She remembered the rain. More than the rushing air, or the dark, or the impact, or the chill, the rain had pelted the skin like tiny needles, unrelenting and driven by an early winter wind. It had stung. And then it was dark.
It wasn't dark now. Claire knew that before she even opened her eyes, the light penetrating the backs of her eyelids in an aggressively cheerful way. She blinked against it, raising a hand that no longer had streaks of blood across the back of it.
That was strange.
Even stranger was the landscape before her appeared to be entirely made of clouds, the already too bright light glinting in an impossible array of brilliant shades off the enormous golden gates in front of her. The air was soft and warm, like an eternal gentle hug, and-
Wait. Her eyes widened at the realization. Golden gates?
"Am I…" she asked the empty expanse, looking left, then right, then down at her immaculately clean hands. "Shit."
"Hold on, I forgot my—" the owner of the voice, a man of middling stature with brown hair and a large pair of angel wings, wandered in and jumped at the same time Claire did.
"Oh! You're early! That, aha, that never happened before," his voice and expression held an offensive amount of trepidation as he approached the podium Claire hadn't noticed until now and opened a large book.
"I wasn't expecting anyone for another hour so…there go my lunch plans!" He flipped a few pages as he continued in a low grumble, "Which I never get invited to…"
The context clues were too many to ignore. "You're Saint Peter," Claire stated with as much certainty as she could manage.
"I am not supposed to be here."
While Peter didn't roll his eyes, the tone behind his smile indicated he very much wanted to, "Of course you are! Or you wouldn't be here you'd be, haha, down there you know so," he thumbed off to the side with his left hand while his right traced a list of names and dates and times.
Claire glanced to the right, taking several backwards steps to peer over the edge of the fluffy, yet sturdy cloud. Below her seemed to stretch the entirety of the universe itself, an infinite field of stars, and two strange looking nearby planets. One of them covered by a large, red pentacle. Could that be—
"If I could just get your name please?" Peter's voice snapped Claire back to reality. Or whatever this was. She turned back towards him, but the only answer she gave was to take a definitive step backwards.
Peter snatched up his book, hastily moving out from behind the podium, "Hey, hey! Don't get too close to the edge! You could—"
Claire didn't hear the rest, extending her arms to the side and closing her eyes as she leaned back, surrendering herself to the whims of gravity for the second time that day.
And fell.
Alone on the edge of the cloud, Peter clutched his precious book to his chest and watched with wide, horrified eyes until he could no longer distinguish her from the other faint stars in the sky . "Well," he said finally, "That's a first."