There was no thunder when the sky broke.
No screaming winds, no divine trumpet. Just silence—heavy and wrong, like the world had stopped breathing.
Ash drifted like snow through the air, soft and slow. It clung to burnt branches, to broken armor, to the open eyes of the dead. The trees had wept fire, and now they stood as ghosts of themselves, blackened bones against a bleeding horizon.
A boy knelt alone in the wreckage. Cloak torn. Hands raw. Eyes dull with something older than sorrow.
He didn't know how long he'd been walking. Hours. Days. Maybe longer. Time had no weight here—just memories that surfaced and sank like stones in water. His name—Kael—felt foreign in his mouth, like someone else's story.
He hadn't meant to come this far.
He hadn't meant to survive.
But something had brought him to this place, to this battlefield that wasn't a battlefield anymore. Only silence and cinders remained.
And then he heard it. Faint. A sound like breath caught in a throat. A whimper, buried under fallen timber and shattered stone.
He moved before he could think.
He tore through the rubble, fingers numb. Blood smeared over splinters and scorched metal. He moved debris, pushed aside a cracked shield, a broken spear, a severed banner.
There, in the hollow of ruin, lay a girl.
Small. Still. Her skin smeared with soot and blood, her dress ragged, clinging to a body too thin, too cold.
For a heartbeat, he thought she was dead.
Then she opened her eyes.
Not the eyes of a child. Not really.
They glowed—dimly, like embers, like something old trying to remember how to burn.
And in that moment, something in Kael shifted. Not a calling. Not a prophecy. Just a quiet thing. A choice.
He reached out.
She didn't run. Didn't flinch.
Her tiny hand met his, trembling, and the ash fell like snow around them.