The air tasted of copper and lightning, thick with the promise of endings. Above the ruins of Vareth, the stars blinked out one by one, swallowed by a creeping darkness. It wasn't night falling - night had fled this place long ago. This was something far older stirring in the hollow bones of the world.
Far below in the obsidian streets, a lone figure moved between pools of torchlight. The Executioner's silvered cloak whispered against the cobbles, his featureless mask turning left then right in methodical arcs. They called him the Angel of Silence in these lands, though he knew himself to be neither silent nor angelic. Tonight the mask weighed heavier than usual, its polished surface gritty with the residue of too many judgments passed.
In the square ahead, the crowd parted before him like wheat before the scythe. At its center knelt his latest charge - a Seran boy no older than fourteen, with eyes that caught the torchlight and threw it back fractured into a thousand colors. The Executioner's fingers tightened around the Silver Key as the chief priest recited the charges. The boy had been caught teaching forbidden histories, breathing life into dead gods' names.
"You need only recant," the priest wheezed, jowls trembling beneath his ceremonial blindfold. "Name them demons and this ends."
The Executioner waited. He always waited. In his long service, he'd learned that silence worked far better than torture in breaking men's spirits.
The boy lifted his chin. When he spoke, his voice didn't shake. "Naraven shaped the mountains before this city's first stone was laid. Vadra sang the tides into being. Seraven wove our memories into the wind. Mirai bound us together. Esera gave us rest." His eyes found the Executioner's blank mask. "To call them demons would be to spit on truth itself."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. The Executioner felt it rather than heard it - a vibration through the contact points of his boots on stone. He raised the Key, watching the boy's reflection warp in its polished surface. For the briefest instant, his hand faltered - an aberration quickly smothered.
The boy's breath hitched just before the Key touched his brow. His pupils dilated, then flattened into mirror images of the Executioner's mask. "You're not hers," he whispered as his body went rigid. "Not truly."
Then there was only silence, and the faintest echo of something that might have been a chime.
Far away, in another world not yet touched by this one's rot, a man bled out on rain-slick pavement. His fingers scrambled at the broken glass scattered around him, each shard reflecting a different fragment of the streetlight above. The edges bit deep but he couldn't feel them anymore - just the creeping cold spreading from his chest where the rebar protruded.
He'd pushed the child clear. That much he remembered. The impact. The crunch of metal. The way the little girl's eyes had widened before her mother snatched her to safety.
Darkness lapped at the edges of his vision. The rain fell harder now, turning the blood beneath him into swirling pink eddies. He thought he saw shapes moving in the water - not reflections, but things looking up at him from impossible depths.
A hand gripped his. Warm. Dry. Not a paramedic's touch.
"You were supposed to live" a woman's voice said, the words resonating in his skull rather than his ears. "But not here. Not like this."
The pain receded like a tide going out. The broken glass at his fingers began to chime, vibrating against the asphalt in a discordant melody. He tried to speak but his mouth filled with light instead of blood.
When next he opened his eyes, it was to the feel of damp linen sheets and the sound of sobbing. A woman's face swam into focus above him - hollow-cheeked, red-eyed, her lips moving in silent prayer. The air smelled of tallow and stale incense, nothing like the rain and gasoline of moments before.
Behind her, a priest in mirrored robes raised trembling hands. "Praise the Goddess! The child lives!"
He tried to sit up, but the body he now occupied was small, frail, wracked with the aftereffects of some wasting sickness. Through the room's single window, he glimpsed a sky choked with unnatural clouds, and hanging among them, a moon so fractured it looked ready to shatter.