Still Falling

Valaciel is fifteen again. It is January 2009, first day of a new term, and he is sitting in a classroom like any other student. That is the lie everyone else gets to believe.

He remembers everything.

He remembers dying alone at sixty-one. He remembers being pulled into Heaven and climbing for centuries as someone Heaven never wanted. He remembers the fall, the Void, and the long years inside it — years that felt like forever and ended with a wish he did not fully understand: to come back. When he wakes in 2009, the world has moved on without him. No one else remembers Heaven, or the war, or what was done to him. Only Val does.

The world he returns to is stranger than it looks. Monsters spill from Gates that open in cities and forests and empty lots, and the people who fight them grow stronger with every clear. Angels and demons and old bargains sit behind ordinary life, and Val is trying to learn how to be fifteen again while carrying the weight of someone who has already lived too much.