After Lucifer’s insurrection, God learned a lesson about mercy and punishment. When next an angel chose to cross Him, He did not give it the opportunity to seek succor or influence elsewhere. Instead He cast the angel from Heaven and into the wide ocean of the earth, where broken wings could no more lift the angel from its watery grave than carry it back to God’s domain. In cold black water the angel drowned, and thereafter God sealed its body in a casket of iron, a substance as anathema to angels as it is to the fae. The casket came to rest on the ocean floor, miles below the water’s surface, where only creatures that shunned all light and warmth could live. But God was not done, for He had no mercy left for the disobedient. He had cast the angel out, had drowned it in the salty waters, but He had not taken its immortality away. In its tomb beneath the waves the angel continually suffocated and continually resurrected, an agonizing cycle of death life death from which it could find no release.

Yet as God had once underestimated the force of the love of those angels who chose to remain at Lucifer’s side in exile, likewise He gave no account to how powerful the sacrifice of an angel might be, should it abandon its celestial home forever to free its kin. Yet love drove an angel to do just this, casting itself willingly from Heaven and into the dark depths of the ocean to break open the iron tomb. What it set free was no longer divine, though it wore the wings and immortality of its kind. No being, angelic or otherwise, could live and die a thousand thousand deaths and not retain a bit of each one’s darkness in its heart. On black wings it rose from its grave, a creature now of neither Heaven nor Hell, and promised retribution across all of God’s creation.