MadameMigraine

As she spirals toward the earth, tumbling halo over heels, Lucy struggles against the bola wire lashing her wings and arms tight against her body. She’s going to go unfeathered on Barnes as soon as she’s heavenside again. The sheer audacity– attacking a non-combatant Cupid on a priority match mission. Mid-flight, in neutral atmosphere.

The attack had caught her completely off guard– one moment Lucy had been revelling in the warming air as she traversed closer to the Earth's surface, the next found her careening sideways from the force of the impact, the weighted bola tailends whipping around and biting into whatever purchase they could find. Someone must have been tailing her from above, and when she finds out who's responsible, they’ll never know love again. She’ll dissolve every bond they’ve ever formed, turn even the crows against them. She screams, infuriated as she strains desperately against the razor-thin wire, blood welling in the gouges as she only succeeds in driving it deeper into her skin. Her primaries are bent and torn, scapular feathers shredded and made useless.

As the earth flips and spins dizzyingly closer, Lucy stops fighting. She’s not getting out of the bindings before she hits the ground and she needs to try and choose a landing site that won’t draw too much unwanted attention while she’s trussed up with no way to defend herself. There’s a chance, albeit a small one, that she hasn’t been knocked too far off course. If she’s grounded for any substantial amount of time, as the poor condition of her wings suggests, she needs to be within Search and Rescue parameters. Her lip snarls up– it will be weeks before they even consider her MIA. Rotwell just launched a formidable campaign against one of the larger Fittes battalions, and all available resources have been rerouted to them.

With defeated resignation, Lucy realises that she really only has one option left.

She closes her eyes, digs for the thread attached to her assigned Soul and Listens.

“Come on, Georgie, lie in the garden with me.” A warm and charming voice coaxes. “The sun's out. It’s too lovely a day to be stuffed inside studying.”

Lucy casts the thread out from her mind, watching with clouded eyes as the wind catches it and yanks, dragging it near instantly down to its tether.

There.

A row of stately houses with rear gardens in various states of disarray, a pink thread pulsing brightly above one. There's a tiny speck of a man standing at the back door, head poked inside the house.

Ignoring the pulsing pain, she forces herself to push outward as much as possible, a feeble attempt to increase her surface area or capture some lift, anything to resemble something less like a meteor burning across the sky. If she can just angle… a little left…

It’s of little use– she’s still falling far too fast.