Deftness becomes survival.
Many stars fall at once, gaining speed as they rocket toward Earth.
Ulinitis. Zyasis. Nuaw—the eldest of the lesser gods is gone. They no longer reside in the sky. Though their names are not widely known, they were the first to beseech the Holy Redeemer of all for an eternal resting place among the cosmos, choosing to remain as onlookers as the future of this race unfolded.
Which then became the custom.
Watching their descent is like witnessing the unmaking of history itself.
Each impact erases more than terrain—it erases memory, the continuity, and the delicate architecture of existence. Forests flatten, mountains fracture, and shock waves ripple outward in widening circles, pulverizing everything stagnant, or too slow or too small to escape.
I weave through them, adjusting my trajectory by instinct and prayer. My lungs sting with particulates, and with each breath, my divinity works to purge them from my system.
When a clear path opens, I seize it—teleporting miles ahead, reappearing only to fight through the onslaught again, correcting my course as stars continue to barrel toward the Earth.
I watch each one strike with growing trepidation. All it will take is a single impact at the wrong convergence point to tear open new gates—or widen those already present—granting more of the underworld passage to the surface and placing the living at immeasurable risk.
Something we did not account for, but which now puts everything in jeopardy.
I do not yet know how Lucifer has managed it—how he has found a way around the agreement—but I can feel his hand in this. The realization embeds itself within me and is impossible to ignore.
If he has found a way to fracture the covenant, then it’s also likely that nothing that follows will remain as ordained.
His unpredictability is what makes him so dangerous, and the lengths he will go to ensure his will is carried out. He will use whatever means—and whoever he must—to achieve it.
I don’t let the thought hamper my progress, but it is something I know I must never lose sight of.
Transporting through air is effortless, but spatial jumps demand precision. I must see the space before I arrive—an old limitation I placed upon myself after too many early mistakes taught me the cost of impatience. So I surge forward again and again, wings cutting through smoke and ash, teleporting between brief clearings in the sky as Pollock and Kahill’s last known location burns bright in my awareness, guiding every movement.
When at last Pollock’s city comes into view, it emerges through the haze of smoke in fractured glimpses—firelight, ruin, movement—and I begin my descent from the upper reaches of the sky, angling carefully toward it through falling debris and drifting ash.
Flames crawl through broken districts, spreading unchecked. Entire blocks lie cratered and collapsed, the ground beneath them split open where a fallen star struck too close. Some structures still stand, but few have escaped without severe damage, their foundations compromised, their silhouettes warped by heat and impact.
Humans scatter through the streets below—running, dragging the wounded, carrying children, shouting warnings that vanish beneath the thunder of distant crashes. Others lie where they fell, unmoving, left behind in the chaos.
Their cries reach me—not through sound, but through something older, something woven into the fabric of what I am. As a guardian, their pleas for mercy and deliverance pierce the boundaries of my mind, threading through me in a way that disrupts even my immortal composure, each one a call I feel but cannot yet answer.
Many souls linger here, caught between what was and what comes next, but I have not the time to see them on their way. There will be time for passage into the afterlife, last rites, and mourning once the threat before us is contained.
The demons have found the city.
From this distance, I catch sight of Kahill’s forces, and they are already engaged with them. His camp spreads along the perimeter like a living barricade, lines of soldiers fighting off demons that have forced their way through weakened seams in the earth.
Steel flashes in the firelight. Explosions tear through clusters of pale, monstrous forms. A lesser god lands and takes out a horde of them that were gathered below and climbing up the city’s wall.
And still, more stars fall—striking, breaking, widening the fractures this world has already endured.
If this continues—if the heavens empty themselves entirely—this place will not be overrun.
It will be extinguished.
I glide through heat and ash, angling toward Kahill’s men's position, already drawing my power to me and unsheathing my sword as I prepare to enter the fray.
For now—morbid as the thought may be—I am grateful for what light remains.
And though none here may know it, they’ve seen the last of the cresting sun. It will not rise again. The last dawn came and went without ceremony or fanfare, and from this day forward, whatever illumination humanity survives by will come from the moon alone—soon to turn red, as though the heavens themselves bleed for those left behind.
The next sign.
