… His form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured...
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Through time and space interminable, he plummeted.
 
The strangling darkness pressed in on him from all sides, and the cold burned as though with invisible flame.  He shut his eyes against it to small avail, and sought with even smaller success to twist or turn away from whatever awful magnetism was acting on him.  In each second he grew more desperate, his movements more haphazard, 'til his body became a mess of coils and knots.  A frightened scream welled up in him, then boiled uselessly away into the void.  Sensation failed him, and he became certain of the final oblivion.
 
For a fleeting moment there came something like the warmth he adored.  He hadn't the time to wonder at this, or to open his eyes to look about, before his flight came to an end amid a titanic impact.  He slept.
 
Above his molten grave, the evening sun glared in jealousy.


Night soon descended.  Around the newly made clearing, however, light persisted.  What little foliage remained after the blast was either withered or burning, while the crater itself smouldered brilliantly.  Soil and rock had liquefied into a liquid mantle which warmed his frigid, sleeping form.
 
He stirred, and unconsciously reached out for the heat as he had done for aeons.  It answered to him; but whereas the sun and stars could sustain him endlessly, the fiery pool could do so only for scarce seconds.  The lava became vitrified with the sudden cold, and threatened to entomb its maker in dark glass.  Reflexively he ceased his call, and twisted deeper into slumber; but already he had confined himself - blissfully unaware - within a sphere not much larger than his body, and whose only aperture out into the world was slowly shrinking.
 

Still he slept, and dreamt of things impossible.

She was late.

The art of prophecy was a fickle one, full of spirits and riddles and planar translations. It required more intuition than was reliable and less magic than was practical. The world and its possibilities were infinite, and most divinations could only tell the same. But sometimes the stars align and the clairvoyants sing. Sometimes, the sun spits out a titan.

But the Archmage would not be there to see it. She appeared among the seared leaves of the jungle just in time to watch the monster close itself in igneous casing, flirting a glimpse of him for only an instant. The glow of waning warmth threatened to seal him away for the rest of time, leaving only a memorial to what could have been. But this was not what had been written. A circle of ash and death had dilated from the impact, a fitting nest for the obsidian egg. This was not a burial, but a birth.

Silence followed. The wildlife had either died or fled, leaving only one to whisper through the dense foliage of the surviving forest. The first thing she perceived was some sort of foreign sentience, an unconscious consciousness. Her own aura, which she pressed onto this creature whether he could sense it or not, was made of equal parts curiosity and impatience.

"Coward," she assessed, muttering the word if only to confirm its reality. Then she crossed into the crater and lifted her arms.

Space itself then swelled with divine energy, distending around the egg and crackling with the static potential of her brimming power. A tiny eternity passed suspended in this strange, solid moment. In the next, the world stretched thin. A crack bloomed on the curve of the shell, glowing with an electric light which streaked into the black air. Chae did not know what she would find inside, but she needed to just the same. Other cracks would divide from the first, but only an effort from within could truly break the prison. "Wake up! Wake up!" She demanded.

"You are worth more than your dreams!"

He was falling again, twisting again. This time, there was no cold, no burning, only the rush of descent.

He opened his eyes, and saw true nothingness.
Its surface struck him. Liquid darkness sliced into him, diving between his scales and freezing flesh where it touched.
Rearing up proved escape impossible – there was no resisting that icy pitch. Thin runners wrapped around him where he was not yet submerged and pulled him down.
Hate-thick blackness covered his face and blinded him, plugged his nostrils and drowned him.

He opened his eyes, and was faced with himself.
There was no light, but he could see that the wyrm had turned as black as the substance around him. It flailed against some unseen force, and groaned in pain.
Something wriggled in its pupil, and Uriel could feel it in his own, too. Segmented legs breached the cornea, distorting everything.
Antennae, a bulbous head emerged, skewing the image further. Transparent wings twitched against the sclera. Then came the abdomen, destroying all sight.

He opened his eyes, and stared up at the rippling interface between darkness and void.
A bright speck appeared high above him, and fell impossibly quickly. He panicked, tried to move his legs, head, tail, but they were all manacled by shadow.
The light burst where he had first fallen. Blue flame spread over all, eating at the fabric of the world.
An ocean of darkness boiled away, and the fires descended upon him. They gnawed his eyelids and ears away, and dissolved the flesh of his eyes, so that all that remained was burning.

He opened his eyes, and shrieked so awfully that the already cracked glass separating his prison from the world simply shattered. There was no time for the warmth's embrace to dispel his panic – immediately he launched himself out of the lambent chamber to clamber on cold, ash-streaked earth. Every part of him jerked and contorted to rid himself of the suddenly repugnant lava, until his skin writhed against the chill air. He whimpered fearfully at the loss of heat and failing light, except –

Except at the corner of his vision was something standing, haloed in a colour from out of his nightmare. Uriel turned to it, snarling and forgetting the oppressive cold. He snatched at it with ebon talons, screaming in wrath and terror, and from his mind there emanated into some hidden dimension a single desperate question: ”WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!”