Falling Feathers (Angels)

• Madelin Creighton, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2015

They fell.

One by one they were cast apart from the others and were hopelessly falling through the soft, almost non-existent vapour around them. The vapour separated, not daring to touch them, knowing they were now outcasts from the others. They were cursed.

The once welcoming clouds raced away from them and didn’t offer the protection of catching them, which they had once been so dedicated to do. They were no longer carried by the wind, but were simply falling with no trace of their past left for them to cling to.

White pureness was all they knew. It was all they were.
Blue emptiness was all they saw. It surrounded them.
Black eternity was all they dreaded. It suffocated them.
Red streams of sacred blood was where their demise began. It ended them.
Gold flames was their fear. It tormented them.
Angels wings was where they came from. They belonged to the Heavens.

They did not feel. They saw nothing. They only had the faint vision of blankness that was now their mind, and memories which had been disintegrated as soon as they leaned too far over the edge. Their age and knowledge had dared them to wonder ‘What else is there for us? What feelings are out there that we do not know of?’

That is what caused them to fall. They dared to dream. They dared to wonder if there was more to their endless life.

They reached for the air around them which they had once commanded without a thought. Facing the sky from which they had fallen, they didn’t sense the harsh earth below them until their only connection to all that they knew was crushed to nothing but charred and unrecognisable dust: their eyes looking towards the Heaven from which they had fallen.