went through my heart at her expression as she looked down at the tiny baby she was holding.
Before I could peer any closer, I felt myself shift in midair, reality warping around me.
I slid onto another fragment of Chain, the links pulling me away from these old memories I had no recollection of.
I was ripped backwards, away from the hospital and the houses and trees, and into another time and place.
The leaves of Earth were painted in warm golds and rich oranges, piling up along the cracked pavement of streets. A girl with long black hair looked up at the sky, shielding her eyes against the glare of the autumn sun. The woman with the loving face was only steps behind her. “Rebecca-” she said, and then her voice was cut off, as though a pane of glass had slammed down between me and them,
My stomach flipped as the Chain reversed again, pulling in yet another incomprehensible direction.
Olive drab. Marching legs. Waving flags of red, white, and blue.
I remembered this, a little.
They were all so young, these new recruits. All the human soldiers marching down the street, their parents cheering madly for them. They thought they were going to make a difference, to give up some of their years to honorable service and come home.
There was the little girl again, an adult this time, her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun, her cheeks still full from being well-fed and happy.
I wasn’t sorry when the Chain pulled me away, far from this memory that ended in nothing but heartache and despair. But it wasn’t over yet.
Olive drab. Camouflage, netting, dark oily guns in soft, unproven hands.
The sky was no longer blue. The young soldiers, hardly more than children the longer I saw them, falling by the dozen. The last line of defense as the sky went black with ash, as the sound of Heaven’s trumpets deafened them and made blood pour from their ears, the screaming… the distant flare of red on the horizon of the mass bonfires where they burned the bodies.
They were all starving now, their cheeks gaunt. Their eyes were no longer innocent, glazed and distant as they aimed and fired at an enemy they’d never be able to kill.
The Chain pulled me upwards, away from the battlefield where we’d lost all hope. Into the sky, no longer blue but forever choked with ash and flame, and away from the stench of the burn-pits.
It was terrible to see the Earth this way, from high above. The Horsemen were riding, Conquest cutting his way ever closer, War herding the dregs of humanity with his dogs, Pestilence walking through cities and people dropping around him, and Death… he was ahead of the others with his scythe, reaping the souls that stood there like dumb sheep and stared at their doom riding them down.
It’d been hopeless, all of it.
The Chain yanked me through time again. The forts were gone, the land scorched black, and not even vultures came to circle the air over the killing fields.
The angels descended with a brilliance that cut through the destruction and illuminated how terrible it had been. I watched Gabriel stoop over a woman’s body, peer into her face… and smile as he pulled her silent, numb soul forward and into a new shell.
The new angel blinked at him, her black hair like pitch against the snowy white of her new wings.
“Don’t-” I tried to whisper, but my mouth wouldn’t work. The Chain kept my words bound inside my throat; this was the past, a place where I couldn’t interfere.
He took the angel’s hand and flew upwards, and the Chain dragged me after them.
Somewhere in the back of my dazed mind, I wondered if it would skip away from the history I knew and show me the past I hadn’t been alive for… the cursed slice of time when God was killed.
For a moment I thought I’d gotten my wish; there was no sign of myself or Gabriel, and the gleaming gold and ivory towers of Heaven were nothing compared to the tower in the center. The throne room of God.
I held my breath, waiting for the horrible moment when Gabriel had ensured humanity’s destruction.
But I saw nothing except chains. Golden chains spiraling from the tower in every direction, connected to everything… and then I was falling again.
Downwards, another steep plummet like my fall, the wind whipping tears into my eyes and my hair behind me like a comet.
I forced myself to keep