The First Children are not bound by the world's natural laws.
Their presence is not structured as an arrival, it was a great intrusion.
They grew so strong as Phantasm that they do not belong in the same chains all other beings in the world are wrapped in.
They press into reality like a mountain falling suddenly through the clouds.
The world, built for smaller weights, bends and shudders to hold them.
Space ripples. The atmosphere twists upon itself. The balance of heat, pressure, and magnetic pull fractures in invisible spirals.
And so when they vanish, whether by choice, defeat or even sealing, that tear is not healed gently.
It snaps shut like a torn muscle, every element rushing to fill the absence, colliding and tearing and screaming as the laws reassert themselves. The weight of what was just held hurts.
***
And so the temperature fell first.
It did not drift downward like a slow winter, it plunged. One moment the air shimmered with the ghost-heat of burning stone, the next it was sharp enough to bite bone, each breath turning to frost before it could be drawn fully.
The clouds swelled without warning, beds of rolling grey pulled from the horizon. In their bellies churned storms, cyclones spun into being as if they had always been waiting in the wings.
They fell upon the ruined city in spirals of wind and ash, whirling tight around the blackened skeleton of streets.
The heat from Dario's last attack met the newborn cold, and the clash birthed storms unlike any season knew, snow melted into rain, rain froze to hail, hail burst into mist, all in the space of three heartbeats.
For an hour they circled, anchored to the city's corpse like vultures unwilling to leave a fresh kill. The cyclones dragged the little that was left of the city into the air like shards of glass.
Lightning stitched the clouds together in jagged seams flashing light over a land that could no longer decide whether it was fire or ice.
Beyond the city, the violence stretched outward in thinner arms. Smaller towns like Grenswick felt the storm's fingertips. The sky there turned heavy and grey, the air was freezing cold, the windows rattled in their frames. Rain came in sudden, lashing bursts, but the worst of it never left the city's center.
The storm's heart stayed fixed above the place where the First Child had fallen, spinning and roaring as if the world itself refused to forget what it had just held.
***
"What the fuck just happened!?"
Corbin broke the silence. His voice was flat, but the edge beneath it hissed with a curse.
Ruben didn't look at him. His eyes were still locked on the black line of the horizon, like the answer might be written there.
"We ran," he said finally. "And they chased, then I," he hesitated because he still wasn't completely sure he had progressed as he did with his Ego. "I used my dragons. Got us as far away as I could. I think we went south. I just kept in the air."
Corbin stared. "Kept flying."
"Twenty minutes." Ruben's voice was distant, like he was replaying every second. "We stopped being chased ten minutes in. Heard an explosion behind us," a pause, it happened as soon as their pursuers had stopped following them. "It was Dario."
A second one was heard a couple minutes after that one. He let out a sharp breath, still remembering the way it felt in his bones. "It was like the ground got kicked out from under the world. Shook everything around us so hard I ended up veering off course."
Some of the trees they had been flying in between had been uprooted out of the ground.
The two boys were so far from the city they had been teleported to. It felt far, but Dario's last attack was incredibly powerful.
It reached so far, they could still feel the heat off of the explosion from where they stood.
Corbin's gaze drifted to the drop in front of them. The cliff face fell away into a valley that was doused in fog. His chest rose and fell in uneven beats. "And now?"
"Now?" Ruben asked, "I guess we wait until we're ready to start moving again." Ruben took a breath. He wanted to speak about his fight with Elijah to Corbin, he wanted to speak about how strong Elise was and how he still won.
But Corbin's mood was off.
They both sat at the cliff's edge, lungs clawing at the air. For the first time, Corbin looked at him, saw the exhaustion written in the set of his shoulders, the heaviness in his grip on the rock. "You're too tired to keep going."
"I can still keep going," Ruben shot back, like it was a challenge, though there was no bite in what he was saying. "You should worry about yourself. Your arm…" his eyes flicked to the way Corbin's left arm hung, still broken. "It probably hurts more now right?"
The adrenaline would be gone. But that wasn't what Corbin seemed to be thinking about.
"Strong." Corbin said out of nowhere. His jaw flexed. "Crazy strong. She obliterated me."
Oh, Ruben figured out who he was talking about.
"It didn't even feel like a fight. Rosette is so damn strong." He clenched his hands, "I hate it. It just felt like I was forced to sit there, and take the beating. Like I'm just some poor defenseless kid."
Ruben caught it, the tremor in Corbin's hands. Subtle, but there. In the long two years the two of them have known each other, Ruben had never seen Corbin look so… weak. Shaking. From fear and loss.
He was shaking from feeling small.
Ruben said nothing. He didn't know what to say. He wasn't wise with words, it would sometimes take him too long to figure out the right thing to say, and even when he thought of something good to say, he was never sure that it would tide over well.
So, the best thing he thought to do was stay quiet.
The air changed. Ruben felt it before the wind hit, the shift in pressure, the subtle, unnatural tilt in the air's weight.
"Get up," he said.
Corbin was already rising, the hair on his arms was prickling. The wind surged without warning, slamming into them in a cold wall that felt like it had teeth. The temperature plummeted so sharply it bit at their bones.
The winds were too unnatural. And Corbin already had an answer to it.
"One of the First Children." It was common knowledge in this world that after any of the First Children disappeared after their initial appearance, that it was akin to a delayed impact on a game attack, but on a much greater scale.
"Then it probably appeared in the city." Ruben said. His words were clipped, each one sharp as glass. "Dario. Had to be. And this," he gestured at the sky splitting open in rolling grey, "is what happens after."
Corbin gave a short nod, more to himself than Ruben.
Ruben thought of summoning his dragon to try and get above all of this before it turned worse. But Corbin stopped him with a look. "If you pass out mid-flight, we'll just fall and die."
He wouldn't pass out. And even if he did, as long as they followed the order then they would be fine. But Corbin wouldn't know about that aspect of his Ego.
He reached within, forming the words in his mind, Take us to safety going further south. Away from the winds. Out of the storm. And avoid all dangers.
The dragon didn't come.
Pain did. A spike through his skull, white-hot and splitting.
Corbin noticed instantly. "You alright?"
"Yeah," Ruben lied. The pain was fading, replaced with a slow, creeping realization. His dragons hadn't disobeyed. It was probably a lack of comprehension.
A couple things brought that conclusion to him.
The order was too vague and he didn't even fully feel it was reliable enough, so maybe it was sensing his lack of confidence in the order.
The order was also too long and just not simple enough. That brought more questions to Ruben, like if his dragons had brains.
The wind died down without warning. Even the hail stopped. Corbin frowned. "That's it?" I thought it was supposed to be even worse than this."
Ruben didn't answer. His mind was pulling apart the failed order, rebuilding it into something short, clean, actionable.
The storm hit like it had been holding its breath.
Hail the size of fists, sheets of sleet. Thunder that shook the cliff under their feet. The ground began to groan, and then the trees in the forest behind them ripped from the soil in a chain reaction, their roots twisting like severed veins.
The rumble deepened, mud. A wall of it, dragging the forest down with it, surging forward in a churring wave. The wind hit first, a physical shove that knocked them both off balance…
And then they were falling.
The cliff face blurred past, wind screaming in their ears… until it didn't.
Sound itself cut out. Not muffled. The air went flat and still in an instant, the way it feels when lightning is about to strike. They were still falling, but it was wrong, slower, almost gentle, like the world had decided to let them down easy.
Hands caught them, small, strong, fingers biting into Ruben's arm. A girl's face flashed past, hair whipping, eyes locked on the drop below. No words left her mouth, but something in the air shifted again.
A pull sideways. They were wrenched toward the cliff wall.
Which bounced?
The stone had turned to spring-soft, elastic under their weight. They hit and rebounded, the cliff giving just enough to send them tumbling down onto a narrow ledge. The landing still hurt, skin on stone, bone on bone, but they were alive.
When Ruben lifted his head, the girl was standing over them, still holding his arm like she owned it. Another figure stood behind her, one hand pressed to the cliff, the skin of his palm bleeding where it met the rock.
They didn't speak. Neither did the boys.
The mud roared past far below, but up here on the edge, it couldn't reach.