Chapter 1 – The Last Breath
The sky was on fire.
Liora Kane stood on the shattered roof of what used to be the Orion Tower and watched the horizon bleed crimson.
Lightning crawled across clouds the color of dried blood, splitting the night with jagged veins of violet light.
The air reeked of smoke, metal, and something far older—an ozone tang that made her tongue sting.
Below, the city screamed. Glass shattered. Sirens wailed and died in bursts of static.
The world itself was ending, and she could taste it.
She tightened her grip on the plasma rifle, the weapon slick with sweat and blood that wasn't hers.
Her arms trembled, but not from fear. Not anymore.
Fear had burned out of her days ago, scorched away by betrayal and survival.
What remained was a cold, diamond-edged clarity.
Behind her, the rooftop door banged open.
"Liora!" A voice she once loved cut through the chaos.
Kai.
For a heartbeat—just one small, treacherous heartbeat—hope flared.
He was alive. Against every nightmare, he had found her.
The boy who had once laughed with her under summer rain now stood framed by the ruin of the world.
But the man stepping into the flickering light was not the Kai she remembered.
His dark hair was matted with blood. His eyes—those warm amber eyes she used to drown in—glowed faintly silver, reflecting the storms above.
And in his hand, he carried a blade that shimmered with the same sickening energy as the monsters howling in the streets.
"Don't move," he said. His voice cracked like broken glass.
Liora's stomach turned to stone.
She knew that tone.
She had heard it the night their team was ambushed, when half their friends died and Kai came back alone.
She should have listened to the unease in her chest then.
But she had wanted to believe.
Wanted him.
"Why?" she whispered, the single word nearly lost to the wind. "We were supposed to fight together."
Kai's jaw tightened. "I am fighting. For the future. You… you're the key, Liora. I can't let you destroy it."
Destroy it?
The laugh that burst from her throat was harsh, almost feral.
Below them, a skyscraper folded in on itself like wet paper, its collapse sending a shockwave of heat across the rooftop.
The end of the world roared around them, and he spoke of a future?
"You think killing me will save anything?" she spat.
Kai stepped closer, blade humming.
"I don't have a choice."
The wind tore at her hair, whipping black strands across her face.
Every muscle in her body screamed to run, to fight, to live.
But a deeper instinct whispered of inevitability.
This moment had been waiting for her since the first tremor of the apocalypse.
"Then do it," she said.
For a second—just a second—his eyes flickered with the boy she once loved.
The one who had kissed her in the shadow of a dying moon.
Then the blade slid forward.
White-hot pain exploded through her chest.
Her breath hitched. The rifle slipped from her hands, clattering against the roof.
The world tilted sideways, colors bleeding into a kaleidoscope of smoke and lightning.
Her knees buckled, and she sank to the cracked concrete.
Kai caught her before she fell completely, arms strong and trembling.
"Forgive me," he whispered against her ear.
His voice broke like a man already haunted.
She wanted to curse him.
Wanted to claw the truth from his chest.
But the pain drowned everything.
Her heartbeat slowed.
Each thud stretched into eternity.
The screams of the dying city faded into a distant echo.
In the growing silence, something stirred inside her.
A warmth—no, a pulse—deep beneath the wound.
It spread like liquid fire, threading through her veins, reaching for the stars.
It felt ancient. Familiar. Waiting.
Not yet, a voice murmured.
It was not her own.
Her eyes snapped open.
Above her, the red sky fractured.
Through the cracks spilled a storm of silver light—
not lightning, not fire, but something alive, folding the night like paper.
For a breathless instant she saw the world behind the world:
endless spirals of galaxies, rivers of raw time.
And in the center of it all, a mark burned itself into her vision—
a circle of shifting runes, glowing like molten moonlight.
The symbol seared into her skin, over her heart, branding her with a pain that was almost pleasure.
Kai's voice became a distant echo.
Her last sight of him blurred, his silver eyes wide with shock as the light swallowed everything.
Not the end, the voice whispered again. The beginning.
Then the universe folded inward.
Darkness claimed her.
And Liora Kane died—
with a smile that tasted of vengeance.