Imagine you are an angel in the first age of the world. Everything is young, eternal, immortal. You live in a universe of richness and beauty, a world of endless blue skies and bountiful greenery. Neither pain nor fear exist yet in this place for there has been no need for their creation; each being lives in harmony with every other thing.

Imagine you are an angel in the first age of the world and you have slain one of your own. Holy blood stains your hands and soaks a soil which has never before been tainted by such precious liquid. Holy breath struggles to fill pierced lungs, then ceases completely. Holy flesh cools beneath your trembling fingers and begins the slow sacrilege of decay, the first thing in all the wide world to succumb to the act of rotting.

Imagine you are an angel and you have brought death into the universe. With your own hand you have ended the first age of the world, the era of peace, and ushered in the era of suffering. Does it matter why you committed this first and greatest sin? Does it matter if you did it out of fear? Or wrath? Or love? Will you even be able to remember, ten thousand years from now?

And if not, will it still have been worthwhile?