🕯️ Fallen Wings – Meet Cassius Sebastian
Some heroes are made.
Some are born.
Cassius fell.
😈 Who is Cassius Sebastian?
He’s not a demon anymore.
He’s not human, either.
By day: a biker in a battered leather jacket.
By night: a shadow that stalks Valhaven’s darkest streets (does Astra have competition?).
Cassius once had wings (not the good kind). Now? He fights with nothing but fists, grit, and a past that won’t let him go.
Marked by golden blood, pursued by old enemies, and carrying a name older than the history books.
Cassius walks the line between damnation and redemption. He doesn’t know which side he deserves.
🎸 (Also, he plays guitar… like a god. Don’t tell him I said that.)
🎧 His Theme: Fallen Wings
Where Astra burns and Aidan remembers, Cassius endures.
“Fallen wings, I still rise / Through the fire, through the lies.”
Fallen Wings is heavy. Broken. Defiant.
It’s the sound of someone who’s lost everything… and still refuses to kneel.
Let it play while you read.
📖 Preview: The Outcast Among Us
Today’s chapter finds Cassius doing what he does best:
Hating others. Hating himself. Wishing he could be better than he was.
Valhaven’s lecture halls aren’t built for men like him.
(Neither, honestly, is Valhaven itself.)
But when you’re hunted, tired, and forged from sin itself, you don’t get to pick where your story restarts.
📖 Read Chapter 3 below.
Featuring dubious cafeteria lunches, philosophical goth girls, suspiciously cursed teeth, and the start of something Cassius can’t quite name yet.
Chapter 3
Cassius thought the class was full of fools. In his experience with humanity, fools were everywhere, clustering closest to lost causes like flies on shit.
Take the planet: the most lost cause of them all. Last time Jesus visited Earth, assholes nailed him to a board. Even He’d be more likely to return to where someone stuck him with a spear than to count on those with influence using it to combat climate change.
So why am I in this environmental science lecture?
Perhaps his cause had been lost long ago. He understood why people prayed to false gods for salvation.
That wasn’t it, of course. It was nice to get poetic—he’d earned it—but his purpose was at the front of the room in a ridiculous tweed jacket. The last time Cassius had seen Aidan, he’d been dressed in something closer to sackcloth. It was a long time ago. Finding him here in Valhaven was exciting. It promised an end to the fight they’d begun back when Cassius wore a different face, and Aidan wore a different name.
Students silted into the lecture hall, arriving in ones and twos. Cassius’s eyes tracked to Aidan’s right. The skinny chick simpered at the druid. He’d noticed her yesterday. Classic case of damaged goods. The way she clutched that Pacsafe bag spoke of anxiety chiselled right into the bedrock. He vibed with the neon highlights, though. They drew electric blue and vibrant purple trails through her hair. Textbook programmer tan.
“You know her?”
Cassius turned to find the goth next to him. You’ve seen one goth, you’ve seen them all, although he had a soft spot for them. They were a little more rebellious than the useless halfwits littered about most street corners, and some of them even had the horn for the Dark Lord. This one didn’t look like the usual collection of depressive tendencies goths often came with. She had an intense stare that felt like it could scald him from beneath her hood. He turned away. “No.”
“It’s just you’ve been looking at her since she arrived.”
“Not her.” Cassius pointed. “Him.”
“Mr Douglas?” The goth followed the line of his arm. “You know him? Got a burning desire to know how his inner environment works?”
He showed teeth. “It is Environmental Studies.” He glanced back at Aidan. “But no.”
“You know him from somewhere? Can’t place his face?” She slouched onto the seat next to him. “I thought that yesterday. I feel like I know him from somewhere.”
“It’s the accent.” Cassius shifted in his seat, which creaked beneath his weight. “Straight out of a movie.”
“Maybe that’s it.” The goth girl studied the professor, then the skinny chick. “There’s something about her, too.”
“Lost souls.”
The goth chuckled. The rich sound wonderfully accentuated her honey-and-chocolate voice, and for a moment he wished he still had the… leeway to pursue those pleasures. “Isn’t everyone?”
“Yes.” Cassius frowned as he thought about it. “I think that’s right. I’ve known millions, and they all fell in the end.”
“You must be an absolute blast at parties.” She crossed her legs, leaning back to take a good look at him. She framed him in her fingers; he noticed the black of her nail polish was such a stark contrast to the almost pearlescent nature of her skin. He could see her eyes through the finger frame. Her eyes were meant to look playful, and he might have been fooled if he hadn’t seen thousands of women like her. She’s not playful. She is playing with me.
Cassius was about to say something else, but the prof got started. Cassius hadn’t even noticed the skinny chick had faded away to haunt a desk at the front. She had a MacBook open in front of her, and from his vantage up in the gods he could see she was taking notes like a true believer. Careful, little one. The last time a woman trusted the druid, she died.
* * *
After class, he lost sight of the goth girl. He supposed his biker chic wasn’t the thing her type went for. The professor headed out like he had an important date with destiny. The skinny chick followed him out, but not immediately. They weren’t together. Not yet.
He gathered his books and tucked them under his arm, then wandered up the lecture hall steps to a door at the back. In the hallway outside, students were the arterial pulsing blood flowing through ValTech’s veins. They coursed between classes, taking vital knowledge from one place to another. He drifted among them. Cassius didn’t really have any place to go right now. He let the fools flow about him, a fatty blockage in the veins of their lives.
He caught sight of electric blue highlights ahead. Curiosity tugged at him. He wondered if he should follow the thread of it, tug the fish in, then decided to get something to eat instead. Dotted through the refectory was the odd I’m-studying-while-force-feeding-myself youth. He grabbed himself a Coke and four Snickers, paid with a dead man’s coin, and settled himself at a table. He ate two Snickers without tasting them, because he was still thinking about the skinny chick talking to the druid.
I wonder if she’s a Snickers kind of girl.
He surrendered to the old fang-mouthed beast within for a moment. Cassius set off, books under his arm again, and retraced his steps back to the door she’d vanished through. He entered, finding himself in a lab. There was the usual technological nonsense the foolish used, trying to break the Father’s creations down atom by atom. As if there’s an actual recipe to His method.
He spotted her by the open MacBook, face pressed into a microscope. The lab was empty except for a few bedraggled plants wilting in beakers beside her. The door clicked closed behind him and she startled, then gave a nervous laugh. “Uh. Hi.”
“Hi.” Sharks could sense even trace amounts of blood in the water, and there was blood of a sort about her. It drew him in, her vulnerability, her reckless regard for her own safety. “I’m sorry. I must have the wrong room.”
“It’s easy, like, to get turned around?” Despite the Valley Girl tone, she offered it the way someone who was really fucking smart would. She has the innate understanding that everyone else is a moron. “This is the lab. Where were you headed, chief?”
“Somewhere quiet,” he admitted. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Well, I don’t make much noise.” She studied him over the microscope. “I’m Jen.”
“Cassius.” He cruised over, the shark in him scenting the red meatiness of the creature before him. He pushed it down. I’m not that thing anymore. I can’t be, or they’ll find me, and the covenant will be lost. He offered her a Snickers. “Lunch?”
“It’s ten thirty in the morning.”
“Early lunch?”
Jen took the Snickers. He sat across from her, watching her eat, and work, then looked at the plants, then her laptop. “We’re in the same class. Environmental Studies.”
“I know.” She didn’t look up from the microscope.
“It’s just, the prof, you know? I don’t think he likes me.”
“Because of him calling you ‘wise’ yesterday?” She peeked at him for a moment, then went back to the microscope.
“I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot,” he said. “Do you think he, you know… Do you think he’s pissed at me for interrupting his flow?”
“I don’t know him that well.” She leaned back, rubbing her eyes. “Screw this.”
“I thought you and he were, you know.” Cassius raised an eyebrow. “I saw you talking.”
She gave the tiniest blush. “No. No! Definitely not. That wouldn’t be, like… appropriate?”
“It’d be fast, is what it would be. It’s the second day of term.” Cassius leaned forward. “You do have the look of a quick study, though.”
“I thought you wanted quiet?”
“Sorry,” Cassius lied. He popped his Coke, then took a sip. “Plants, huh?”
“They’re dying.”
“Is that because you ripped them out and put them in swamp water, or were they like that when you found them?”
“Hah.” She stretched, then crossed her arms. “We found these last night? And, like, they’re dying for no reason?”
“You and the prof you have no inappropriate relationship with? Last night?”
“It’s not what it sounds like.” She looked at him over the square frames of her glasses. “And it’s none of your business.”
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Fair enough.”
“Your accent is… odd. Where are you from, Cassius?”
He detected nothing but curiosity in her tone. “Europe, mostly. I travel. So, the plants. Where’d you find them?”
She hedged. “Somewhere kind of bad, actually. There were… people there? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. These ones are trash. I can’t tell why they’re dying. I need more? Maybe from a different spot?”
The way she said people made Cassius think they probably weren’t. “So, you’ll get more, right?”
“Uh.”
“Or not, I guess.” He studied how her shoulders hunched forward, her body trying to make itself smaller. Time to bait the hook with a little guilt. See if I can get the druid alone. “I guess the prof will then?”
“Uh.” She looked at him sidelong. “It was dangerous. He wouldn’t—”
“Does he look like a man who suffers from an abundance of caution?”
She snorted. “No, he doesn’t. He was so brave, and…” Jen trailed off. “He’ll go, won’t he?”
“Probably.” Cassius shifted. “Look, I’m done for the day. I could get the plants for you.”
“You could? Why would you do that?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Because I’m done for the day, and we both need the prof.” He stood, and allowed himself to stretch. “I can take care of myself.”
Jen looked him up and down, then did it again. His body was sculpted. Cassius had made it that way for just this reason. “I mean, I guess?”
“Where?”
“The waterfront.” She pulled open a map on her laptop and showed him. “You should, like, get there before dark?”
“Bad part of town?”
She bit her lip. “I mean, um. Yeah?”
Perfect. Maybe I’m finally getting close to the snake after all this time. He smiled, making it easy, reassuring, and confident. “Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about me at all.”
🔁 Writer’s Note
Cassius wasn’t designed to be a “bad boy.” I hate that shit 🤣 He’s not here to brood in corners or wear leather ironically.
He’s the man who lost his world and didn’t get a new one in return.
He’s the anger you can’t swallow. The regret you can’t bury. The hope you’re too ashamed to say out loud.
He’s the part of the story that reminds us: sometimes survival is the hardest fight of all.
And sometimes, the ones who fell furthest… are the ones who stand longest.
Preorder To Save the World
The Three Faces of Fate launches May 1.
Cassius has bled for a lot of mistakes. Some weren’t even his.
👇👇👇
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