The lightning did not strike.
Dante stood trembling, his storm held in suspension, caught between the fury that demanded release and the horror of what release would mean. And in that moment of hesitation, in that fraction of time when violence paused but had not yet been chosen or rejected—the shadows at the edges of the Ruined Realm began to move.
Not the revenants' shadows. Not the darkness cast by skeletal buildings or the shade beneath the bleeding sky. These were older shadows, deeper shadows, shadows that belonged to things that should not have shadows because they no longer existed to cast them.
They gathered first as whispers, as distortions in the void, as places where light bent wrong and space folded in on itself in ways that suggested presence without form. Then, gradually, terribly, they began to coalesce. To take shape. To manifest as something that existed in the space between memory and reality, between history and haunting.
The shades of dead thrones.
