Josiah expected a slow drift down to the surface, or better yet, no fall at all. Instead, as soon as he was ejected from Limbo, he plummeted. He plummeted like a rock from thousands of feet in the air. The edge of the atmosphere, actually. He was pretty sure he was somehow leaving a trail in the sky, if the diamond shape of fire around a translucent purple and gold shell was anything to go by. An average passerby might have mistaken the falling fireball to be the average meteor burning up in the atmosphere and pass it off as such. Not one, though.

Alone, peering out of the town's tower observatory's main window searching the night sky, sat a pegasus stallion: Sky Step, a royal guard reserve and the owner of a small blacksmiths. It was a sort of tradition for him at this point, coming up here once a month every month to watch the heavens as time slowly ticked away from him. It all started when his father had died and he had used the night sky as a coping mechanism, though now he just does it because watching Princess Luna's starscape change throughout the seasons is simply breathtaking. He had sat on his perch in the tower and observed space countless times in the past, so this time he could tell that something was off; a shooting star that wasn't burning up or disappearing. In fact, it was getting bigger and faster as he watched it.

He quickly stood up and ran down the several flights of stairs leading from the tower's main room to the outside world. That shooting star will be coming down and he wanted to be there for when it does. There may be a pony or a piece of property in its way when it landed. He couldn't let that happen. He was a Royal Guard, after all. Of course that was just a rationalisation, he just wanted to see what an actual shooting star looked like, and this was his chance.

As he chased the vapour trail path left by the object, a loud boom resounded through out the valley that Neighwick was built in. It had landed and he would be the first there. Sky Step, as his name suggests, took to the sky with a single flap of his wings and accelerated towards the crash site at a speed that would turn even the head of a Wonderbolt. He wasn't a scout for no reason.

After about five minutes of flying at top speed, he arrived at the site. It was a mess. There was a crater about four meters deep and fifteen meters across, smoking and smouldering from the impact, some parts of the ground that had a high sand content had been completely turned into glass. Rocks and debris of the derelict barn house on the edge of town were scattered everywhere. Luckily there was no one there, as the area had been abandoned due to a flooding issue a long time ago, much to Sky's delight.

Most noticeably, in the centre of the crater, there sat a large glowing purple and gold orb, pulsating and moving like a lava lamp. Whatever this thing was, it had survived re-entry somehow and didn't have a scratch on it, a feat quite impressive for an object the size of a trading cart. This was nothing like what Sky had imagined a shooting star to look like. He expected a glowing golden ball of pure white, much like the static stars of Luna's night canvas. Then again, this was not a shooting star, a fact becoming more and more obvious by the second.

With that thought, as if on queue, the light emitting from the orb began to fade, and white cracks began to spiderweb around it. Whatever it is, something is coming out.

Whatever this Purple and gold shell around him was, it was protecting Josiah from the heat of re-entry, taking all of the heat and dispersing it somehow. He just floated inside of it, not able to move either because of the shock of where he had just been or the fact that he was strapped into the angelic equivalent of a planetary drop pod, he didn't know.

'I wonder what sort of place I'm being sent to.' Joe thought, unable to determine anything from his point in the sky. 'I hope it's not too different from home... Readjusting will be hard. I just can't believe I died.' He was inwardly surprised that he wasn't freaking out more. Of course he poured his heart out if front of that figure, Azrael, but that was just the start. He was clearly going to have some issues going ahead. 'I really hope this place has half decent psychiatrists...'. Looking at things from a non subjective outside point of view was something that he was surprisingly good at considering his age and lack of experience. 'Why did he have to drop me from the sky? Couldn't it just have been a nice doorway through some random person's wardrobe and be done with it? I feel like I'll draw attention, falling from the sky like a damn meteor...'.

A large part of him still thought that all of this is a long drawn out dream and he would just wake up any minute. You don't just meet a deity, do you? Were the Buddhists right all along? He had been an atheist his entire life, religion just didn't make sense in his eyes, especially considering there is no solid proof. 'I met a godly being that sent me into a new world with some freaky tattoos and a blessing because my soul is too pure or something like that... Nietzsche clearly did a bad job.'

He was falling through the air for about five minutes in total until he hit the ground. Decimated the ground would have been a more apt description. He couldn't actually feel the force of the impact, but the sudden lurching halt of momentum was enough to knock him out cold.

Author's Note

This isn't meant to be a religious story, I just like the thought of angels and all that. :D Because of this, the divinity in my story will have inspiration from many past and current religions, faiths and mythologies