“That was a waste,” they admonished. “How much of your Light did it take to rescue those people?”
“It wasn’t a lot…” the angel demurred.
“Nevertheless.” The archangel scowled. “You knew they were nonbelievers. You knew you would not be getting that Light back.”
The lesser angel could not help but object. “What was I to do? Leave them to die in a flood we caused?”
“Yes! That is precisely what you must do! Not a single one of those wretches gave even one prayer of thanks, you know that? Not one! That Light is gone forever!”
She knew she was diminished by the unrewarded expenditure, but the next time the angel left the Heavenly Plane, she hardly felt different.
So she didn’t behave any differently. Well, except for being a bit more discreet, perhaps.
A miraculous recovery from illness, a fire that took no life, a spooked horse whose kick narrowly avoided striking someone. Who cared who they worshipped? If she could help, she felt obligated to. How could she leave them to death or injury when she could save them?
In a bridge collapse one day, she managed to get everyone to safety, but it took a lot out of her.
A smattering of thankful prayers were offered up, restoring some of her precious Light, but afterward she started to really notice all that her labors had taken out of her.
Short flights left her winded. Minor miracles made her sweat with effort. The glow of her halo was visibly dimmer when compared to another angel.
The others worried, but she solved that problem by avoiding them. The dimmer her Light, the easier the shadows hid her too.
The flight back home was getting challenging anyway.
But it didn’t become genuinely distressing until two people died and one injured because stopping an avalanche had become a miracle beyond her abilities to perform.
At least she was able to bring help for the injured one.
She couldn’t be everywhere or do everything, so she settled down in one place to help from the shadows in small ways.
She could listen when someone needed a sympathetic ear or take bread to hungry mouths.
She gave what she could. Often even more. How could she not?
If a child stricken with illness would die without help, and if a shard of halo, crushed into medicine, was the miracle cure they needed, how could she do otherwise than to offer such a thing joyfully?
And an angel’s feather was a powerful charm against misfortune.
Besides. The people here may not have believed in her god, but they believed in her, and she could not bear to let them down.
Even after she had no more halo to give, and her wings withered into useless, featherless nubs, she gave her time and what meager strength she had.
For a while, it was enough.
But her god was always a jealous god, and a town free of disaster—one that did not even worship his Light, at that—was a stain that needed to be cleaned.
When the flooding and fires and devastating storms struck, she knew what was happening.
She also knew how best to prepare. The Heavens were predictable, and she had been in one place for over a century.
There were already shelters and contingencies, and even without Light she was never more in her element than during a crisis.
They trusted her. They listened.
They weathered crises that brought other places to their knees. Where others begged for relief, her people endured.
However, an angry and jealous god would never just give up.
Divine retribution was the only possible response for defiance like theirs.
Few methods to smite a place could ever be quite so dramatic as the Flood of Light.
The ex-angel had never seen it done before, but she had heard of it. Pure Divine Light, too much for any halo to hold, too much for anything to endure, pouring from the mouth of a god.
It would wipe this place and everyone who lived here away completely.
She watched the sky open in exactly the way it never should. She peered directly into the Heavenly Plane for the first time in centuries.
She was filled with a feeling entirely unlike a longing for home.
She witnessed her old god’s fury and matched it with her own.
How dare the Divine attack her and her charges?
How dare Heaven’s Divine Light demand so much worship without earning it?
While all the sky’s Light pulled itself to that gap in the sky, poised to pour upon her home, all the world’s Shadow gathered in support of her.
These people never believed in that god in the sky.
But they believed in her.
Their belief filled her with something entirely unlike the power that once did.
The Light of Heaven fell upon them, a flood to wash them all away, a god’s infinite wrath.
She swallowed it all in Darkness. Destroyed it. Inverted it. Fed on it.
She had spent many lifetimes giving everything and suddenly felt wild, hungry desperation to take something for herself.
The attack ceased. The town was safe.
She wasn’t done.
On glorious new wings of Darkness she ascended.
Heaven scrambled an army to stop her, a swarm of angels descending to halt her furious charge.
Black tendrils—writhing like serpents of Shadow—reached out and grabbed each one that approached, cracking them open, emptying their Light into her ravenous, fanged mouth.
Still she rose.
A phalanx of archangels arrived, forming a line against the dark and hungry new goddess. Like stabbing at a hole, their spears touched nothing when thrust into her.
She swallowed them too, continuing her rise.
A god may not be so easily killed, even by another, but her steps permanently darkened the Heavenly Plane, and when she broke the Divine One’s throne, it sent the message she desired.
A goddess of Darkness is not one to be taken lightly, and she protects her children.