The wind howled like a starving animal across the wastes.
Berou didn't flinch.
He walked barefoot through dust and shattered stone, blood crusted to his chest, dried tears caked into the edges of his jaw. The mark of the Abyss still burned across his back — a brand that pulsed with rejection.
Exiled.
Discarded.
Feared.
He hadn't eaten in days. Sleep came only in fits, haunted by flashes of blades and bone and the girl's voice whispering from beneath the grave they'd dug with silence.
He should have died.
They expected him to.
Out here, nothing lived for long — especially not broken angels.
But Berou didn't die.
He kept moving.
One step. Then another. Until pain felt like memory, and memory became armor.
He found a ruin on the seventh night. What was once a chapel — now collapsed and overgrown with rot. Its walls bore carvings of old gods, long since abandoned by the divine.
He collapsed beneath a broken archway, staring at the ceiling as if it owed him something.
And that's when it started.
The pulse.
A slow thrum beneath his skin, like metal heating in a forge. His bones ached. His vision blurred. His wings twitched violently — feathers falling out in clumps, replaced by sharp, jagged protrusions of blackened bone.
His breath hitched.
Not fear. Not agony.
Change.
The kind that doesn't ask permission.
He clutched his head as whispers flooded him — not voices, not exactly. But pieces. Feelings. Angles of thought that didn't belong to him. Memories from something deeper, older. Buried in his blood. Buried in the fire that had always lived behind his silence.
He saw himself in the chapel's shattered glass — eyes glowing faint red, his silhouette twitching with new weight.
And then—
Armor.
It didn't descend.
It crawled over his limbs — summoned not by spell, but by hate given form. Metal without origin, forged by the furnace of abandonment. It wrapped around his arms first. Then his chest. Then the roots of his wings, like it had always been waiting.
He screamed.
Not from pain.
But from recognition.
He was becoming something else.
Something worse.
Something truer.
And the Abyss hadn't killed him.
It had unleashed him.
When he woke the next morning, the armor was gone — retracted back into nothing. But it had left marks. Black veins spread down his arms like ink. His eyes no longer looked like his own.
He stepped out into the lightless dawn, and for the first time, he didn't feel lost.
He felt aimed.
They thought exile was an ending.
But it was only prelude.
The Apostate was stirring.
And he had not forgiven the world.