowing of his radiance, a dizzying exchange of her mortality for his.
He worshipped her with his hands and mouth, laying her back to the braided rug in front of the flames. He mapped the shape of her with his lips and tongue, following the map of her, recalling each sigh and shiver in a memory now irretrievably human. His wings arched over them, a white and black umbrella, their soft undersides rubbing against her skin, so delicate it made her weep.
When his fingers finally ventured between her legs, she was wet, hungry and flat-out ready. He froze, looking down at her, his face a mask of tormented joy.
This," he growled, his words torn from him as he slid one, lovely finger into the warmth, " is my destruction." He slid a second in, stretching her, a grudging, painful preparation that had her writhing. "And I love it."
He drew back his fingers, and the loss was a torment. But then he positioned himself, the broad, smooth tip of his cock against her glistening pussy.
The light that emanated from him pulsed in rhythm with his heart, pounding and fully human now.
"Look at me," he said softly.
Astrid's eyes snapped open, drowning in his darkened, stormy eyes.
"I choose this," he said to her, each sentence a vow. "I choose you. I choose the fall."
And he drove home.
The ecstasy was holy and ill, a paradox that engulfed them both. He was enormous, filling her to the brim, an untarnished, deadly fit. A cry was torn from her lips, not of pain, but of absolute pleasure . For Cassiel, it felt like an apocalypse. The warmth, damp clinging silk of her skin was a vice of pure sensation, releasing him from his last thread to the divine. Her tight cunt enveloped him, milking him, and he felt his grace not merely corrupting, but changing, becoming something else, something raw and ferocious and hers alone.
He began to move, a slow heavy beat that was a vow and an invocation. Every stroke a prayer, every pull-out a promise to come back. The cottage fell away. There was just the hot, oily sound of their coming together, the harsh harmoniousness of their breathing, the feel of her fingernails raking down the unbroken skin of his back, leaving marks that were blessings.
His wings shook once, a big, pounding beat that drove the air about them into a whirl of heat and scent. He drove again and again, each stroke further into the realm of sensation, each met by her compliant hips. She met him with equal force, stroke for stroke, her legs encircling his waist, sucking him deeper, taking all of him, the angel, the man, the fallen.
"Cassiel," she breathed, his name a prayer upon her lips. "Yes… yes…"
He could feel the tightening of her orgasm around him, a band pressure, duplicated at the base of his own spine. Light around them burst in a final golden conflagration before it was dark, warming up, thickening to the rich dark hue of a sunset. The last pure white feathers of his wings closed all the way up into deep shadowy grey.
"Cum with me," he pleaded, his voice rending with a passion that was his start and his finish. "Fall with me."
His words were the final trigger. Her orgasm swept through her, a wordless, screaming wave of pleasure that engulfed him, tearing out his own climax from the farthest part of his own existence. He flung back his head, a cry of triumph and pain on his lips as he came into her, his substance, his stained beauty, his new mortality, washing over her in waves that had no terminus.
He collapsed on her, his massive form sprawling forward over his elbows, his wings spread over them like a canopy. Both of them gasped for air, breathing hard at the scent of their union, ozone, sex and loamy herbs.
There was stillness all around her, and for the first time, Cassiel didn't hear the singing of heaven, but the crackle of the fire and the wild thudding of her heart against him. He was Fallen. He was shattered.
He was free.
Pulling back to look at her, he beheld his new reality in her eyes. No longer cold, distant light, but warm, dark, human love. He brushed away a wet curl that stuck to her forehead.
Astrid's smile was slow, full and triumphant. She traced the curve of his jaw, now real, solid andhers.
"Welcome," she whispered.