Heaven fell on a Sunday, but the Saint awoke on a Tuesday, entombed in concrete and the perpetual synthetic rain of the Neon-Haze district.
His coffin was a shattered sarcophagus of black marble, the remnants of an angel's tomb half-buried beneath the foundation of a towering corporate spire. For four centuries, he had been a thoughtless absence, a sealed weapon. Quiet returned as agony.
The first sensation was the phantom weight of his wings. He tried to stretch them, but only the raw, ruined muscle responded, tearing against the rough concrete. The burned-out remnants, blackened and stiff as steel, were two monuments to his failure strapped to his back.
He forced his silver eyes open. Above him, a hollow sun a colossal, pixelated billboard advertising a new brand of synthetic blood flashed across the digital soot of the night sky. This was not the Earth he remembered. The cathedrals were gone, replaced by glass and steel towers. The air smelled of ozone, cheap synthesis, and the distant chemical tang of fresh violence.
Where is the war?
He pushed himself free, his bare feet hitting wet asphalt slick with the grime of the Shattered City. His muscles moved with an unnatural, coiled grace, not the grace of a man, but of a machine primed for the slaughter. He wore only the tattered remnants of a linen tunic, the sacred marks across his arms pulsing beneath his skin with a faint, uncomfortable warmth.
His memory was a broken mosaic: He was The Saint. He was The Executioner. He was a creature designed for one purpose: to deliver God's final, perfect Judgment.
And he had broken the first law for a mortal woman.
The memory of her was a needle of pure pain the scent of woodsmoke, the crackle of fire, and the final, horrific knowledge that the life he protected was ash. His chest seized. A minute fissure of pain traced a line across his divine core, the delicate engine of his power.
Killing unjustly cracks the core. The law was now a cruel mockery, centuries too late.
A trio of gangers, their faces hidden behind reflective half-masks and armed with crude, electrified bats, stumbled out of a derelict arcade. They were laughing, their voices distorted by cheap vocalizers. They didn't see him; he was too still, too much a part of the shadow and the rain.
Kill them. Purify the filth. The predatory instinct, honed over millennia in Heaven's eternal war, screamed in his blood.
His eyes flared silver. The air around him grew heavy, and a low, resonant chord the silent Voice of Command began to form in his throat. One word, one tone, and their wills would be his. He could force them to turn their crude weapons on themselves.
He knew their sins. Petty theft, minor battery, chemical abuse. They were not worth the cost. They were not angels. The divine cost was too high. He clenched his fists, forcing the celestial song to die. The silver light vanished.
"Look out, old man," one of the gangers spat, seeing him at the last moment.
The Saint stepped to the side. The gangster's weapon whipped past his ear, the air crackling. The Saint did not touch him. He moved. To the gangers, the man in the silver-eyed shadow had become a blur of impossibility. He was in front of the arcade entrance, then he was gone, melting into the downpour.
They exchanged uneasy glances. The street was empty.
The powers are sealed, he confirmed, moving through the alleyways. The Voice had died, the Judgment Flames felt like only a dull ember, and the knowledge of his Celestial Regenesis his one-time resurrection was a cold comfort. He was a weapon without a trigger, and the world was utterly defenceless against him.
He was hunting not for a target but for an anomaly. The digital city was a sterile, predictable machine. But moments ago, a signal had reached him, a unique frequency that cut through the endless noise of human life. It was a note of purity, a melody his soul remembered from the time before the Fall.
He followed the trace to a small, isolated warehouse a shipping depot near the Limbo Streets. It was quiet, only the flicker of emergency lights and the rhythmic thrum of a parked cargo hovercraft.
This was a black-market exchange. He saw the sign of it in the energy signature a faint, ancient sigil painted hastily over a rear air-duct, barely visible beneath the rain. It was the mark of a minor order of Seraphiel's human servants, the ones who dealt in stolen relics and smuggled tech. Heaven's hunters were already here.
He scaled the rusted fire escape, his movements silent, his burned-out wings a perfect silhouette against the neon glow.
Inside the depot, two figures moved in the shadows of shipping containers. One was a tall, heavily armoured man a typical Seraphiel hunter, perhaps a mortal Nephilim by the look of his cold, fast movements.
The second figure…
He stopped, his fingers digging into the wet steel of the railing.
The second figure was a woman. Her hair was a wild, dark halo around her face, her eyes fixed on the contents of a crate the soldier had just pried open. She wore a simple, rain-slicked jacket over dark clothes an investigator, a journalist.
But it was not her current form that stopped him. It was the light she cast.
Around her, a subtle, ethereal shimmer defied the rain and the shadows. It was the same light that had guided him, the signature that had torn him from his centuries of stasis. It was ancient, potent, and utterly impossible.
It was the signature of Eden.
Her.
His breath hitched. Lyra Cross. The name wasn't spoken it was felt, a desperate, forgotten prayer vibrating against the fragile shell of his divine core.
She looked up. Not because she had heard him, but because the raw, violent recognition in his soul had slammed into her like a physical force. Her eyes, wide and searching, met his through the downpour and the shadows.
In that instant, his fractured mind completed the broken mosaic.
He saw the fire again. Not the synthetic, electric glow of the city, but the raw, screaming purity of the stake, the smell of burning flesh, and her eyes her past eyes, full of desperate love and forgiveness looking up at the angel who had failed to save her.
"Lyra!"
The silent cry was not merely a memory; it was a retroactive spiritual wound. His sacred marks across his arms flared from warm gold to a furious, burning white, and the delicate crack on his divine core widened, the pain a thousand times sharper than the memory of the fire.
He had broken the law for her. He had paid for it. And now, centuries later, she stood before him, reborn, her soul carrying the very fragment of Eden's forbidden power that could either save all of Heaven or burn it to dust.
The Nephilim hunter reacted instantly to the sudden, powerful discharge of divine energy. He dropped the crate and spun, his hand flying to the hilt of a hidden blade.
The Saint couldn't stay. To stay meant to kill—and one more unjust crack would render his Celestial Regenesis worthless. He needed his strength. He needed to understand.
He plunged backwards, dropping from the fire escape in a controlled, silent fall. He hit the ground running, a shadow among shadows, his silver eyes flashing one last time toward the only light in the digital darkness.
Lyra stood frozen, her hand instinctively touching the centre of her chest. The Nephilim was shouting, but she barely heard him.
She saw the shadow in the rain. She saw the silver eyes. And for a single, terrifying second, she didn't see a man. She saw wings vast, soot-blackened monuments of pure despair and a sword that wept.
Then a fragment of her forgotten past flashed across her mind: a church burning, a face of terrible, beautiful rage, and a wordless vow: I will follow you into the end of all things.
The Saint was gone, swallowed by the Neon-Haze. He had awakened not to a new life, but to the crushing weight of his original, unforgiven sin.
They want her. Heaven, Hell, and whatever force sealed me.
He knew only one thing: The killer must protect the saint's lover.
The soul of his love was a key to a war he thought was over. But Heaven's hunter had seen his light. The Saint had to move fast or the church would find her first.