One moment he was happy with his life, living with a wife, two daughters and a pet gecko. The next his skin began to turn gold, wings painfully grew from his back and horns sprouted from his head. He tried to scrape them away, clawing his skin raw, but it only came back stronger.

And then his world shattered around him, into yellow-orange dust, and never went back.

He was the first angel spawned from a disease from the void. It had made it's way to his world, and out of the billions of people on the planet, found him.

He was angry, and soon had a direction for that anger. A voqui - a kind of soul creature from before time or death that lived out in the void - was disintegrating, and those particals were what caused him to transform. It swirled tiredly in the sky, a dark patch among the gold. And curled around it was a pinkish winged wolf, protecting the darkness... or maybe keeping it contained.

He swore at them over and over, but got no answer. And soon his voice had gone, wrecked by the virus and never to return. He spent long days staring at them, playing with the dust, simply surviving the pain of transformation from day to day, hour to hour. If he could scream, he would have for a long time.

He clawed at the gold in his skin until the dust swirled with red, but all in vain. There was no hope here.

It was a long time before anything happened, and it was totally by accident.

He found he could make stuff from the golden dust. At first, small shapes, then walls, a roof, a door. He made his home from dust, he made it black as the night before dawn, with gold viens throughout like his own. He lived there, alone, sometimes listening to the whispers of the wolf, mostly hearing white noise.

Until there was a knock on the door.

A bloodied, gold winged person stood there, panic running wild in their eyes. He invited them in, silently comforted them, showed them tricks with the dust.

They grew close, even though neither could speak.

And closer still when something like telepathy evolved between them.

His name was Gawain, and he'd named Kiki Pyrite all this time.

So Pyrite he became.

Thousands of years on, and Kiki, now Pyrite, had built a glass city. It was filled with Angels, some mostly human, others so mutated they were no longer recognisable. And still the wolf and the voqui circled above them.

Gawain had left to wander the expanse of desert around the city, so Pyrite was alone again, despite the abundunce of life. He was an outcast, almost. He didn't want to be part of it, he still missed home, he was still angry. But he was happy he had done something so big, so important like this.

Ever so often he wrote letters home... and burned them, knowing he couldn't go back.

And war. Why was it in every population, war happened.

He joined it, for whatever reason he didn't know. He fought against the daeilims who sought to kill the angels. He was injured. He crawled to the desert. And readied himself to die.

He wrote one last letter, and burned it.

And saw a hand offer him help through the smoke.