I fled from where we had fought the great evil, where victory had been claimed.

I fled to the ruins of my once-great cathedral, lying now in ruins - though perhaps it was better that way; after all, the evil we had just defeated was the only one more awful than my own. I sat down atop my crumbling roof in human guise, laying my head in my hands in utter shame.

"You see now, don't you, brother?"

I lifted my eyes, fighting to keep the tears from escaping.

Sin stood beside me. In my current form, he easily towered over me, ashen grey skin and ebony wings casting me in shadow.

Fitting, isn't it? For eons I had been lost in madness, thinking myself greater than I was. Greater than my brother, and yet it was he who had cared for humanity, cared for my righteousness, cared at all.

It was Sin who had brought me back.

I tore my gaze from my younger brother's almost hypnotic eyes. I could see the blood of millions of innocent souls on my hands, hands that I had always sworn would only do good.

A broken oath from a shattered god.

My brother sighed and sat beside me, characteristically silent, and I knew he would not speak before I did.

"Please forgive me." My voice, barely a whisper, echoed nonetheless - a mirror of how my actions had led to massacres. "I know I don't deserve it but -"

Sin cut me off with a raised hand. "No matter what, we are still brothers. You ask my forgiveness, and freely I give it."

I didn't have time to question, to ask how.

"Innocence," Sin murmured, "what you never learned was that the difference between purity and corruption is if you want redemption - if you would use or if you would squander a second chance."

And how many sinners did I kill who wanted redemption - who would have appreciated a second chance?

I was crying now, openly, unable to hold the tears back. Sin wrapped one wing around me, tightly, briefly, and then he stood and left.

He wouldn't condemn me, I knew. Of everyone I had ever harmed, my brother was the last I expected to forgive me. And yet he had, at the same time as he rebuked me for my past actions.

Such was Sin.

Sin was something that could be forgiven, I realized that now. But you could never forget those crimes.

I will always remember. I have to.

I had not wanted Sin to see me in tears. And my brother, always the more empathetic of the two of us, had seen that and let me cry out my soul in solitude.

I would never forget what I had done, but nor could I allow myself to wallow in it. And if ever I hoped for redemption, I had to help pick up the pieces of this broken land.

Thank you, Sin, the brother I never deserved.

He had given me the second chance I'd never earned.

I wouldn't waste it.

So swears Innocence, on his broken oaths and shattered soul.