2nd POV

For a long time, there was simply nothing. Just darkness surrounding you like an old friend, numbing the pain you had been subjected to. A cold reprieve from everything. It was just you, the shadows and eternal silence.

It took you a good few moments to realise you weren't dead. It certainly felt as if you were. Every muscle in your body ached, your head pounded and your wings must have gotten twisted at a bad angle when you fell, as they too hurt the moment you tried to move.

Slowly, you opened your eyes, squinting when light immediately assaulted them with its brightness. You groaned, gritting your teeth to push yourself up. You had landed in a cavern of some sort, your fall broken by a bunch of grass and flowers that seemed to grow down here, fed by the sunlight streaming in from above. Everywhere around you was dark, the rockface looking rigged and unclimbable, with sharp points sticking out of it that would surely cut your hand if you tried to touch it. In the shadows you could see a path deeper into the underground.

You looked yourself over for any wounds from the fall, noting with relief that there didn't seem to be any permanent damage, merely a few sore spots at worst. Your armour was gone, obviously, leaving you in the outfit you usually had under it. At least it meant you'll be comfortable and won't have your movement restricted by anything.

The biggest change in you, were your wings. You spread them out, wincing when the right one screamed in protest. You already knew it was sore on the elbow joint and the skin would probably be tender if you tried to touch it. Instead of the usual gold feathers with only the marginal coverts being white, you were met with black. Soot black primaries and secondaries, with ebony black coverts and alula.

It looked... hauntingly beautiful.

You ran your hand through your feathers as you thought what to do now. With the right wing bruised, flying would be too much of a risk. Even if you did manage to take off into the air, you had no guarantee it wouldn't give out on you and you'd rather not have a repeat of your fall. Besides, even if you could fly, God probably made sure you wouldn't be able to leave either way. They wouldn't have left you with your wings otherwise.

With a quiet sigh you straightened up, eyes landing on the way deeper into the mountain. At least you assumed you were now on the other side of the barrier, considering God's words before they banished you. With the thought of a possible meeting with a monster in mind, you pressed your wings tight against your body.

They began to shrink and shift, snaking around your entire back and turning into black lines in an outline of them that ran from your shoulder blades to just below your waist. All you had to do now was keep your back covered up and you should look like a normal human.

With that taken care of you started your trek into the mountain. The scenery shifted almost immediately, going from dark rocky surface to purple bricks. They looked a bit cracked, but still in a good shape, a few vines of ivy starting to grow on top of them. Most of the rooms contained some type of puzzle which baffled you -why have puzzles to leave a room?- but they were easy enough to solve and pass.

The only place that gave you any trouble was a room with spikes on the floor. You figured some of them were probably fake and you needed to find the right path through them, but the idea of stepping onto a wrong tile did not sound like something you'd like to deal with. Instead, you spread your wings for a moment and even with the pain in your right one, you managed to glide above the danger zone and land safely on the other side. Hiding them again, you continued on.

The deeper you went, the harder it became to avoid the monsters. You knew they'd probably not be thrilled to see a 'human' down in the mountain. It had been 30, maybe 40 years since the barrier had been raised, so there are probably still some monsters who remember the life on the surface and wouldn't hesitate to take their revenge on any person that winds up stuck in the underground too.

You know you'd probably want vengeance had you been in their situation.

Luckily for you, the monsters that lived in the area weren't that observant, which allowed you to slip past them unnoticed. You stayed in the shadows, pressed against the walls and corners as you walked, always scanning the terrain for a hiding spot in case you needed to make a split second decision.

Soon you found yourself in front of a giant house. It stood at the centre of the cavern, wide enough to reach both ends of it. In front of it was a lone tree with a hefty trunk and naked branches. None of the monsters seemed to go near it, so you decided it would be where you would go next. With some luck, it might even lead somewhere else.

To your surprise it was unlocked when you tried to open the front door. The inside was mostly barren, with a thick layer of dust -normal, not monster kind- forming on top of every surface. Seems nobody has lived in it for quite some time now. It meant that you could easily explore with no fear of being caught.

You didn't find much at first. It was a normal house like any other, with a small kitchen in the corner connected to a dining area mixed with a living room. It held an empty fireplace and an armchair, along with a long dinner table near one of the walls. The other side of the mansion had a long corridor, filled with empty bedrooms. Nothing remarkable in them either. There was a mirror at the end of the hallway though, so it allowed you to finally see yourself.

You didn't look as bad as you thought you would. There was no dirt on your face as you had feared there would be from the fall. Your (h/c) hair was a bit of a mess, but nothing that couldn't be fixed. You ran your hand through the strands to smoothen it out a bit and then turned around to go to the last place in the house.

The basement.

You walked down the stairs leading to it, finding yourself in a long royal purple corridor with absolutely nothing in it. It seemed to stretch on forever, each step filling you with more and more unease. Why would anyone have a single, long hallway in their basement? Especially one with a sharp corner? You peeked at what awaited you once you take the turn, expecting someone or something to be waiting there to lunge at you. There wasn't. Just more corridor with an open door at the end of it.

You raised your eyebrow and made your way towards it, noting with confusion that there seemed to be snow on the other side of it. How was it snowing under a mountain?

The cold air hit you the moment you got close and you shivered, your clothes not made for withstanding low temperatures.

Wait... shivered? Angels had a natural immunity to temperatures, so it wouldn't distract you in battle. Unless you were to be burning or freezing alive, you were not supposed to feel any shifts in heat.

The wind picked up when you passed the threshold and you immediately began to tremble from the cold, your breath coming out in a vapour because of it. The snow seeped through your shoes and wet the fabric of your clothes, making you wrap your arms around yourself to try and conceal any heat you could.

You hated this. Hated feeling the temperature. Hated how it made you have goosebumps on your skin, how it travelled through your entire body in mere seconds, how it left you with your teeth clattering. You wanted to wrap your wings around yourself so badly, use their warmth for comfort and shield yourself from the element. You couldn't though. It would be too risky. The monsters would probably be weary of a human, but an angel? You'd be lucky if they didn't kill you where you stand, especially if they were to find out exactly which one you were.

You didn't look where you were going as you walked and tripped on a lone branch. You landed on the ground, half buried in the snow. If you were cold before, you were absolutely freezing now. You wanted to just... not get up. The cold was unbearable, you were aching everywhere and now your clothes were soaked with the snow that melted against your body heat. It was all starting to be too much, too sudden. Barely a day ago you were one of the most respected angels in the God's army. A general so known that the humans had given you a title. You were the Golden Wing, a ray of hope for any person that saw you and now? Now, you were nothing, just a mess shivering on the floor.

You wanted to go home. Go back to your old life, to barely acknowledging the fact it's snowing, or that there's a heatwave. Back to having your wings always out and proud, because them being seen was a guarantee of respect, not a death sentence. You just... you just wanted the aching to stop.

Before you fell deeper into despair, an image popped into your head. God, their eyes cold and their smirk mocking, saying that they knew you'd break so easily and come begging on your knees to be taken back. That they expected you to turn back on your brief episode of empathy the moment you were subjected to anything remotely uncomfortable.

It made you angry. Not just angry, it made you furious, because it might as well have been true. Your punishment could have been death, but THEY chose to banish you instead. They were probably watching you right now, waiting for you to start praying to be taken back. They did it so they could break you and you were not going to give them the satisfaction of seeing it. You made your choice and you were going to live with it and live with it proudly. If the price to pay for not wanting to slaughter innocents was this, then you were going to take it with your chin raised high.

You will not surrender. Not to the likes of THEM.

With newfound determination burning in your veins, you got up from the snow, wiping it away from your clothes. You were hoping God was watching now, so that they could see first hand that whatever their plan was, it was going to fail.

You took off running down the road, hoping that doing so would warm you up. It helped a bit, but your endurance was still depleted from the fall, so soon you had to slow down to a trot. Everywhere around you were just trees, snow and more snow. It made it easier to hide though, staying in the shadows of the pines instead of the main path.

Beforelong you saw the first unique feature in this part of the underground. A giant crater separating two sides of the land with a small wooden bridge to connect them back up. You weren't going to risk spreading your wings out like you did in that spike room and so you had to abandon the relative safety of the forest to cross the gap.

Before you could reach the bridge however, you were engulfed with magic. Bright blue and strong, it picked you up easily, as if it had taken hold of your very soul. You found yourself unable to move, body frozen in the grasp of whoever has found you.

"don't try anything human."

Your eyes widened and you gulped, the voice coming from right behind you. The magic tightened its hold on you to an almost painful degree and you were starting to panic again. You were at the mercy of a monster. You could die if they so choose. It all could end right now and you wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. At least they thought you were human, which meant you had some chances of survival. Slim, but better than none if they knew of your true identity.

"why is your LV so high?!"

The accusatory tone did not help the dread snaking its way through your body. Even if the magic wasn't holding you still, you would have probably frozen in place anyways. Something so unbecoming of the fearless image you had built up around yourself.

When you didn't answer the magic lifted you higher off the ground and then you were whipped around to come face to face with the monster that grabbed you.

You were expecting many things, your mind coming up with different types of monsters powerful enough to use magic allowing them to keep someone in place, but what you saw didn't even cross your mind.

Because standing behind you, was a child.

"When all the love around you is dying-"

A/N

To anyone still confused about the timeline. It has been around 30/40 years since the war ended. The ruins are mostly abandoned because they were too small for all the monsters to fit in there, so New Home is already the main city where the royalty resides. They aren't ruins yet though, as they aren't locked away from the rest of the underground and monsters still live there without trouble.