POV: Aphrodite
Fate tightens its grip.
The dark comes wrong tonight.
I've been watching sunsets long enough to know the pace of them, the way the light pulls back gradually and the sky moves through its colors before giving up to dark entirely. This isn't that. The light doesn't pull back — it gets taken. One moment the afternoon is still present in the sky above the drained canopy and then the quality of it changes, drops, the remaining light flattening out and dimming the way it dims when something large moves between a source and the ground it was reaching.
No cloud cover. No natural explanation.
Kai notices it at the same moment I do. I can tell because his hand finds the crossbow at his side with the automatic motion of someone whose body responds to wrongness before the mind has finished cataloguing it. He doesn't raise it. He just puts his hand there.
