Vaina rubbed her aching temples, a constant pulse ringing in her eardrums as she struggled to stand back on her feet. A moment ago, she was in The Middle Ground, and now she was shrouded amongst the shadows, with her recent memory a distant blur. An overwhelmingly pungent stench of decomposing carcasses had her nostrils shrivel before her eyelids managed to forcibly open to nothing but endless darkness.  

“Oh goodness, I’m really in Kaufernis now aren’t I…” she whispered to herself, holding onto the ends of her dress as she looked for any signs of an exit. 

She was thankful for the blinding luminosity of her white wings that illuminated her way out of the pitch blackness and found herself by the edge of a large stone gate that loomed over her. She observed the sky obscured by the gloomy blanket of clouds, barely allowing any flickers of light passing through it. It was far too bright to be Kaufernis, and definitely not extraordinarily unique to be The Middle Ground. She sighed in relief, and wiped the sweat that trickled from her forehead like raindrops racing against glass. She was back in Ylipeste, her home Realm. 

Vaina jumped as the Gate creaked open, slamming shut behind her. She noticed a dark-haired male silently approaching her in a rather menacing fashion, drenched from head to toe in a thick scarlet liquid that she could only assume to be the blood of his enemies. Somehow, the daemon broke into the Gate of Ylipeste, one of the most secure Gates amongst the Realms - or, used to be, until now. He had three wings, something she’d never seen nor heard of before, with half of them being daemon wings, and the other, a pitch-black angel wing. Angel wings were only ever created by her father in shades of pale whites or greys, leaving her to assume that the man had torn off a poor angel’s wing and drenched it into a pool of rotten blood or some other filth, and stitched it onto his back to wear as a trophy.

The subtle gleam of the steel blades adorned with an angel wing wrapped around the grips that sat in his sheaths caught her eye in an instant. They were vaguely familiar in her distant memories, but one thing was for certain - there was no way a daemon-winged fiend could wield Ylipesten weaponry. Without hesitation she lunged into the man, and reached for his sheaths in an attempt to recover the blades.

“You..! Those blades don’t belong to you!” she breathlessly exclaimed, endlessly grasping into the air as the man continued to step out of her reach. 

She heard him huff beneath his breath, almost mocking her, his irritating sneering gaze agitating her whilst she continued her fruitless attempts in retrieving the blades. How ruthless could he be, taunting an angel by using their own weapons against them? Her heart dropped for the poor angel he mercilessly slaughtered, leaving only deep sorrow and a raging anger to fuel her courage to fight against the brute.

“Ha, really… have you forgotten all about me already?” he snarled, side stepping away from her in a sequence akin to a foxtrot dance. “These blades have always been mine from the beginning.”

“A daemon like you cannot wield Ylipesten weapons,” Vaina stammered as she wrestled him, holding onto the back of his wing and reaching for the other blade. 

The man’s eyes lit up and smirked, watching her struggle from behind his shoulder. 

“Ho, a daemon. Not long ago you were just calling out to me.”

Vaina lifted an eyebrow and paused to take a good look at him. Was this daemon really speaking the truth, or were his words a mere distraction to strike her? The longer she held her gaze, the more his face moulded into something more vaguely familiar. His right eye carried a vibrant red iris adorned with a daemon pupil mark, along with a large vertical scar that etched through his light skin tinged with a slight brush of pink. Yet somehow, his other iris was definitely a murky Ylipsten grey, his pupil branded with the standard Ylipsten cross mark that all angels were created with. But that aside, beneath his darkened eyes, he was the young boy she knew so long ago.  

“...Renba? No, is it really you..?” she delicately asked, her voice barely audible in disbelief. The boy she sought for even beyond his death was in her reach, alive and well.

“It’s me,” Renatus reassured her, turning to face her.

She threw herself into him, embracing him tightly to not let him escape from her grasp again. “I thought you died so long ago…”

“And I thought the same for you,” he gently replied, accepting the rare instance of physical contact with another, the shared warmth not an icky sensation for once.

“Let’s catch up, somewhere - that isn’t out in the open,” she suggested, her touch still lingering from the embrace.

“After all, the trees have ears lately.”