The earth ran slick with blood-red rain,
The sky itself had learned to stain.
The sun still stood — yet none did rise,
The wind still wept, the poppies lied.
The trees looked on, the steel was worn,
Death left men in his borrowed form.
Iron gleamed — half silver, half dread,
The tale too bleak, too grim to be read.
Water fell from heaven's din,
Widows prayed for devils' kin.
Tell me then — what's left to tell?
If not for horns and red skin's swell,
Would you not name this place as hell?
---
The moon — that sleepless, silver witness — vanished an instant before dawn failed to arrive.
We were meant to leave by the dawn of the second sun. I'd gone to bed early, expecting the usual quiet before travel. The Prince, his sister, and Kanabo of the Kitorienmasu Clan were still awake when I turned in. Their muffled conversation drifted through the paper walls — steady, low, and too careful to be ordinary. Something in their silence unsettled me, as if the air itself knew it would soon break.
It began not with a crash but with a silence so vast it erased every other sound — the kind that sucks the air from your lungs and makes your own heartbeat sound intrusive. Then came the light: a violent, searing bloom of orange and electric red from beyond the eastern ridge.
It wasn't sunrise.
It was birth — or blasphemy.
The colour was wrong. It wasn't fire but something trying to be — raw, unstable Mana burning in hues no mortal forge could mimic. The faint grey promise of morning was devoured, replaced by a pulsing inferno that cast the shrine's shadows into madness. Every lantern flickered as if afraid.
I ran outside barefoot, the cold biting at my skin.
Hitmisu and the others were already armed, their movements precise, mechanical.
The Dragon Prince stood at the open hall door, his jian drawn but motionless — his stillness more terrifying than action. His gaze was fixed eastward, toward that false dawn consuming the sky.
"They came at the changing of the guard," he said quietly, voice flat as cut glass. "A terrible hour for prayer."
The ground began to hum. A low vibration climbed through the soles of my feet, up the beams and walls, until even the paper screens trembled. It wasn't an explosion — it was energy awakening, ancient and territorial, answering the threat in kind.
"Father, the high strike!"
The Prince's command split the chaos like a sword through water, carried on Qi so sharp the air itself shuddered.
I looked up — and saw it.
A sphere of burning light arced over the eastern horizon, compact and furious, the size of a carriage but heavier than mountains. A false sun — a weapon of condensed Mana, trailing white-hot vapor that screamed through the clouds, aimed directly for the shrine's heart.
Kanabo moved first.
He didn't shout or hesitate; he simply ceased to be human. His body shifted into motion too smooth to track.
With a guttural breath, he thrust his blade forward — light cascading up his arms like liquid gold. The air ignited, and a streak of Qi burst forth — the Dawn Tiger Spark, magnified into a divine inferno.
The collision was cataclysmic.
No noise. No shockwave. Just blinding being — two gods arguing over what it meant to burn.
Then, the false sun shattered. It broke into a storm of dark ash and molten glass that rained over the city, each shard glowing like a dying prayer.
"Victoria. Heiwa. Now."
The Prince's tone was quiet but final. "The ground will not hold if they breach the perimeter."
He dropped to his knees and pressed both palms to the stone. The courtyard shook.
The flagstones split apart, not collapsing but rising — as though the mountain itself obeyed him.
A black wall of polished earth surged upward, smooth and gleaming with inner light — the Earth Dragon Coil, sealing the shrine within its divine skin.
His eyes met mine — no warmth, no doubt, just an instruction that carried centuries of bloodline weight.
"The capital. Do not stop until you see its walls."
I turned to Heiwa. She didn't flinch. Her caramel eyes stayed fixed on the false sunrise, face unreadable, almost tranquil. I took her hand anyway.
"What about them?" I asked, my throat dry. The Prince and Kanabo were already descending the stone steps, their silhouettes framed by red light, walking straight into the war's mouth.
"Their duty is here," said Dōngzhi. Her voice was calm, ancient. "Yours is to live."
The air grew colder — so cold frost gathered midair, clinging to breath, steel, and skin alike. The shrine creaked under the weight of unnatural chill.
"Why her?" I snapped suddenly, the words tearing out before I could stop them. "Hitmisu can't even sense Mana or Qi! What makes us so different?" I added, pleading.
Hitmisu smiled then — that small, knowing smile that hurts more than a wound. "It isn't fair," she said softly, walking toward me. "But fairness doesn't keep the world turning."
The ground convulsed again, a deep groan from the earth's marrow. I staggered. She caught me, pulled me against her. Her scent — incense, steel, and foxfire — filled my senses.
"I don't like this," I whispered, voice cracking. "I don't—"
"Your contract," she said, her breath warm against my ear, "is more than death. It's more than fear. Remember that." Her fox ears twitched once before she drew back.
Then she pressed something into my palm — a pistol, cold and heavy like guilt.
"You should learn to use a sword someday," she added, forcing a grin, patting my head before gently pushing me away.
Danpung approached, spear in hand, eyes glistening though her voice stayed steady. "There are universities in the neutral states," she said, half-laughing, half-pleading. "You could actually graduate before dying. That'd be a first."
I laughed — a hollow, broken sound. "You think I'd survive the paperwork?"
Her grin faltered. "Survive this first."
I looked at them — Hitmisu, Dōngzhi, Danpung — standing against the false light like figures painted on the world's last mural.
Then I looked at Heiwa.
She stood apart, serene as a shrine statue. Even now, she didn't tremble.
Clutching the pistol, I took her hand and ran.
The narrow forest path twisted downward, moonlight vanishing behind us as the world turned orange. The air thickened with ash. Every breath was a knife.
Behind us, the shrine roared to life.
I heard the clash of steel, the bellow of dragons in human throats, the hum of divine Qi cracking stone.
The scent of ozone, of burning iron and blood, filled the sky.
And somewhere beneath all that, a deeper sound — like a heart breaking.
When we reached the ridge, I looked back.
The city below was no longer a city — it was a furnace.
The false sun hung low, swelling, pulsing as though alive. Its light reflected in the snowmelt streams, turning them into rivers of molten copper.
And yet — even as horror unfolded — a strange, impossible beauty persisted. The world was dying, but it was magnificent in doing so.
Heiwa finally spoke. Her voice was quiet, steady. "You're crying."
I wiped at my face. I hadn't noticed.
"Maybe it's the smoke."
She tilted her head. "Maybe."
We walked on in silence, the sound of war fading behind us, replaced by the whisper of wind and the faint hum of the false sun's dying echoes.
That was the day the heavens cracked.
That was the day the second sun was said to have for a brief moment of blood and steel, have a twin— a weapon, another curse, a miracle no one asked for.
Some called it the mortal inability to learn history's lessons, Others called it the dawn of the new age.
But I remember the way it looked before it fell —
cold, bright, and wrong.
A god made by man, frozen mid-cry,
preserving the sun in ice.