Everything at Ardgroom, suddenly and with a uniquely human curiosity, awoke with discord as Gabriel locked his pistol’s safety. He slid the holy weapon of judgment into its holster at his right hip, its twin was set at his left thigh. The wingless angel stood calmly as Atticus seemed to glide across the ill-fated field of stones. Once standing and ancient, now destroyed and in pieces on the floor. In a way, the stones were still there, they’d just have to change the name to [i]”The Pile of Stones of Ardgroom”[/i]. 

Atticus held his lover, Veti held hers. The fire-demon, which had been so instrumental in the destruction of the wolf-god, seemed to wither and die as well, leaving the red-head sorceress from earlier behind it. Everything was broken, people were surely missing, and the site, which held such victory in it, was seeped in sadness as well. At no other time did Gabriel feel the sting of the outsider more clearly than now, as he stood among the bent and broken, the battered and burned. How ironic, since Gabriel, in relation, was perhaps the most scorned and beaten out of all of the one’s who laid here. Those thoughts, which were so indulgent and pitiful, were sacrilege to the occasion, and so Gabriel cast them out as such. 

Gabriel could not reach out to anyone in the quadrilateral of despair. The atmosphere was thick with fear and an optimistic heartbreak only love can bring. He could not penetrate the invisible and unspeakable barriers which were wont to encapsulate those with the disquieting dejection of death. There was an impenetrable space separating those who experienced loss and those who could not, like Gabriel. He was bemused for as to the whereabouts of the missing team-members, as well as the aforementioned lack of god-wolf carcass. The angel could not tell whether anyone who was left on the field was dying, he did not know if there were people yet lying among the rocks who would need help either. All the archangel knew was that he would not be of help to them. He was an arbiter, a soldier of special occasion who was stripped of all special skills and divine capabilities. 

Gabriel felt the wind brush against his scarred back. He reached over his shoulder and merely rubbed the tip of the back-length scar which ran in vertical parallels. Then his hand came to rest behind his right ear, where he knew his mark to be, the mark of the outcast; Gabriel’s eternal moniker. The angel-turned-human wanted to cry then, he felt an overwhelming shutter pass through his body, a wave of emotion which was brought on by the tremor of psychological stress and physical distress. Instead he breathed and let the sorrow from his past life flow on in his stream of consciousness, sure it would resurface soon enough. 

And Gabriel stood there at the center of the quadrilateral of despair, his arms folded in front of his bare-chest. He didn’t want to leave it, he made himself watch this sadness, because there was a kind of catharsis in the experience. Hell, if he could not truly feel it, he would live in it. If he could not take on the burden, own it, he could, at least, not ignore it.