The Temple of Broken Clouds was not falling. It was being erased — brick by brick, methodically, like someone crossing a name off a list. At the most inhospitable peak of the entire mountain range, the sanctuary of volcanic stone and black marble bore the weight of a divine verdict. Bolts of absolute white, cold and utterly merciless, split the sky into slices. They turned the night into something without a proper name — too surreal to be real, too brutal to be a dream. There, thunder did not rumble. It cracked, dry and metallic, as though reality fractured with every discharge Olimpya unleashed upon the stone.
In the middle of the circular courtyard, Hyperion was on his knees. The patriarch of Typhon's lineage looked like the embodiment of geological fury — the kind of rage that does not scream, that simmers. Beneath his bronzed skin, veins of magma pulsed with a glow that could not make up its mind, and the heat pouring from his pores bent the surrounding air in waves, like asphalt in summer. But brute force has a ceiling. Chains of solid light, forged in the depths of the Dogma of Order, ran through his shoulders from side to side and pinned him to the ground with a firmness that allowed no argument.
Beside him, Lyra, the Lady of Discord, held a posture that made no sense given the circumstances. She was strangely upright. Her eyes covered by a golden silk blindfold — though the crimson soaking through the fabric made it clear that the judgment had already collected its toll.
Before them both, Arthur Sterling, the prodigious heir of Clan Aegis, floated a few inches above the ground. His platinum armor did not reflect the light; it produced it, swallowing the surrounding shadows as if they had no right to exist. His eyes were slits of pure electricity — no pupils, no humanity, only purpose. In that moment, Arthur was not a man. He was a decree with legs.
"You mixed Chaos with Discord," his voice emerged like an out-of-tune chorus of a thousand overlapping layers, as though an entire legion breathed through the same lungs. "You gave shape to an anomaly this world has no structure to withstand. The balance is not suggesting your extinction. It is demanding it."
Hyperion raised his face. He spat a mouthful of ash and blood that boiled before it touched the cold ground. And he smiled — a wild smile, unfeigned, the kind born in someone who has nothing left to lose.
"We created no anomaly, Arthur. What we delivered to the world was freedom. You built a golden cage, baptized it a kingdom, and spent millennia teaching men to love the feel of the bars."
Arthur did not bother to respond. He raised his right hand. The air ionized in a microsecond and every strand of hair in the courtyard rose with it.
"By the First Dogma," the Avatar decreed. "Insubordination is necrosis of the Order. And necrosis must be cauterized."
Lyra, sensing the weight of what could not be avoided, tilted her head toward a fallen pillar. There, in the shadow of a cracked stone, a bundle of black rags concealed a secret that sobbed softly.
"Fly, my little apple," she whispered. One last spark of Eris's power escaped her lips like purple mist. "Fly and destroy their banquet."
The final blow was not a lightning bolt. It was a vertical column of pure annihilation. In a single heartbeat, the two turned to stardust. Where defiance had stood, there remained only a vitrified crater exhaling the scent of ozone — that caustic, metallic taste that lingers at the back of the throat.
Arthur landed lightly and walked toward the pillar. He sensed a dissonance, a vibration out of tempo — something that did not fit the perfect meter of his dogmas. But before his fingers reached the fabric, a trail of liquid mercury cut through the air.
The Avatar of Hermes appeared from nowhere. He was a sharp-featured man with eyes that never stayed still for a single second. He held the child against his chest with a familiarity that flirted with blasphemy.
"Too late, 'Your Majesty,'" said Hermes. The cynicism in his voice was the kind that not even an electric aura could intimidate. "My Dogma is the only truly absolute one: the message must be delivered. And this boy... he is the most urgent message the future has ever sent you."
"Hand him over, messenger," Arthur ordered. The ground beneath his feet cracked in response. "He is a biological error. A flaw that must be corrected."
"Errors are the only parts of history truly worth reading," Hermes winked. With a snap of his fingers, he dissolved into an explosion of silver light and left the lord of the world alone beneath a funeral rain of black ash.
Eighteen years later.
The cold clarity of memory gave way to the heavy half-light of an alley on the outskirts of Olimpya. Valerius was leaning against a wall of damp bricks, rolling a bronze coin between his fingers without much thought. The rhythmic clinking of the metal was the only sound that dared compete with the constant hum of the metropolis — that machine that never switched off beneath the gaze of its gods.
He wore the worn leather of the low-ranking messengers of Clan Hermes. To anyone passing by, he was just another invisible cog, a rat paid to carry bureaucracy from one point to another. No one noticed the precision of his gaze, nor the fact that no matter how far he walked, his feet seemed to maintain a minimal and constant distance from the filth of the ground.
"Day six thousand, five hundred and seventy of my esteemed servitude," he murmured, catching the coin without taking his eyes off the horizon. "The coffee is an offense, the city reeks of sacred incense, and I still haven't set anything on fire today. I'm becoming dangerously well-behaved."
The sound of heavy boots and the clinking of gold rings announced the arrival of a Clan Fortuna guard. The man was a walking poster for the lineage's decadence: fat with arrogance, draped in jewels that emitted a pale and artificial light.
"Hey, rat!" he growled, hurling a parchment envelope at Valerius's chest. "Take this summons to the tenements in the south sector. Deliver it and disappear. I don't want your kind contaminating the clean areas."
Valerius intercepted the envelope before impact. He spread a broad smile — that mask of obedience he had been refining for nearly two decades.
"As you wish, sir. The Dogma is clear: the message always arrives. Especially the ones nobody wants to read."
The guard left with a snort of contempt. The moment he turned the corner, Valerius's smile vanished. For a millisecond, his fingers glowed with an unstable purple hue — an energy that seemed to be picking a personal fight with the laws of physics. He did not break the seal. The vibration of the paper fibers had already told him everything.
He raised his eyes to the ivory towers in the distance, where Clan Aegis ruled with an iron fist, and then to the dense shadows of the tenements, where fate was calling him by name.
"They finally found you, Nina," he said. His voice was clean now, stripped of all varnish. "What a shame. I genuinely wanted the privilege of getting there first."
With a movement that blended fluidity and silence in equal measure, he scaled the ledge of a window and gained the rooftop. Valerius vanished into the night — a ghost that Olimpo, in its arrogance, had forgotten to exorcise.