It is a very rare phenomenon for angels to have human soul mates. An ancient prophecy claimed that the child born of such a couple was destined to rule the heavens. However, no one believed it because it was just talk, right?

Wrong.

It was a long time ago, when Angels still walked among humans and the heavens lived in harmony with earth.

Angels, by spirit, were creatures created to obey and fulfill the duties to keep the cosmos running. Yet, like every other creation, each was bestowed with special characteristics, a personality which identified them as individuals. Not that it mattered much among the ranks… except when it came to piety. Angels are competitive like that.

Those who surpass all others in their goodness and obedience and general piety ascend to the rank of Elders, gaining golden stripes as they go. The higher they get, the more golden their wings. However, pure golden sparkling wings… there was not yet an angel created who could claim to deserve that. Some even claimed that those were just a myth, a story to motivate the Angels to excellence. It was hard enough to rise in the ranks and getting even a single golden stripe was an honor beyond imagination. Still, exceptions exist to prove the rule and thus, there was not one but two angels who managed to rise high enough that they were bestowed with the highest honor any angel to date had achieved – almost completely golden sparkling wings.

Friends they were – being on top gave them honor yet it also rendered them intimidating, everyone respecting them but none daring to contradict or voice their own opinions and only they could understand what it felt like. Not a loving friendship perhaps but a friendship of minds.

Still, discourse could entertain one so much and unbeknownst to each other, each sought company among the humans. Incidentally, around the same time, they were also selected to go through a training program designed to help angels better understand the beings so driven by their basal instincts so foreign to them. Since they were the best, they were selected so they could set example for the rest.

The Human Emotion Training Program was a curse disguised as a blessing for them. For while it enabled them to feel emotions as the humans do… or rather, approximate those emotions since it took practice before they came naturally, it also made them vulnerable to the same pitfalls as the humans and the seven cardinal sins of greed, lust, envy, pride, wrath, sloth and gluttony.

Or mayhap, it was simply that fate had destined them to follow this path and they would've found a way to finish each other… as a famous human saying went, a kingdom could only have one king. More and there'd be chaos – and this was the cosmic solution to restore order.

Be as it may, the fact remains that it had catastrophic consequences.

Because – and here too, fate appears to be having fun at their expense – both angels, by then known as the Elders, found their soulmates.

Or rather, soulmate. The same person, a human girl of utter beauty and wisdom far beyond her years. They fell for her as anyone with newfound emotions would – hard, with no return.

They say that relationships with humans were forbidden after this terrible incident.

They did all they could to win her over but they were so evenly matched that nothing one did that couldn't be countered by the other. It was beginning to take its toll on them – with emotions, they found, they could also get depressed and enraged, unstable and dangerous. So, to avoid further conflict, they decided to give the choice to the girl – and she chose.

To his credit, the Elder decided to give up his rank and his wings – his everything, particularly speaking as an angel – in favor of spending the rest of his mortal life with his soulmate and then finding her again in the gardens of paradise. He was granted his wish because of the excellence of his service and bid well wishes from everyone.

He enjoyed an entire year of blissful happiness on earth with his wife. Imagine his joy when he, a being created from light and never having experienced the joy of having a blood relation, found that his wife was pregnant. His happiness could be heard loudly in the heavens where his friends – and one rival – still occasionally looked down to see how he was faring.

She gave birth toward the end of the year – in the spring – to a lovely baby boy (the child was an anomaly because he had his mother's humanity and his father's angel – literally the best of both worlds… but that was unknown to all except the child's guardian angel and he wisely kept it a secret) and thence rose the root of the problem.

The Elder – since the other had given up his title, there was only one left – couldn't take the happiness his rival had gained, getting both a soulmate and now, a family. Even after the de-education to restore him to the previous emotionless state, once aroused and experienced, emotions are virtually impossible to get rid of.

The jealousy and hatred he felt then was enough to make him restore to the one thing no angel should be able to survive – kill another angel.

But for a being of intellect, who'd sadly given in to the negatives of the human emotion – with virtually no controls and social judgement in place to guide the sense of right and wrong which prevents humans from self-destructing as a race – he had no problem rationalizing his deeds.

His rival was no longer an angel but just another human – and since he'd dared to take away what rightfully should've been the Elder's, his soulmate, the Elder felt justified to kill him. With no remorse, his wings didn't wither nor alter in the shades, striped golden as before. He even went so far as to offer his own companionship to his soulmate – the girl who'd chosen his rival. Grief-stricken at the loss, she committed suicide instead of accepting the angel who'd taken her soulmate's life.

Her loss was sad, maybe even tragic and the Elder never got over it. But as with the humans, time eventually healed that rift and in his own way, he moved on.

But what became of that lovely child?

His guardian angel took him under his wing, protecting him from the sadness of his parent's death and took him to the heavens, where he began his life as an angel.*

And thus started another chapter in the history of the cosmos.

Note to self

* Interesting... 

A/N

Buckle up!