With the crowd’s attention focused on the creature in the cage, no one noticed that the storm, still distant and threatening, had hidden within its turbulent clouds a lone figure. Except for his blond hair, his black leather clothing helped blend him into the darkness as he circled above them. Looking for a place to land, his searching eyes anchored on a church that stood adjacent to the Reef’s promenade. The church had a graveyard that stretched long and wide, the haunting sight disturbed only by a pair of angel’s wings, one broken, the other cracked. Their ragged beauty reached upward into the black sky, providing shadows that stretched across the dry grass. Dead leaves littered the ground, and flowers stood in cracked vases, dying on the graves.
The vivid colors of autumn had painted a
