The world ended at 3:17 A.M.No trumpet. No fire. No epic battle.Just silence—as the sky blinked out like a dying eye,and the sun, once golden, became a pit of teeth.
Sol Draven was the only one still looking up.
He stood ankle-deep in a crater that wasn't there yesterday, where the asphalt had turned to obsidian glass and the wind screamed in voices that shouldn't exist.
Behind him: the skeleton of a dead city.In front of him: a girl's name carved into concrete, now smudged and unreadable.And beside him… a child.
Not a real one.This thing had no face. Just smooth skin where its eyes and mouth should be.It spoke without speaking, its words burning straight into Sol's skull.
"She never existed, Sol. Just like you."
He didn't look at it. He never did.
"She wore yellow," he whispered, kneeling by the name. "She used to say the sky was a liar. That it hides the stars."
His fingers brushed the stone.Warm.Like it remembered her better than he could.
The faceless child tilted its head.
"There is no record of her. No voice. No laughter. No screams."
Sol gritted his teeth. "Then why do I still dream of her crying?"
The child stepped forward, leaving ash prints with every barefoot step.
"Because you are cursed. Because you are the Ash-Marked."
Sol rose.
He didn't feel heroic. Or chosen.He felt tired. The kind of tired that seeps past blood and bone — the kind that lives in your name.
Around his neck, the rusted dog tag clinked.
IRIS M. DRAVENStatus: REMOVED
He didn't know if she was his sister, or a memory stitched into him by guilt.He just knew that every time he said her name out loud, something in the air tried to choke him.
The wind moaned. Shadows shifted.And from the cracked sky above, something started to fall.Something massive. Something ancient.Its body writhed like storm clouds with veins. Its face? A spiral of wings and void.One of the Celestial Maw.
"Time's up," the child murmured, voice a whisper inside Sol's spine.
"It's always been up," Sol muttered back.
He reached for the knife at his belt. Not steel. Not even metal.It was made from a sliver of sunbone — the rib of a dead god.
"S.I.N. Activation: Type I – Wrath."
The tag around his neck ignited, searing red glyphs blooming down his arm like infection.
Blood boiled.Vision blurred.And his heart skipped a beat.
"Warning: You have 14% 'Humanity' remaining," the System whispered.
Sol didn't care.
Fire licked from his veins, erupting from his hands like hatred made visible.
The sky-snake above howled.It remembered him.
And Sol remembered everything.
"I'm going to burn your memory back into this world," he whispered to the smudged name on the stone."And I'll burn down the gods to do it."
He leapt.
A blur of ash and flame.Blade in hand. Eyes red with extinction.The god screamed, but Sol screamed louder.
He was wrath. He was memory. He was the sin that should've been erased.