Deep in the outlying ranges of the Rocky Mountains in western Kansas, near the Colorado border.
This place had no name. On maps, it was merely a vast blank marking uninhabited territory, with steep peaks covered in perpetual snow and dark gray exposed rock.
The valleys were deep, filled with impenetrable coniferous forests. The air among the trees carried the damp scent of humus and the musky stench left behind by some beast.
The thin air was bitterly cold, and the wind threaded through the jagged rocks with a ceaseless wail.
At the bottom of a hidden valley enclosed by cliffs on three sides, accessible only through a narrow mountain pass, lay an abandoned mine long forgotten after being used to extract some non-precious metal.
Its entrance was cleverly concealed by vines and fallen rocks arranged by human hands. Inside, the tunnels wound deep into the mountain's belly—cold, damp, and dark. Only the occasional faint light seeping through cracks and certain luminous mosses on the walls offered negligible illumination.
This was the third, and currently safest, hiding place Gadriel and his sixty-seven followers had found since falling to Earth.
In a relatively dry and spacious chamber deep within the cave, the campfire was their sole source of warmth and their main source of light.
What burned was not firewood, but chunks of pine resin gathered from the nearby forest and given a simple blessing of holy light. They crackled as they burned, releasing smoke with a strangely sweet scent.
The firelight flickered, casting huge, twisted shadows across the rough stone walls.
Gadriel sat on a relatively flat rock. His once magnificent and exquisite angelic armor had long since become tattered, caked with mud and dark blue stains of dried blood.
The wings on his back had been severed at the