The sky pulsed like a dying heart. It heaved and shuddered, its surface bruised with crimson light, as though trying to push something back, to repel a force clawing at the edges of reality. A sickly rhythm beat overhead—boom, pause, tremor—like the pulse of a god's vein, resisting intrusion.
The air was poison. Smoke coiled in the ruins, thick enough to sting the lungs, acrid enough to burn the throat. The stench of sulfur and scorched flesh weighed on every breath.
Ash fell in thin veils, clinging to armor, to hair, to the skin like a mockery of snow. The ground itself was a graveyard—blackened corpses of fallen demons scattered, their wings torn, their bodies half-charred, faces frozen in agony.
The silence of the first layer was no silence at all. It was a suffocation. The echo of screams still hung in the smoke, whispers of war that had burned itself out but left scars too deep to heal.
And then the sky broke.
