"Earth is dead, and what remains is an abomination created in its place... I wish I could say 'She' was to blame."
— Pope Ignis Everburn.
———
Dawn broke, and the city of Corinthian Cross exhaled its human tide. Pedestrians poured into streets that gleamed with transient morning light, a symphony of car horns and hurried footsteps flooding the avenues of commerce.
At the farthest fringes of this urban organism, in an alley where sunlight fought a losing war against the urban gloom, the city's squalor lay exposed.
Wild cats, ribs visible through mangy fur, hissed and swiped over the spoils of an overturned dumpster, their conflict a silent, desperate scramble in the shadows.
Away from the fray, a black cat lay still against the cold brick. Malnourished. Empty. Dead.
Then, the shadows at the alley's depths stirred. Not with light, but with a deeper, colder current.
The fighting cats froze as one, ears pivoting, their primal brains screaming a single truth: Predator.
Suddenly, the fur on the lifeless black cat began to rise, each strand lifting in a wave against gravity. A raspy, shuddering breath filled its lungs. Then, its eyes opened—not dull as expected, but glowing with a toxic, luminous green.
It rose to its feet with a languid, unnatural grace and shook itself, as if discarding the fragrance of death.
The surrounding cats did not flee. They could not. To move was to be acknowledged by the creature, and acknowledgment felt like a prelude to death.
Era gazed upon them, her indolent, divine eyes parsing only the dull algorithms of base survival. Finding nothing of interest, she turned.
She gracefully stepped out the alley's depths, through the mouth, and into the sunlight as if entering a spotlight on a stage of inconsequence.
The light, so fierce to mortal eyes, was a pale, interesting texture to her. She looked up, not at the sun, but through it.
[Have you ever wondered how a life is formed? How the breath flows into dust and grime, sparking a flame within the soulscape?]
Her gaze—a consciousness spanning galaxies now channeled through a stray cat's pupils—drifted over the bustling crowd.
[No. I suppose not. Such thoughts are not for lower lifeforms. They belong to beings who dwell in the spaces between your dimensions, in the silences between your heartbeats.]
Suddenly, a yellow cab hissed to a halt at the curb, and a passenger disembarked, eyes glued to a phone. Era moved, a streak of obsidian shadow. She darted through the open door, used the seat as a springboard, and alighted soundlessly on the cab's roof before the human even registered her presence.
Startled, the passenger blinked, then dismissed the event, their mind already consumed by the day's trivial calculus.
Passenger gone, the cab pulled back into the stream of traffic, and Era settled at the front of the roof; a diminutive figurehead on a vessel of mundane journeys.
[I sense a shift in this world's frequency. A fundamental alteration has been scribed into its core.]
She watched the monolithic high-rises blur past, their signs and advertisements a meaningless chromatic smear.
[More pressingly, I recognize the scribe. An old… 'acquaintance'. An insufferable, but chilling entity.]
A sigh, felt more in the soul than heard, whispered through her consciousness.
[If context for this chaos is what you seek, then context you shall have. But introductions are in order. I am Era. 'The Connoisseur of the Unknown.' My purpose is woven into the fabric of a greater being: to serve the Champion. To guide him. To anchor him in times of cataclysmic peril.]
The cityscape began to transition, the corporate citadels giving way to the temples of commerce—vast malls and mid-rise apartments.
[The Champion… Think of him as you would the oldest of myths. A great power, cast down from its celestial seat. Betrayed by one he called 'kin'. Now, he gathers the shattered pieces of himself, life by life, world by world, hoping one day to reclaim his legacy. ...But I fear— Haaah~]
The psychic sigh was one of cosmic weariness.
Aside, the cityscape continued its metamorphosis, and monolithic malls and occasional mid-rise offices, bled into rows of uniform, blocky apartments and shops.
[It is the year 2028, and the planet called Earth is a memory. It was unmade and remade, merged with something… 'else'. Its history is now a palimpsest, written over by a regal, lifeless hand...]
Era's tail drifted carefreely in the wind.
[You may have likely deduced it by now. Supernatural entities infest this world. They are not invaders; they are a symptom. The natural order here is corrupted, fractured... and this broken state has been accepted as the new baseline of reality.]
Her toxic green gaze drifted over the tide of humanity on the sidewalks, hundreds of heads bobbing like seeds on a dark, restless river.
[Strange beings walk amongst men, unseen. A great and terrible glamour addles mortal minds—a psychic static overlaying the truth. When a werewolf sprints down an alley, they see the shade of a wild dog. A vampire feeding in a nightclub's shady backyard becomes a pale addict in a violent altercation... The magic is profound, a global-scale illusion.]
The cab slowed in thickening traffic.
[Its power source... I wondered at its origin. But now I sense it. The radiation. The ghost of atomic fission. A smart source—in its profoundly foolish way. To build a lie from the energy of nukes. Madness. The faintest error, and it all comes undone. In its own way, it is a testament to the caster's skill.]
A sigh, not of breath, but of essence, whispered through her consciousness. Then her gaze took in the sunbleached buildings.
[The Champion will awaken here, and he will live. He will, as he always does, plunge himself into the heart of disaster, trusting the haphazard mosaic of his past lives—a warrior's instinct here, a king's gambit there—to see him through.]
The buildings outside became softer, residential, and pedestrians walked leisurely.
[Until, one day, it cannot. The collage fails. The gamble loses. Then, he has only two paths: a true death, sending his essence screaming into the cycle for a new world... or a lingering in the silent, lightless void between lives. Waiting. Waiting for me to gather enough strength across the lonely centuries to pull him back and continue the cycle into the next life... For now, he begins life anew.]
Soon, the calm strolls, the leisurely paces, and the faces unguarded by the city's illusion of peace. Shattered in an instant.
A van screeched to a halt, and men in garish floral shirts and light hats—Beach Boys—poured onto the sidewalk, weapons raised.
Their target was an innocuous cafe.
*Bang!* *Bang!* *Dududu!*
Gunfire cracked the morning air, and the cab driver slammed the brakes and fled.
Screams erupted. A chorus of pure, human terror cut through the air as nine figures fell to the initial volley—three of which were GBG lookouts, their hats tumbling onto the asphalt.
Immediately, Beach Boys rushed forth, hurling grenades through the cafe's shattered doorway. A beat of silence, then retaliatory gunfire spat from within, stitching holes through the beautiful front glass and into the bodies of the attackers outside.
*Dadada!* *Bang!* *Bang!*
The grenades detonated, and the gunfire from within ceased.
The remaining Beach Boys stormed the ruined cafe, delivering hails of final, brutalizing gunfire.
Meanwhile, Era watched, her toxic green eyes impassive. Then she shut them, retreating into a long, internal silence.
Moments later, a Beach Boy stumbled back out, his face a mask of panic.
*Dududududu!*
Sporadic, intense gunfire roared within the cafe, then ceased as other Beach Boys ran out in panic.
A few beats, then a concussive blast.
A young man was suddenly blown out through the cracked glass front, tumbling across the pavement to lie still.
A moment later, a young woman with a soft, professional bearing—Aegates—emerged from the sidewalk. She ran to him, fingers pressing against his neck, seeking a pulse.
At that moment, Era opened her eyes. Her toxic gaze focused on the back of Aegates's head with an intensity that could have bored through steel. Then, she looked away, and the dreadful, judging aura that had gathered around her dissipated.
[I will not defy fate. I will not repeat the Champion's ancient offence. If she is to kill him… then so it shall be.]
With that thought, she lay down on the still-warm roof of the cab, her glowing eyes slowly dimming as they closed shut.
[But if she relents… then perhaps, against all cosmic logic, there is a fragment of hope yet—for this gloriously accursed world.]
Soon, her consciousness receded, and Era fell into a deep, restorative slumber, the kind that measures time in the turning of worlds.
When she awoke, many suns had risen and set. She found herself in the quiet alley behind a large, austere hospital. The air smelled of antiseptic and damp concrete.
She lifted her head. Not with her feline eyes, but with her true perception—a sense that bypassed walls, flesh, and bone, seeking a specific, brilliant, and familiar signature within the building.
She found it. A flicker. Weak, but stubborn. Unyielding.
It was Rainer's.
Her toxic green eyes opened, slitting against the mundane light of the alley.
[He lives.]