One
The procedure was still fairly new when Jade Hillcrest was taken and tried in the High Court. It was deemed that her actions were too hideous to warrant the death penalty, as was common for crimes of this calibre. No, Jade was sentenced to something far worse.
The Tearing was brutal and, in Jade’s opinion, barbaric. The judge himself tore your wings off your back and tossed you to earth, to live a life of pain and suffering. Because suffer you did. The fall itself was dangerous enough, angels rarely survived it, but if you did, when you made it to earth, you were forced to live a bleak existence, cloaked in depression and misery.
If you thought you could take it upon yourself to change your life, you would only be proven wrong. The origin of the depression you felt ran so deep that nothing could cure it. There was nothing that could lift your spirits.
When an angel loses its wings, its spirit is broken and it’s faced with something it has never had to endure before. The intensity of which is more than any human has had to bear.
For seven months after her fall, Jade was crippled with despair, too filled with misery and hopelessness to rise from the ball on the floor she had become. Most days she stared into a blank expanse of nothingness, her mind and body numb and unfeeling. The wounds on her back slowly healed and became scars, there forever, unlike her wings. Jade didn’t know how anyone could possibly feel so helpless and desperate, seeing things in only several shades of black, like a night that never ended.
Jade was alone and broken. Nothing could fix the shattered remains of her heart.
~**~
Two years later, Jade still dreamed of that day. It’s presence haunting her unendingly. When it woke her again on the 7th of December, she didn’t cry like she normally would. She laughed. A high, shrill, maniacal laugh that would have woken the house if Jade had not been so desperately alone.
It was not yet sunrise, but Jade threw back the covers and showered before dressing in black and grey. Her clothing matched her mood, dark and unyielding.
The streets outside her small apartment were blanketed with snow, like an icy sheet, hiding the bitumen from the world. Jade wished the snow would hide her, but people always had a way of finding things that didn’t want to be found.
As Jade started on her thirty-minute walk to the college campus, she thought not of herself or her feelings, but of her family.
Her mother, who did nothing to defend her in court. Her sister, who she knew hated her from the day Jade was born. Her grandmother, who listened to the gossip of the youth and did nothing to set things right. Her brother, who was never home in the first place. And her father, the man Jade hated with every fibre of her being. The one thing that had only grown stronger with her depression. Her father, the man who tore the wings right off her back and threw her to earth, bleeding and dying.
