For what felt like an eternity, I believed the weight upon my back was simply another burden to carry. I walked through the world bent beneath it, convinced that struggle was my purpose and survival my only measure of success. I never questioned why I felt different. I never wondered why the light always seemed familiar, as though it were calling me by a name I had forgotten.
The Luminarks never forced remembrance. They understood that truth cannot be given. It must awaken from within.
Then came the moment when the horizon caught fire.
The sky did not burn with destruction, but with revelation. A single breath became silence. A single heartbeat became eternity. Everything I had mistaken for identity began to dissolve like ash in the wind. The fears, expectations, failures, and victories I had collected throughout my life were only garments draped over something infinitely older.
The weight on my back shifted.
It was never weight at all.
The burden unfolded into wings.
I realized they had not grown in that moment. They had always been there, folded tightly beneath years of doubt, hidden beneath the gravity of a world that taught me to look down instead of up.
As the light rose behind me, I did not ascend because I had earned it. I rose because I finally remembered who I had always been.
The journey was never about becoming an angel.
It was about remembering that the spirit was never meant to crawl through life carrying invisible chains.
Some awaken by finding light.
Others awaken when they discover the light has been waiting inside them since the beginning.
