The sky was dead
There was no sunlight, no moonlight: only a sprawling sheet of gray, suffocating everything with its weight. The city was perpetually drenched under the rain, its streets sliding with water and blood. The iron odour hung dulled in the atmosphere alongside the sweetish scent of burning wood and gunpowder. Some bodies lay unattended, lifeless eyes gazing up into nothingness.
And standing dead centre, one lone hunter knelt.
His black trench coat soaked with rain and gore clung to his frame. Water dripped down from the scissors of his hat brim, shadows veiling his haggard face. He held her close: once fierce, a woman of fire, now reduced to coldness. Her slim fingers, delicately curled, splayed inward, as though she had attempted to reach for something. Blood oozed down from the jagged collapsing wound in her chest and mingled with the rain as it flowed out in a dark halo beneath her.
He stared into her blank eyes, looking for something, anything: she was gone. A single tear rolled down his cheek in slow motion before being lost to the storm.
The ground shook.
It was a low growl that rolled amidst the rain-soaked debris, vibrations rattling through his bones. Sick, ancient, it thickened the air. The shadows twisted, flailing through the chaos like flesh, and climbed into a massive form from the realm of darkness.
A beast.
The wolfish frame overshadowed the battlefield, rain-slick against fur as black as night. Clawed hands trembled, with each talon longer than a dagger. Faint embers glowed beneath its ribs, bone-deep, pulsing with unnatural fire that crackled and flickered under ruined tissue. And its eyes, marrow-deep, cavernous voids stripped of all light but a dreadful hunger.
Back went the head.
The howl came.
Not a wail, but a rageful eruption that cracked the heavens. And the rumble of thunder answered as if the last sky had somehow shrieked. The rain, mid-fall, seemed to stall, while in the overflow, distant bells clanged, interring eery harmony with the howl.
But no flinching did the hunter make.
With utmost tenderness, he laid her down, fingers closing softly over the moon in her chest that had robbed her breath. He lingered upon her, brushing itself away, and etching into the timeless recesses of memory each and every detail of losing the one he could no longer safeguard.
Then he turned to face the photograph.
A man. A woman. A boy, hair almost like snow, left eye crimson—no older than six, toothless with a grin flashed freely between them. A moment frozen in time—untouched by war, by monsters, by death. Already wet, the paper, the ink was beginning to run.
And together came a sigh from the depths of his heart, wearisome yet somehow purged.
"This is the end of my journey."
The silver blade rasped as he pulled it out from its scabbard, glimmering in the dark. Grip took a turn tighter with a whitening of the knuckles beneath worn gloves. He drew herself up, squared his shoulders, and smiled for the very first time that night: Not in defiance, not in hatred—no, this was something different altogether.
Acceptance.
Lightning split the sky into multitudes.
The beast lunged, claw slicing through
The hunter moved.
Steel met flesh. Blood sprayed.
The storm swallowed their struggle, their howls and cries lost in the downpour.
And the photograph—battered, torn, and stained in crimson—slipped from his fingers, carried away by the wind.