Chapter Text
It felt like he'd been struck by lightning. (Not that he had ever experienced lightning, but what else could possibly be compared to a pain so direct and so horrible?)
His entire body jerked backwards to his left, in conjunction with another burst of agony from his wing. His throat suddenly felt painfully raw, as if he'd screamed far too loudly, but he couldn't hear anything over the deafening static in his head.
A frantic look over his shoulder revealed the cause: his wing was speared. A weapon he didn't even recognize was impaled completely through the limb; a long slender shaft with a wickedly sharp tip, viciously hooked at the end to keep it from coming back out, and the whole thing glowed white-hot with powerful magic.
Another flash of pain drew his gaze further behind him, and he realized with sinking horror that the weapon was attached to a cable, the other end leading to an unfamiliar object clutched in Two's claws which must have launched the thing at him. And now, it was reeling him back in.
He didn't have time to think about it. He'd already wasted too many precious ticks just to understand what had happened. Bright pulses of magic were already flashing an alert within the temple– he would be swarmed in moments if he didn't act now.
His right arm crossed over to force the wing forward, while his left reached behind him to grip the weapon shaft from the back. Before any secondary preservation instincts had the chance to kick in,
he ripped the thing out.
Flying on a wing with a hole torn out of it was torture. Time and worlds passed by him in brief flashes– there was no way to know if he'd been traveling the void for seconds or for hours. His mind snapped randomly in and out of lucidity, at times so overwhelmed by the pain and adrenaline that he couldn't even remember why he was running.
Just often enough, though, he came back to himself with the awareness needed to course correct. Not that he really knew where he was going… it was more like following a compass needle, if compasses were powered by a cocktail of gut feelings, dark magic, and shadows of memories inherited from a dead person you'd never met.
But something was starting to feel right. He was rapidly approaching a single world that seemed somehow different from the others he'd passed along the way, and it felt like his heart was singing. Or, not his heart, but… something hidden inside of it.
He slammed into the edge of the world and dug into it as hard as he could. Fiery pain raced up his arms as he frenetically clawed his way through layers and layers of security and firewalls, the jagged edges he was creating digging harshly into his existence and scraping against his exterior code as he forced himself in. There couldn't be much time left. Some way or another, he'd stayed ahead of his pursuers, but he knew they could only be seconds behind him.
The innermost firewall held him in it like molasses, refusing to let him continue or escape, even as his movements become increasingly desperate. Finally, finally, his fingertips caught ever so slightly on the tiniest gap in the system's logic, and with a last push of all the force he could summon he tumbled forward through the barrier into a bright blue sky.
His body was wracked with a shudder of relief as air– air!– whistled past him, his senses beginning to grow distant. As he let himself fall, the Angel's eyes finally slipped closed.
They wouldn't open again for nearly two weeks.