Three days after Selena revealed the weight of souls she carried in her flames, Dante's storm began to fracture.
It started small—a spark of crimson lightning that struck the ash near their feet without being called, without intention, without control. Dante stared at it with confusion, then dismissed it as a side effect of the strain they were both under. But the random discharges continued, growing more frequent, more violent.
By the second day, his lightning was lashing out every few minutes, striking ash dunes and reducing them to glass, scorching the already dead landscape with patterns of fused matter that looked almost like words in a language no one spoke. And by the third day, Dante could no longer sleep, could barely focus on anything except the storm building inside him, demanding release, refusing to be contained.
