Like a lonely star fleeing the judgment of heaven, she flew.
Upward through the chilling cold of the night, her figure carving a luminous wound across the darkness as Hell's Paradise Island shrank beneath her into scattered lights, black forests and moon-silver cliffs.
One of her enormous wings shone white, pure and radiant, its feathers carrying a soft golden undertone as though some remnant of heaven still refused to leave her body despite every contract, every fall and every master who had ever dragged her name through obedience.
The other wing burned with a brilliant darkness, not dull or corrupted in the ugly way everyone imagined fallen things, but resplendent in its own terrible manner, black light spilling from it like midnight had learned how to gleam.
Together they made her look holy, unholy divine and condemned.
A bewitching contradiction of gold, white and shadow fleeing through the moonlit sky.
She flapped both wings once.
