The newborn hell swallowing the fringe of Veyra did not roar with explosions alone but screamed with people too.
The district had always been loud in the way wounded places were loud—vendors barking prices over rusting generators, children shouting over the rattle of hover-carts, drunken laborers singing cracked songs beneath flickering streetlamps—but the noise had become something else entirely. Tonight the city screamed like an animal being butchered alive.
"Nightcrow! You void-eating bastard—may the abyss swallow you whole!"
A woman's voice tore through the suffocating dark as she ran blindly down the shattered street, her dress ripped open along the seam, torn fabric snapping behind her like broken wings.
Her feet struck pavement she could not see.
Twice she stumbled. Twice she caught herself and kept running, sobbing curses into the choking air.
"Nightcrow, you demon—burn in your own darkness!"
Another voice answered, raw and furious. A man staggered over a mound of broken concrete, blood streaming down his temple from a gash that turned half his face slick and red.
"Nightcrow! Nightcrow, you bastard—release us!"
"Curse you, void-spawn! Give us back the light!"
The district had been swallowed whole—not by smoke, not by nightfall, but by something heavier. The darkness pressed against the skin like deep water, thick and absolute. Streetlamps had vanished. Neon signs were nothing but dead silhouettes.
Even the distant skyline of Veyra's shining core had disappeared beyond a curtain of devouring black.
Still, people ran.
They ran because standing still meant waiting to die.
Men and women crashed into one another in the dark. Some tripped over fallen masonry and vanished into unseen pits with shrieks that ended abruptly. Others clawed their way forward with outstretched arms, grasping for walls that might guide them through the suffocating void.
Some collapsed where they stood. Others fell to their knees and pounded the cracked pavement with bloody fists.
Yet woven through the curses came another chorus—desperate, childish, heartbreakingly sincere.
"Thunder Saint! Thunder Saint, save us!"
"Saint—please—please see us!"
"Thunder Saint, we're here! We're innocent! Save your people!"
A cluster of laborers huddled near the remains of a collapsed storefront, arms raised toward the flashes of blue lightning flickering somewhere high above the darkness.
"Saint—protect the innocent!"
"Thunder Saint, have mercy!"
They prayed to the same storm that had begun tearing their world apart.
Among the stampede of blind terror, one boy refused to pray.
Pryce heard every word, and each one twisted something bitter inside his chest as he ran through the dark like the streets still belonged to him.
Seventeen years had carved him tall and lean, the sort of wiry strength forged not in gyms or academies but in long days hauling scrap metal through alleys that stank of rust and cheap fuel. His right hand clamped around his sister's wrist with iron certainty, dragging her behind him through the chaos.
Lulu struggled to keep up.
She was the same age as him but smaller—too thin, too fragile for the brutal rhythm of survival that had shaped her brother. Her free hand clutched the back of his shirt like a lifeline while sobs tore uncontrollably from her chest.
"We're going to die—Pryce, everything's breaking!" she cried, her voice cracking as another distant explosion rolled across the district like thunder. "Look at the sky—it's falling—we're all going to die! I don't want to die—please, Pryce, I'm scared—my legs hurt—tell me it's going to be okay—please—"
He didn't answer.
His jaw locked. His grip tightened. Inside his chest his heart beat a single stubborn refrain.
'Just a little more.'
'Just a little more and we live.'
The darkness that blinded everyone else barely slowed him. These streets were etched into his bones. He knew the uneven slope beneath his boots where the pavement dipped toward the old drainage channels. He recognized the faint metallic tang of the ventilation pipes buried beneath the wall to his right.
He felt the way the wind curled strangely around the corner ahead where two buildings leaned too close together.
Even without sight, the district spoke to him.
Just a little more. A few meters.
There was a place—a narrow storm-drain entrance half buried beneath fallen girders, something he had once crawled into as a child during long summers when the world had been cruel but not yet murderous.
'One more alley bend.'
The memory burned bright in his mind.
Then the sky exploded.
A slab of concrete the size of a wagon screamed down from above, its jagged edges wrapped in coils of furious blue lightning. It would have crushed Lulu's skull flat against the pavement.
Pryce moved before the thought finished forming. He yanked her sideways so violently her feet left the ground.
The slab struck the street a heartbeat later.
The impact shattered the pavement like glass, and lightning erupted outward in whipping tendrils that lashed across the fleeing crowd.
One arc grazed a woman running ten paces away.
She burst into white flame mid-scream.
Her body convulsed as skin peeled away in smoking sheets. The smell of burning flesh spread instantly through the choking air while she thrashed against the ground for a few agonizing seconds before collapsing into a twitching black ruin.
Pryce slammed into a nearby wall, dragging Lulu with him as they both gasped for breath. The air tasted of ozone and charred meat.
Then the heavens tore open.
A pillar of lightning descended through the darkness like a spear thrown by the gods, and within that blinding column a man appeared. He fell from the sky with the calm inevitability of a meteor, hovering for a single heartbeat above the ruined street.
Bare chest gleaming with sweat and power. Muscles layered across his torso like sculpted armor. White-gold hair rippling around his head as electricity danced between his fingers like obedient serpents.
Thunder Saint.
Sylas Stormveil.
To the crowds stumbling blindly through the dark, he was salvation made flesh.
To Pryce, he was the reason the district was dying.
Their eyes met across the ruined street, and recognition sparked instantly. Sylas smiled—not the warm smile of a savior, but the slow, amused grin of a predator recognizing prey that had once wounded him.
Pryce felt his teeth grind together until his jaw ached.
'Dickless bastard!'
Sylas raised both arms. His shoulders rolled with the smooth power of a creature born to command storms as his fingers traced a blazing sigil through the air, lines of lightning carving symbols so bright they burned afterimages into the eye.
The clouds answered instantly.
A swirling mass of lightning condensed above the district, a compact storm dense enough to glow like a miniature sun.
Sylas's grin widened.
Then he winked.
Slow. Mocking.
"Goodbye."
The saint dropped the final ten meters and drove his heel into the rooftop beneath him.
The impact split the building like rotten wood.
Lightning detonated outward—not in bolts, but in a perfect expanding sphere of annihilating blue light that devoured everything in its path. Walls vaporized instantly. Pavement melted into glowing slag.
People caught within the outer edge were lifted screaming as lightning poured through their bodies, skeletons glowing white beneath dissolving skin before their forms collapsed into drifting ash.
The storm reached Pryce and Lulu in less than a heartbeat.
Pryce turned and wrapped his entire body around her. His arms locked tight, his taller frame folding over hers like a shield until she disappeared completely beneath him, face pressed against his chest, her thin fingers clutching the back of his shirt.
For the first time since the disaster began, Pryce spoke.
His voice came out hoarse, half fury and half bitter laughter.
"Well… guess it's time to be a hero or whatever that saying is."
He squinted upward at the incoming storm.
"Something about… dying gloriously like a noble heroic chicken or something."
Then the lightning arrived.
Heat struck first—blinding, absolute. His back ignited with agony as arcs of living electricity tore through flesh and muscle, his spine arching violently as lightning raced through his nerves like molten wire. Lulu screamed into his chest as stray forks licked across her limbs.
Their bodies convulsed together in synchronized torment.
Hair burned. Skin blistered. The air filled with the sickening smell of roasting flesh.
Another bolt struck, lifting them from the ground as the storm hurled them across the street like discarded rag dolls.
Blue fire poured into Pryce's mouth, into his eyes, into the marrow of his bones.
His final conscious thought was strangely calm.
'Well… that went about as well as expected.'
Then the world turned white.
When the storm passed, two charred silhouettes collapsed onto the ruined pavement.
Far above, Sylas Stormveil rose once more into the sky on wings of lightning, rolling his shoulders as if shaking off mild exertion. Across the shattered rooftops, Nightcrow waited in silence, darkness coiling around the armored figure like loyal hounds.
The saint cracked his neck. Lightning gathered again.
And the battle resumed.
Below them, the fringe of Veyra kept dying.