"This is dangerous," Ren murmured. "Rebels could be anywhere. You know that." He adjusted his robe after jumping into the crowd, smoothing the white fabric as if composure alone could hold chaos at bay. His eyes never stopped moving. Left. Right. Over shoulders. Over the heads of the crowd. He scanned the way soldiers do when they don't want to scare anyone.
Before I could answer, Zaida reached us, her hair already loosened from the heat. Coleman followed close behind, breath uneven, one hand pressed to his chest as if he'd walked farther than he meant to. The people noticed immediately. The space around us shifted tightened, then opened like water adjusting around stone.
"Does anyone have water?" Zaida asked.
She barely finished the sentence before bottles appeared. Not one or two. Dozens. Hands stretching forward, overlapping, offering. Ten. Fifteen. More. The abundance drew a ripple of amused murmurs from the crowd. Someone laughed. Someone clapped. Someone whispered a blessing.
Zaida smiled, surprised. For a moment, even she seemed disarmed by it.
"Oh—thank you," she said, taking a few bottles and passing them back. "Here. Everyone take one."
The remaining disciples caught up then, faces flushed, movements heavy. They sank down where they stood, backs to knees, knees to ground, exhaustion winning out over decorum. No one scolded them. The people simply made room.
Zaida lifted her bottle and then stopped.
She tilted her head, listening.
"Guys," she said slowly, eyes narrowing as she looked upward, "why are there so many birds?"
I followed her gaze. The sky was moving, Not clouds. Wings.
Crows. too many to count cut across the light in a black, frantic surge. Pigeons burst upward beneath them, white and grey scattering in panic. For several long seconds, the sky vanished behind bodies in flight, feathers colliding, shadows flickering wildly across the crowd.
People murmured. Some pointed. Some laughed nervously.
Zaida never drank the water.
She handed the bottles to us instead, distracted, still watching the sky as if trying to remember something she'd forgotten. I twisted the cap on mine and took a sip.
The vibration came then.
So mild I almost blamed myself. A faint tremor in my teeth. A ripple through the water bottle, barely visible, like a breath passing through plastic.
I froze.
No one screamed. No one ran. The ground shivered again. gentler than a stumble, stronger than imagination. And in that small, suspended moment, before fear found its voice, I understood something was wrong.
Now the water bottles began to tremble, not violently at first, plastic whispering against stone, liquid shivering inside its shell—enough to draw a few uneasy laughs as people brushed it off as nerves or heat, until Zaida flinched and her bottle slipped from her fingers, shattering uselessly across the ground.
"RUN!" Ren shouted, and the word cut through everything before thought could follow it. The sky darkened not with clouds, but with color as a deep, unnatural crimson bled across the horizon, staining the light as if the sun itself had been wounded, and the hush that followed was instinctive, animal.
Then the ground broke its promise. Stone ripped apart beneath our feet, the street lurching violently as balance became a memory instead of a fact; screams erupted while cracks raced outward, people falling, colliding, vanishing into dust and noise.
And then it happened far across the city, visible to everyone, too large and too distant to deny the tallest building began to fall, not all at once but slowly, terribly, its upper floors folding inward like a giant bowing beneath a weight it could no longer carry. Glass burst outward in mute flashes, steel screamed as the structure collapsed into itself, floor after floor erased in a rising plume of dust that swallowed the skyline whole. The impact reached us seconds later, a shockwave tearing through the streets, hurling bodies sideways, shattering windows, ripping screams from throats already raw with terror as the ground convulsed again, harder this time, the city screaming with it—because whatever this was, whatever had been unleashed, it wasn't stopping
The shockwave hit seconds later, hurling bodies through the air, shattering windows, convulsing the city again harder this time until whatever order had existed dissolved completely.
We ran, not together, just forward, anywhere that wasn't here, and I reached blindly for Ren, for Zaida, for Iason, shouting names that vanished into the chaos, seeing no familiar faces, only bodies moving without direction, colliding, separating, disappearing. The angels were no longer standing: one lay crushed beneath rubble, wings twisted at an impossible angle; another had been thrown against a collapsed wall, eyes open and empty, and whatever they were made of broke like anything else.
They said angels never died, they said angels were eternal—but there I saw one half-buried and motionless, its body lifeless while its head was not, its eyes locking onto mine as its mouth slowly, impossibly stretched into a grin.
"The arising of the true messiah," it whispered, the words meant only for me, and then the light drained from its eyes and it finally went still.
I tried to stand as the stage roof tore open with a shriek of metal and a slab of debris came down so close I felt the wind of it pass; dust burned my throat and I staggered, dizzy with relief, when a hand grabbed me from behind and yanked me back, and for a fraction of a second I let myself believe I'd been saved—until the grip slid higher, fingers closing around my throat, cold and deliberate, lifting me as the air was forced out of my lungs in a dry gasp and panic struck sharp and immediate, my feet leaving the ground while I clawed at the same hand that had pulled me clear only moments ago, but it didn't loosen, it tightened, relief curdling into understanding as the world narrowed to pressure and certainty and the knowledge that I was still under control, just as a voice brushed my ear, feminine and calm:
"The world can burn. You shouldn't. Not yet.."
A brutal force crashed into the back of my head. I turned to face the woman's voice "who are you-" then
CLING
White pain detonated behind my eyes, sharp and absolute. My vision fractured, sound collapsing into a dull roar as my body gave out beneath me and everything went black.