The sky cracked open like an egg nobody wanted to hatch. KRRRAAA-CHHH!
Seoul came down in pieces.
First, the streetlights—torn from their roots, trailing cables that sparked like dying nerves. ZZZSSHHH… Then the apartment towers, windows still glowing with the last moments of brushing teeth, kissing goodnight, arguing about groceries. Entire districts peeled away from the inverted horizon and fell upward into the bruised void that used to be night.
Gravity had forgotten its job. Ash and concrete rained in slow motion. CRASH… THUD… SHHHH…
Aria stood alone on the shattered summit, black feather clutched between bloodless fingers. The mountain of saints beneath her crumbled, fused bodies sloughing off in avalanches of bone and regret.
The cradle was gone. The black sun was gone. Only the feather remained, warm as a heartbeat that no longer belonged to anyone.
She looked up.
A subway train tumbled end-over-end through the air, doors open, passengers strapped to seats, mouths stretched in silent screams. RRRRR-EEEEKKK!
It passed close enough that she could read the advertisement plastered inside:
Smile! Tomorrow will be brighter!
The train exploded into crows mid-flight. Thousands of them. Each carried Seong-jun's face for a single heartbeat before dissolving into smoke. SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SSSHHHH…
She understood.
He had scattered himself to hold the city together a little longer. A reprieve measured in minutes. Not mercy. Just delay.
The air split again.
Grigori rose from the ruins of the mountain, no longer stained glass but raw absence shaped like a man. Where his feet touched, reality forgot how to exist. Edges of him bled starlight that screamed when it died. FZZZZZZ… CRACKLE…
He looked at her with eyes made of every prayer humanity would never get to finish.
"You let him choose," he murmured, voice soft as genocide. "How cruel."
Aria took a step toward him. The black feather ignited between her fingers, becoming liquid shadow that crawled up her arm and sank into the empty scars where names used to live. Pain like rebirth. She welcomed it.
"I didn't let him do anything," she answered. "He simply refused to let children pay for the sins of saints."
Grigori tilted his head. The motion fractured the moon a little more.
"Then watch them pay anyway."
He spread his arms.
The falling city accelerated. WHOOM-CRASH! THUD! SHHHHH!
A kindergarten drifted past, roof torn off, tiny shoes still lined up neatly by the door. The teacher floated in the middle of the classroom, arms outstretched, trying to hold thirty children who were no longer there. Their absence howled.
Aria closed her eyes. Remembered the gentle voice that had raised her inside the corpse of God. Remembered the lullaby she had sung to chains.
She opened her eyes. And began to bleed upward.
Golden fire poured from every scar, every pore, every unsaid apology. It rose in a pillar that punched through the falling city and kept going, burning a hole straight through the bruised sky. FSSSSHHHH… KRAAASH…
Where the fire touched, pieces of Seoul froze mid-fall. A bus hung suspended, passengers blinking awake. A convenience store sign flickered once—and steadied. A mother reached the edge of a collapsing balcony and found solid air beneath her feet.
The fire was not salvation. Only another delay. But delays were all humanity had ever had.
Grigori watched her burn herself to hold the world together and smiled the way winter smiles at spring.
"Beautiful," he confessed. "Useless, but beautiful."
He took one step forward.
The pillar of golden fire wavered. Aria's knees buckled. She was running out of blood, out of names, out of everything except the single black feather now fused to her sternum like a second heart.
From the ruins below, something answered.
A murder of crows, millions strong, rose from every crack in the mountain. They carried pieces of night in their wings, pieces of Seong-jun's last breath. KRRRAK! SQUAWK! SHREEEE!
They were not gentle. They slammed into Grigori like a tidal wave made of guilt and sharp beaks.
He laughed as they tore at the absence that wore his shape. Laughed until the laughter became screaming. AHHHHHH-HAHAHA!
The crows peeled him layer by layer, revealing nothing underneath. There was nothing underneath. Only the idea of an ending wearing a saint's face.
Aria fell to her knees. The golden pillar guttered. Seoul began to fall again.
Then a hand caught her wrist. Calloused. Familiar. Impossible.
She looked up.
Yi Seong-jun knelt before her, half his face missing, replaced by living shadow that dripped like ink. One eye still his. The other a hole full of wings.
He was smiling. The expression looked foreign on what was left of his mouth.
"Told you not to get used to it," he rasped. Voice like every crow speaking at once.
Aria stared. Tears cut clean tracks through ash on her cheeks.
"You were gone."
"Part of me still is," he admitted. "The rest got… reassembled. Badly."
He glanced at the city still falling in slow, apocalyptic fragments.
"Clock's ticking, Saintess."
She followed his gaze. Grigori was reforming already, crows peeling off him and dissolving into harmless smoke.
Seong-jun stood, dragging her up with him. His remaining hand was cold as forgotten graves.
"Listen carefully," he muttered. "I can't hold the shape much longer. When I let go, you take what's left of me and you finish it."
"Finish what?"
He looked at her with the eye that was still human.
"The only thing saints were ever good at."
He pressed his forehead to hers. Shadow poured from his ruined face into her scars. It hurt worse than any chain. It felt like forgiveness.
"End the cycle," he whispered. "Even if you have to drag God screaming into the grave with it."
Then he stepped back.
The crows rushed into him all at once. His body unfolded like burning paper, becoming a single vast wing that wrapped around the falling city.
For one impossible moment, Seoul hung suspended inside a night made of one man's regret.
Grigori paused. Even the absence looked almost afraid.
Aria stood alone on the broken mountain, filled with shadow that tasted like someone else's childhood. She looked at the city cradled in black wings. At the saint who had become the night itself to buy her minutes. And began to walk downward.
Toward whatever came after the fall.
Behind her, the vast wing began to tear. Feathers of darkness rained upward into a sky that no longer knew which way was down.
And somewhere inside that storm, a voice that used to belong to a teacher whispered one last thing.
Run, Aria. Run until the saints can't follow. Then burn everything that tries.
The city screamed as gravity remembered its purpose.
And the Ashen Saint walked into the falling dark, carrying a dead man's final wish like a torch made of endings.