The village of Ashen Veil had prayed for rain for thirty-seven days.
Not the gentle petition of the faithful, but the raw, cracking scream of throats too dry to form words anymore. They had offered the last of their grain, the last of their children's tears, the last of their hope. Heaven had not answered.
On the thirty-eighth night, under a sky the color of old bone, the wind stopped.
No rustle. No sigh. The air simply forgot to move.
In the cracked plaza, Elder Thomar knelt before the cracked altar, palms open to a god who had turned His face away. The others watched from doorways, too weak to stand closer. A single candle guttered between them, its flame unnaturally still.
Then the candle went out.
Not snuffed. Not blown. It simply ceased to be fire.
From the far edge of the square, where the shadow of the crumbling bell tower pooled deepest, something stepped forward.
He did not arrive. He was simply there, as though the darkness had always contained him and only now chose to reveal the shape.
Tall. Cloaked in something that had once been cloth and was now mostly absence. In his right hand hung a blade—long, straight, its edge chipped in places, the steel mottled like old skin. It did not gleam. It drank light instead.
No eyes showed beneath the hood. No breath misted the air.
The elder lifted his head. His voice was a rasp. "Who…?"
The figure did not answer.
He walked past the elder, boots making no sound on the parched earth. He stopped before the altar. The broken stone bore the sigil of Auriel, Second Warden of the Upper Spheres—three interlocking halos now cracked down the middle.
The figure raised the blade.
One motion. Not violent. Not ceremonial. Simply necessary.
The steel passed through the sigil as though it were smoke.
A sound followed—not thunder, not scream, but the low groan of reality noticing a mistake. The halos shattered outward in silent light, then folded inward and vanished.
Rain began.
Not a storm. Not a blessing. Just rain—steady, indifferent, falling straight down as though the sky had finally remembered its job.
The elder stared upward, mouth open, tasting water for the first time in weeks.
The figure turned.
He walked back the way he had come, through the square, past the doorways where mortals now wept and whispered. No one moved to stop him. No one dared speak.
At the edge of the village, where the road became dust and then nothing, he paused.
Behind him, the rain continued.
Ahead of him, the horizon waited.
He kept walking.
The candle never relit.
Here are glimpses of that moment as the world first noticed the anomaly—cold, desolate, inevitable:
Two days later, Elder Thomar sat at the scarred table in the parish house, quill trembling above the record book. The rain had ceased at dawn, leaving the earth slick and smelling of forgiveness no one trusted.
He wrote:
On the thirty-eighth night, a stranger came. He bore no name, no sigil, no light. He struck the altar of Auriel and the heavens wept.
The ink bled outward, forming impossible shapes—halos broken, blades splintered. He tried again. The letters twisted, refused to hold meaning. He pressed harder. The page tore.
He stared at the ruin, then at his own hands. They shook not from age, but from something colder.
He carried the book to the hearth and fed it to the flames.
The parchment curled black. The ashes settled on the stones and kept the shape of a chipped blade for three heartbeats before the wind took them.
The elder never spoke of it again. But in the nights that followed, he slept with his back to the door.
A courier named Brother Elias had been passing through Ashen Veil when the rain fell. He had watched from the ridge above the village, too far to hear words, close enough to see the silhouette cut the night.
He rode south that same hour, horse lathered, heart hammering.
In the saddlebag: a single page torn from his own journal.
Figure. Hooded. Blade chipped yet absolute. One stroke. Sigil of Auriel broken. Rain followed. No word spoken.
He repeated the words to himself as the road blurred. He did not know why he wrote "absolute." The word had arrived unbidden, heavy in his mouth.
At the gates of Cathedral Spire, three days later, he would deliver the message to the lesser archivists. They would read it, frown, file it under Anomalies, Unconfirmed.
But that night, alone on the road, Elias whispered the word he had not yet dared speak aloud.
"Godslayer."
The wind did not answer. It never did.
In the lower choirs of the Celestial Host, a seraph named Liriel felt the tear.
It was not pain. Angels do not feel pain as mortals do. It was absence—a thread in the great tapestry suddenly gone slack.
Auriel's sigil had been a small thing, a minor warden's mark over a forgotten village. Yet when it snapped, the vibration traveled upward through every rank, faint but undeniable.
Liriel tried to report it. The words formed in the eternal light, perfect and luminous.
They reached the higher choirs and stopped.
No reply came.
For the first time in uncounted eons, Liriel knew the taste of doubt—not as emotion, but as silence where certainty should have been.
It looked down upon the mortal plane. The rain had already ended. The village slept under a sky that now seemed slightly thinner.
Liriel whispered, though no one could hear:
"He was not summoned."
At dawn in Ashen Veil, a child named Mara wandered the plaza.
The ground was still damp. Puddles reflected a sky too pale.
She found it near the altar: a single feather, white as new snow, its edges already blackening like paper held too close to flame.
She lifted it.
It weighed nothing.
She let go.
The feather fell without sound, turning slowly, dissolving into motes before it touched the earth.
And so the first crack appeared—not in the sky, but in the certainty of all who looked upon it.
Here, the moment the feather falls—subtle, cosmic, terrifying in its quiet.