"The portal they pushed me through, a thousand years ago. I know where it is. I'll show you, but you have to take me with you." A hitch in his breathing, and he whispered, "I just want to go home."
It would be hard to forget the spot where he had finally crashed to the ground. The desert spread uniformly in all directions, this place indistinguishable from the rest in the deep night, but he knew where the sky had ended and anguish had begun.
And, for the first time in a thousand years, Razgut did not feel the pain that usually accompanied the memory. He was going to fly again. After all his endless waiting, he would finally slip the surly bonds of earth and rejoin his brothers in the sky.
"Are you ready, or are you just going to keep daydreaming?"
Karou's tense voice sliced through Razgut's rapture, and he scowled at her for the reminder that she was making his wish for him; that she would not, in fact, even allow him to touch the leaden gavriel, poisonous to him though its magic might might be.
She turned away roughly, dragging the heavy disc from her satchel, whispered his wish in the guttural Chimaera tongue. If he had not been so lost in delirium, Razgut might have noticed how she hesitated first; how her phrase contained a few more syllables than such a simple wish ought to have done.
But then the Fallen seraph felt his crumpled figure rise inexplicably off the ground, tilted his head as if being baptized by the stars. He could not see the portal from here, but he knew it was there, up in the sanctity of space.
Karou leapt into the air in one fluid motion, seemingly as eager as he was to leave behind this world for Eretz. Razgut followed - Fallen no longer - retracing the path among the stars taken so long ago.
And there it was.
Just a slash in the sky - but more, so much more. He hesitated only a little before edging his torso into it, feeling the faint metallic sense and vertigo that heralded the transition to a different universe.
The world of angels seemed to blossom out of the night; Razgut almost gasped at the intensity of the emotion that surged through him, like starlight that danced with silvered wings. Pain was gone; longing was gone.
.
.
.
He was home.
A/N: There might be one or two more chapters after this. If any phrases look familiar (other than from the book, of course), you might recognize them from the poem "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee. If not, it's definitely worth a read.