I crack my back as I walk out of the old building where I reside, stretching out my soft, white wings and readying them for a night of collecting souls for purgatory.
"Colonel! Colonel Pulchritudo!" calls a newer recruit.
"Yes? What is it?" I reply in a cold tone, flipping my red hair out of my eyes.
"Colonel, how am I supposed to pick a name?!" the boy shrieks. Right. You choose a name... I have been dead so long I forgot that.
"What do you believe in more than anything?" I reply, eyeing him. He has sad, brown eyes that beg and black hair that hangs over his face in waves. He must have been no more than ten when he died.
"Justice!" he replies immediately.
"Lustitia is justice in Latin. How about that?"
"Yeah! Thank you, Colonel!" he rushes back inside to register himself.
"It fits you, Timothy..." I whisper. I remember collecting his soul from the hospital, where his mother had just pulled the plug from him being in a coma for so long.
It makes me think of my death, mostly because I can't remember my life. I've been dead for far too long. It had been a runaway horse that knocked me into a swift river in England, where I think I lived, but my accent faded away fifty years ago. I remember that crushed feeling in my chest and how I just couldn't breathe. I remember being pulled out, but still being too dead to come back. Ha, too dead... I remember the colonel at the time, Auxilium, reaching down and helping me up, leading me to purgatory.
"I'm here. Let's go." I murmur as I reach the Collection group at the Docks. Usually, we would work alone, but the Obscurum have been more hostile lately.
---
On the way back, we meet a band of the Obscurum that have been more hostile. We swing our holy weapons at them, but one clips my wing close to the base.
We ward them off, but I can't fly. I can't fly. A few of my subbordinates help me to the Docks outside the Academy for the Angelicly Lumen.
"Ritu!" calls my best friend, Protege, when she sees my inability to fly. I clamp my hand over the open wound, making myself wince. Being chief medical officer, Prote, as I call her, wraps it in bandages.
"Colonel, the Headmistress requests you presence!" Private Lustitia calls breathlessly, implying that he ran from Headmistress's office. I nod and hurry in.
