Gabriel
The crucible did not fade all at once.
It thinned first, like smoke being pulled apart by a wind I could not feel. The walls that had pressed in on me for what felt like hours, maybe years, began to lose their shape. The black architecture of it cracked open in faint, wavering seams of light, and then the pressure vanished so suddenly my body sagged where it lay. I hit the floor of the mall hard enough to make my ribs flare with pain, and for a moment, I did not understand where I was. I just lay there, blinking through tears and blood and exhaustion, trying to force my mind to accept that the suffocating dark was gone.
The crucible was gone.
That meant the demons were gone too, or at least the part of them that had trapped me had been lifted or broken. I sucked in a sharp breath and coughed immediately after, because my lungs still didn't trust the air. The ceiling above me was real. The floor beneath me was real. Broken glass glittered around my hands. A toppled display lay half-crushed to my left. Somewhere nearby, a sprinkler hissed faintly over dead flames.
I was still alive.
That thought should have comforted me. Instead, it felt like being handed a knife and told to keep walking.
My hand went automatically to my pocket. For one foolish second, I thought maybe I could call them. Maybe Vivi would answer. Maybe Iris would make some tiny sleepy sound on the other end,d and Vivi would laugh and tell me not to panic. My fingers found the phone.
Then I saw the damage.
The screen was shattered into a white spiderweb of ruin. The casing was bent. The side had been crushed in so hard the buttons felt wrong under my thumb. I turned it over once, as if the right angle might change it back into something usable, but it was destroyed beyond hope. I stared at it, my chest tightening again, and I felt something in me go cold.
No phone.
No call.
No certainty.
I looked up at the ceiling and swallowed hard. "Please," I whispered, though I did not even know who I was asking. "Please let them be safe."
My body trembled as the adrenaline began to drain away in ugly pieces. I could feel it now—how much pain I had been ignoring, how much blood I had lost, how badly my ankle had been mangled. My ribs felt as though they were packed with broken glass. My arm throbbed with every heartbeat. But I had enough strength left to think, and that was worse in some ways, because once I began thinking I could not stop.
Vivienne.
Iris.
Elias.
Elias would be fine, I told myself. He was not blood. Not mine. Not tied to the part of me that had been burned into memory and fear. He was just… there. He would be injured, maybe, but he would survive. My mind refused to summon his face the way it kept forcing Vivi and Iris into every dark corner of my thoughts. That should have reassured me, too, but instead it just left me with one smaller, crueler certainty.
The people I loved most were still missing.
I pushed myself up with a broken groan and immediately nearly collapsed again. My ankle buckled under me, and I had to catch myself against a store wall slick with water and soot. I stood there for a second, breathing through clenched teeth, then started limping toward the exit.
Every step was a negotiation, and every breath was a reminder.
The mall doors gave way to the outside world, and the cold hit me like a slap. Snow was falling hard now, turning the night into a dim, silver blur. The sky was black and low and full of drifting white. Flames still burned in pockets across the street, but they looked tired somehow, as if the fire itself had been wounded. Emergency lights flashed everywhere. Red, Blue, White. They cut across the snow and the broken windows and the bodies and made the whole city look haunted.
There were ambulances everywhere. Dozens of them.
Their sirens threaded together into one long, screaming note that never seemed to stop. I saw medics running on the snow, paramedics shouting over each other, volunteers carrying stretchers, people wrapped in blankets, an injured survivor sitting in stunned silence with blood crusted on their face. Some were being loaded into ambulances. Some were too weak to stand and were being treated right there on the street. A woman was crying into her hands while someone held pressure to her side. A man with his arm in a sling kept asking the same question over and over, like he had forgotten how to form any other words.
I scanned every face, then scanned again.
"Vivienne!" I shouted.
My voice cracked and disappeared into the chaos. I tried again, louder, limping forward with one hand braced against the wall of a building. "Vivienne! Iris!"
No answer.
I turned in place, panic rising so fast it made me dizzy. "Has anyone seen a woman with white hair?" I asked a nearby survivor, grabbing the sleeve of his coat. "And a little girl, red and white hair, she's small, she's with her mother, have you seen them?"
He stared at me with wide, tired eyes and shook his head. "No. I'm sorry."
I went to the next person, then the next.
"Have you seen them?"
"No, man."
"Please. White hair, little girl, please."
"No, I haven't."
A paramedic moved toward me with open hands, her face drawn with concern when she saw how badly I was bleeding. "Sir, you need to get into an ambulance. You're going to collapse."
"I can't stop," I said immediately, harsher than I meant to. I backed away from her and nearly tripped into the snow. "I can't stop yet."
She reached again. "You're seriously injured—"
"I said no!"
The force in my voice made her flinch. For half a second, guilt flashed through me, but then the panic swallowed it. I could not let them put me down. If I stopped now, I would never stand back up. And if I never stood back up, then I would never find them, so I kept going.
I used the walls of the buildings to drag myself along. Every few steps, I had to pause and catch my breath. The cold bit through my torn clothes and into my fingers, ears, and nose. Snow settled on my hair and melted against my skin. My hands had gone numb in places, then burned in others. I could feel blood still slipping from me, leaving tiny dark marks in the snow as I moved.
The forest.
That was the next place. The place I would expect them to be if they had run, if they had hidden, if they had survived and moved away from the streets. So I limped into the trees, using trunks for balance, dragging one foot after the other through the powdery snow. Branches shifted overhead. The woods swallowed the sound of the city behind me and made everything feel colder, quieter, more ancient, and lonelier.
The snow was deeper here. It crunched under my weight and packed into the torn seams of my clothes. It had a way of reaching everywhere, biting through fabric, turning every scrape on my skin into a fresh wound. My fingers were stiff. My ears burned. My nose hurt so badly it felt numb. I could not tell how long I had been walking. Minutes, hours— my thoughts were breaking into pieces.
I was thinking of Vivienne's voice, thinking of Iris's laugh, thinking of the way they might have hidden together, the way Vivi always tried to stay calm for Iris, no matter how bad things got. I told myself over and over that this was just the worst part, the part before finding them. I told myself that if I just kept going a little farther, I would hear them.
Then I tripped.
Something soft and adult-sized lay in the snow in front of me. I went down hard, one hand slamming into the ground, and my stomach turned the moment I felt what I had hit.
A body.
Soft, wet, and wrong.
My heart stopped so completely I thought I might die right there. I did not move or even breathe.
No. No, no, no.
My mind immediately rebelled. It tried to make the shape something else. A fallen coat, a wounded soldier, a stranger, anything but what it might have been. My fingers curled into the snow, and I stared at the shape in front of me while my thoughts crashed over themselves.
Vivienne? Please, no. Not her. Not Iris. Not like this. Not here. Not after everything. Not after I kept going. Not after I promised myself I would reach them.
I could not look. My throat closed up so hard it hurt.
Maybe if I did not look, it would not be real. Maybe if I kept my eyes shut, the body would change. Maybe it was an enemy. Maybe it was someone I did not know. Maybe—
I forced myself to look, and the face I saw was not Vivienne's.
It was Mr. Ross.
My history teacher. Mine and Vivienne's favorite back in high school. The man who always made history feel less like dates and more like stories with bruises still on them. His face was pale under the snow, and one side of his coat was soaked dark. For one stunned second, I just stared at him, the air leaving my lungs in a rush. Relief hit me first, then guilt for feeling it, then grief anyway because he was still there in the snow and he was still dead or dying, and none of this was supposed to happen.
"Mr. Ross…" My voice came out broken.
I swallowed hard, blinking rapidly. My chest hurt with the force of the emotion hitting me, but it wasn't the same kind of devastation I would have felt if it had been Vivi or Iris. It was still horrible, still a blow. But it was not the end of me.
I got my hands under me and tried to stand, only for my ankle to scream out in protest. I collapsed again with a sharp hiss. The joint had finally given up.
I laughed once through my teeth, the sound thin and sick. "Of course."
I could not walk anymore, so I crawled.
The snow soaked through my sleeves and knees almost immediately. It stung against the cuts on my hands. I dragged myself forward one painful inch at a time, breathing through my teeth, then stopped when I realized something was wrong with my sight. Not the normal blurring from blood loss and tears.
Something else. I opened my Soul Sight.
The world changed.
Suddenly, everything had more weight, and more color. The trees glowed faintly with their own patient life. The snow became pale and luminous. The darkness deepened around the living things and made the dead spaces even emptier. I forced my eyes onward until they started burning. Blood leaked from the corners of my eyes almost immediately, hot against the cold on my cheeks.
The snow had stopped feeling cold a while ago. That was probably bad.
I dragged myself forward anyway.
My fingers sank through the powder until they scraped frozen dirt beneath it, then curled around whatever they could find— roots, stones, dead grass— and pulled. My body followed a few inches at a time.
Pull, breathe, pull, breathe.
Don't stop.
I couldn't feel my left leg anymore. My right one hurt enough for both of them. Every breath caught somewhere behind my ribs. Something inside my chest clicked when I inhaled too deeply, so I stopped doing that.
The forest ahead of me stretched forever. Black trees, white ground, black trees, white ground.
It would have been peaceful on any other night, but not tonight.
I dug my fingers into the snow again, and my hand came back red.
"...Come on."
I wasn't sure whether I was talking to my body or myself anymore.
"Come on."
Another few inches. My vision blurred, so I blinked hard, but it didn't help.
The trees doubled, separated, then leaned back together.
I could feel my spiritual energy sputtering inside me. Not flowing or responding correctly. It felt like trying to squeeze the last drops of water through a crushed hose.
I had been moving longer than I should've been able to.
There were lights everywhere.
I thought my brain was finally giving out.
"Great." A laugh tried to leave me and turned into a cough, and blood dotted the snow beneath my mouth.
"Now I'm hallucinating."
But the lights didn't disappear; they multiplied. Hundreds, thousands, floating through the forest.
Some were dim little sparks, some were so bright I had to squint, some looked warm.
Souls.
My heart skipped as the lights sharpened.
A deer stood between two trees thirty feet away, frozen in fear from the distant explosions. Around its body was a pale gold shimmer telling me it was alive. A bird hidden in the branches above me glowed faintly green, telling me it was alive.
I wonder if they understood the carnage happening beneath them.
And beyond them there were people. Not bodies anymore, but souls.
They drifted through the trees.
A little blue soul floated past me. It was small. Child-sized. I couldn't see a face or a body, but somehow I felt fear.
It passed right beside me as I reached toward it.
My fingers went through the light, and it didn't react.
"Wait."
The soul continued moving, not forward but down.
I stared as it sank gently through the snow, through the earth, and disappeared.
Then another followed.
A bright white soul.
Then a murky orange one, then purple, then red, then another white one.
"No." I pushed myself upward slightly.
They were everywhere. Coming from the city, coming from the roads, coming from houses beyond the trees.
Some moved slowly, some dropped like stones, some twisted and fought against whatever was pulling them, but they all went the same direction, down. Deep beneath the ground
My Soul Sight widened. Without me meaning to, suddenly the forest was gone. The entire horizon became light.
Millions of colors poured across the world. It looked almost beautiful. That was the worst part.
A river of souls stretched across the sky and earth. Some were radiant, pure white, soft gold, gentle blue. Others were stained nearly black. Some carried colors so ugly they seemed to rot the air around them.
I could feel differences between them. Not names or histories, something deeper. The texture of a soul.
But it didn't matter.
Good, bad, kind, cruel, pure, filthy, every single one of them was falling.
I stared until my neck hurt.
"...Why?" My voice barely came out.
One soul brushed past me, bright enough to make my eyes sting. There was nothing dirty about it, nothing rotten, nothing that felt wrong.
It still sank.
A dark red soul spiraled down beside a brilliant white one, and they disappeared together in the same destination.
My stomach twisted.
I had grown up hearing things everybody had.
Heaven, Hell, judgment, good people went one way, bad people went another.
Whatever you believed, there was supposed to be something. A distinction, or a rule.
But this wasn't judgment.
Something underneath the world was pulling everyone toward it.
I forced more spiritual energy into my eyes as pain stabbed through my skull, but I didn't care.
"Show me."
The world exploded open.
I saw farther. Too far.
Past the forest, past the burning city, past the horizon, everywhere.
Streams of souls falling from the surface. From buildings, from highways, from battlefields, from hospitals, from places I couldn't even see.
All descending toward the same impossible darkness beneath the world.
I couldn't look away.
The dead weren't rising; they were sinking. Every last one of them.
No distinction, no mercy, no separation, only down.
Something inside me went cold in a way the snow never could.
A little lavender soul drifted beside me, and for some reason, that one made me think of Iris.
My chest seized.
"No!" I slapped my hand over it.
The soul passed through my wrist and disappeared into the earth.
"Iris." My breathing became ragged.
I pushed myself forward. Pain ripped through my spine.
Didn't matter.
"Vivi." Another pull.
My arms shook.
If dead souls were being dragged downward...
Then—
No.
Don't think about it.
They're alive. They had to be. I hadn't seen them, I hadn't found them, I didn't know anything yet. That meant they could still be alive.
I pushed harder.
Over the top of the hill, just beyond a rise in the terrain, I saw it.
A soul. A familiar shade of green
Extremely injured, extremely fragile, endangered in a way that made my entire body go cold. My breath locked up in my chest, and I nearly started hyperventilating on the spot. I stared at it in terror, because I knew who it was, and I could already feel the fear trying to become certainty.
No. Please no. Not another one. Not another body. Not another—
I crawled faster.
The world narrowed to the green glow ahead of me.
Then I saw Elias.
He was on a stretcher being rushed toward an ambulance, paramedics shouting over his body in voices strained by urgency. "his entire body is messed up. Keep him stable! Move, move!" One of them was applying pressure to his chest. Another was calling out for more supplies. Even from a distance, I could see how badly he had been hit.
His leg was gone.
Not cleanly or neatly, but gone in a mangled, bloodied mass where the limb should have been, the remains of torn tissue, tourniquets, and soaked bandages shifting with every jolt of the stretcher. My vision blurred even more. Blood and tears mixed on my face, and I kept crawling even as my lungs felt like they were filling with ice.
Elias was alive. He was hurt, but he was still alive.
The relief was so intense it nearly made me sick.
Then I saw the trail.