Chapter 1
Stone dust drifted like gray snow through a sky that no longer knew how to be blue. Moruki's
bare feet sank into pulverized marble at the lip of a crater that had once been a courthouse.
Wind snapped his wild dreadlocks across his face, the strands tugging at the dried blood in the
corners of his mouth.
He pushed them aside with the back of his hand and looked down at what lay beneath him.
Wings, or what remained of them, were pinned under broken columns. Feathers the color of
old parchment floated and burned before they touched the ground, turning to bright motes
that the being's chest rose in shallow, stubborn pulls.
Moruki stood over it in a wrap of royal cloth tied at his hips, the fabric torn but still stubbornly
bright against all the ruin. His torso was a map of wounds that did not bleed. Scar lines braided
over his skin, and within those braids a pale light crawled, pulsing in time with something
deeper than heartbeat.
From the street below came the scrape of claws, a wet chitter, the echo of many bodies moving
with one hunger. The angel's eyes opened, glazed as river stones. One hand, too delicate for
war, too strong for any human, reached and failed to lift.
Moruki crouched, careful not to touch the burning feathers. Heat rolled off the angel in waves
that smelled faintly of storm rain. Don't waste your breath, he said.
His voice came out rough, as if he'd swallowed ash for days. They're close. The angel's cracked
lips shaped a sound that wasn't a word at first, only wind trying to remember language.
Then you. Moruki's scars brightened as if answering an old call. He hated that they did that.
Hated how his skin seemed eager. I'm not your salvation, he muttered. The angel's gaze
sharpened with effort.
No, it whispered. Mine is gone. A howl rose from the avenue, too many throats harmonizing
into one note.
Moruki looked up. Between toppled buildings he saw them spilling around a bus turned on its
side. Bodies bent wrong, eyes like hot nails, mouths full of teeth that didn't match.
Some ran on all fours, some dragged blades grown from their arms. Above them fluttered
smaller things, skin thin, clinging to lampposts like parasites waiting to drop. Moruki stood.
His calves trembled with the coming sprint, the old instinct to flee. The world had become a
lesson, run or be eaten. The angel's voice snagged him like a hook.
Take it. Moruki's jaw tightened. Take what? The angel coughed, and light leaked between its
teeth.
What they want. As if summoned by the words, the demon surged faster. The air thickened with
a copper stench and the sound of nails on asphalt.
Moruki looked down again. The angel's ribcage was caved in. Something inside it still
glimmered, deeper than flesh.
A dim star struggling underbone. You want me to carve you open? He said. Not quite a
question.
The angel's eyelids fluttered. Your scars are doors. You were made.
Its throat clicked, and the sentence fell apart. It swallowed what was left of itself and forced out
the rest. If they eat my heart this place stays broken forever.
A laugh threatened to rise in Moruki's chest, sharp and joyless. The place was already broken.
The planet felt like it had been dropped and never stopped cracking.
A shriek cut the air. One of the smaller things released from a post and glided toward the
crater, skin stretched into membranes like a bat made of grief. Moruki didn't have time for
doubt.
He dropped to his knees beside the angel and pressed his palm to its sternum. The contact
scalded. Not skin burning heat, deeper.
The kind that tried to rewrite what he was. His scars flared, threads of light unspooling from
them like hungry roots. They slid beneath his hand through the angel's broken armor of ribs,
seeking what glowed.
The angel arched once, not in pain but in release. Name, it rasped. Moruki gritted his teeth.
Moruki. Remember it, the angel said, and then its voice became a wind passing through a door
left open too long. When the song comes, something cracked inside the angel.
A final warmth rushed out, flooding Moruki's arm, his shoulder, his throat. It tasted like
lightning and old incense. Images slammed into him, a tower scraping a bleeding sky, a ring of
mirrors, a choir with mouths sewn shut, hands, human hands, reaching up and being turned
away by a gate of light.
Moruki gasped. For an instant he heard a distant harmony, beautiful enough to make him weep
and cruel enough to make him want to bite. The gliding parasite hit the edge of the crater.
It unfolded into limbs and lunged. Moruki moved without thinking. He lifted his hand, still
pressed with stolen heat, and a line of light tore from the scars on his forearm, snapping across
the air like a whip.
It struck the creature mid-leap. There was no explosion, no fire. The thing simply unraveled,
strands of darkness peeling away as if ashamed to be seen.
It fell as dust. The horde below hesitated. Not fear, recognition.
A deeper howl answered them from somewhere behind the buildings, lower than the rest, like
a throat too wide for its body. Moruki looked down at the angel. Its eyes were open but empty
now.
The feathers no longer burned, they lay still, dead weight. In Moruki's chest, something new
began to beat, not quite matching the rhythm of his heart. He rose, dreadlocks snapping in the
wind.
The scars across his torso pulsed in patterns he didn't recognize, forming a crown of light that
faded before it could be seen too clearly. The demons began to climb into the crater. Moruki
backed away from the angel's corpse, torn between revulsion and need.
The power in him wanted out. It wanted to answer that distant harmony. It wanted to sing
back, he whispered, to the empty eyes or to himself.
You better not be lying. Somewhere inside his skull, not a voice but a presence shifted, as if
settling into a throne made of bone. The first demon reached him, grinning with a mouth that
opened too far.
Moruki's hand lifted again. Light crawled over his knuckles like living ink, and the world held its
breath to see whether he would run, or become the thing that made running unnecessary.
Moruki didn't wait to see if the first demon learned fear.
He snapped his wrist and the light that had unmade the gliding parasite flared again, thin as
wire, sharp as judgment. It lashed across the crater's rim, carving a bright seam through dust
and shadow. Three climbing things hit it and came apart like wet paper ripped in opposite
directions.
The rest surged anyway. They moved with the certainty of hunger that had never been denied.
Moruki spun and ran.
The courthouse crater fell behind him in two heartbeats. He hit the boulevard hard, bare feet
slapping cracked asphalt that gave slightly under each step as if the street had grown tired of
being solid. Burned-out cars sat fused to the road, their frames sagged into shapes that looked
like kneeling animals.
The air tasted of old smoke and salt, like the ocean had crawled inland to mourn. Behind him
claws skittered, then a chorus of wet impacts as bodies spilled from the crater onto the street.
The new beat in his chest kept time with his sprint.
Too steady, too calm. Not his heart's frantic drum. Something else pulsing in the scars along his
ribs.
Heat crawled beneath his skin. The old scar lines, braids of pale light, began to itch, then burn,
as if someone was drawing fresh ink from inside his bones. He risked a glance down.
Patterns were changing. Where once his torso had been a web, now certain lines thickened,
bending into deliberate angles. Symbols? A map? The light ran along them in ordered paths, as
if searching for a latch.
A building to his left groaned and split. Not collapsing, the seam opened like a mouth, revealing
a sliver of grey behind it, a colour that did not belong to daylight or night. The crack exhaled a
chill that carried whispers like pages turning.
Moruki veered away, dreadlocks whipping his eyes. The presence in his skull shifted, settling
more comfortably, as if it liked the sound of the city breaking. Faster, it seemed to say without
words.
Moruki spat dust. You're not my mind, he rasped, breath tearing. The answer came as a
memory that wasn't his, wings pinned under stone, a hand reaching.
The last heat offered up. And another thing. Knowledge sliding in like a blade between ribs.
Not heaven's language, not prayer. Architecture, a door. Moruki's scars weren't only scars.
He cut between two leaning office towers that had kissed mid-fall. Their windows had become
jagged teeth. A dead billboard hung above the street, its faded smile peeled into strips.
Below it, a fissure glowed faintly, as if the planet's bruise had lit from within. The horde poured
after him, a river of wrong-limbed bodies. One vaulted onto a bus carcass and sprang, arms
stretched too long, fingers ending in hooked nails.
Moruki threw his hand out without thinking. Light snapped from his forearm. The demon didn't
unravel this time.
The light struck, and the air in front of Moruki folded inward. His scars flared so bright the
world lost its edges. A slit opened in mid-air, vertical, thin as a paper cut.
Grey on the inside, rippling like water that had forgotten to be wet. The demon hit the opening
and vanished, with a sound like breath sucked through teeth. The slit shuddered.
Moruki stumbled, nearly falling. His skin screamed with cold where the light had burned. The
slit snapped shut, leaving only the afterimage of grey.
For a moment the pursuing demons faltered, not from fear this time, from recognition. They
chittered and changed direction, spreading out trying to flank him as if they suddenly
understood. The shape of him.
Moruki's stomach turned. He'd meant to kill. Instead he'd thrown something through a place.
A place that answered him. In his head. The fallen angel's last gift uncoiled another strand of
understanding.
And it was so bitter it almost made him laugh. Limbo. A corridor between what was and what
should never be.
His scars, his cursed glowing heritage. Were not only a shield. They were a threshold.
You made me a gate, he snarled at the empty air, sprinting again. The presence did not deny it.
It merely pressed a sensation into him, the way a lock welcomes a key.
He cut into a plaza where a fountain had been filled with ash and bones. Statues lay face down
like executed saints. The sky above had a wound.
High, faint, a long, pale tear that made clouds look like infected gauze. A winged thing swooped
low, not one of the parasites from the crater. This had feathers, black and slick, like oil on water.
And a beak that glinted as if tipped with metal. Its laugh rolled out first. A bright, delighted
sound that didn't fit the ruined world.
Moruki skidded behind a toppled monument, dust billowing. The creature landed on the
fountain's rim with a dancer's ease. It was tall, lean, and wrong in the way something intelligent
can be wrong.
Its wings folded with a practiced elegance, each feather ending in a hooked tip. Its eyes were
pale gold, amused and too familiar. In one clawed hand it held a ring of keys.
Not brass, not iron. They looked grown rather than forged. Bone-white teeth, obsidian slivers, a
length of something that pulsed faintly as if it were still alive.
Each key carried a different stink. Old blood, burnt incense, ocean rot. The keys chimed as the
demon lifted them, like a lullaby for locks.
Moruki, it sang, savoring the name. Still running, still pretending you're only flesh. Moruki's
scars brightened in reflex, and the demon's grin widened.
You feel it, don't you? The bird demon continued, tilting its head. That tug, that little ache in
your skin when a seam in the world gets close. Moruki rose slowly from behind the monument,
shoulders heaving.
Light crawled over the scars on his chest, forming a pattern that seemed to crown his
collarbones. Torioni, he said, surprised he knew it. The knowledge hadn't come from the
streets.
It had come from the dying angel's heat, delivered like a final joke. Torioni bowed with
theatrical grace, keys swinging. At your service, keeper of thresholds, collector of entrances,
darling of the deep.
He flicked the ring and the keys sang again. And you, oh, you are the prettiest door I've seen
since the sky broke. The demons behind Moruki flooded into the plaza, slowing as they saw
Torioni, heads dipping like dogs before a master.
Torioni's gaze never left Moruki. Do you know the irony? He asked softly, almost kindly. You
stole an angel's heart to survive, and it branded you with what you truly are, a gateway to
limbo, a living hinge.
Moruki's throat tightened. He felt it now, unmistakable, invisible pressure around his scars, as if
reality itself leaned in to listen. Torioni raised the keys higher.
These opened the demon realm, old doors, big doors, his laugh sharpened. But you? You open
wherever you stand. So tell me, shall we see what's on the other side of you?
Chapter 2
Sarah Vance watched the plaza from the skeleton of a parking garage, belly down on warm
concrete that still smelled faintly of old gasoline. Below, the city had been chewed to the gums,
a fountain full of ash, statues facedown like shame. And at the center of it, shirtless, dreadlocks
flung like a banner, stood a man lit from inside.
Even from a hundred feet up she could see the lines on him. Not tattoos, scars glowing,
crawling over his chest and arms in patterns that made her teeth itch. Royal cloth hung at his
hips, too clean for this world, like he'd stepped out of a story and into their ruin by mistake.
Then the thing with wings landed. Sarah's grip tightened on the pry bar strapped to her pack.
The creature was elegant in the way a knife was elegant.
Oil black feathers, a beak that caught light like metal, and a ring of keys that chimed in a way
her bones understood as wrong. She whispered, more habit than faith, and felt the rosary
around her wrist bite like a chain. Please don't be real.
The winged demon bowed to the glowing man as if greeting royalty. Far below, demons
gathered at the edges of the plaza, and they did not swarm. They waited.
Sarah had scavenged long enough to know when predators were holding room for a bigger
predator. In the shadowed subway under Fifth Street, Dr. Imani Kess jerked her head up at the
same instant, amber goggles reflecting a table of jittering readings. A handheld sensor, half
Geiger counter, half prayer wheel, screeched and then steadied into a tone so pure it felt like a
needle through the ear.
Her forearm was inked with equations, and as the needle climbed she mouthed them like a
lullaby. Not solar. Not atmospheric.
Not plasma. She smiled without humor. Grace.
Cade Rourke stood near the platform stairs with his rifle low, armor strapped over a shirt
burned at the seams. He didn't like the way her voice sounded when she got excited. It always
meant something, would die.
Tell me that noise isn't what I think it is, he said. Imani didn't look at him. It's what you're afraid
it is.
Above ground, world exhaled. Sarah saw the glowing man lift his chin, like he was listening to
something inside his own skull. The bird demon, Torioni, the name drifted into her mind like
smoke, raised his keys.
The ring swung twice. The keys chimed and the air in front of the man wrinkled, not like heat,
like reality deciding it couldn't hold its shape anymore. Sarah's breath caught as the street
opened.
A thin seam of gray appeared, a vertical wound in the day. Wind poured from it, smelling of iron
and old incense. Torioni's voice carried up, bright as laughter.
Rematch, he purred, and clapped his clawed hands once delighted. Do you know how long I
have kept the memory of your hands on my throat? The man, Moruki, stood his ground. The
scars on him brightened, as if the seam had put a hook into his skin.
Torioni leaned in, keys ringing softly. You were the only one who ever made me bleed. He
shivered, pleased beyond control, wings twitching as if fighting the urge to take off.
Not angels, not kings, not the holy little storms above. You, a man pretending he's not a door.
Sarah saw Moruki's shoulders rise and fall, steadying.
Torioni lifted a key that looked like a tooth carved from a star. He turned it in empty air. The
seam widened.
Moruki lunged, light flaring from his scars, but the bird demon's grin sharpened. No, Torioni
sang, not here. Last time we danced in your world and almost broke it.
The ground beneath Moruki softened as if it had become wet paper. His feet sank, Sarah's
stomach dropped. Moruki reached toward the seam, toward the gray, but the gray reached
back.
It wrapped him in cold. Torioni's keys chimed a final note, and the plaza snapped shut like a
mouth. Moruki vanished, Sarah stared at the space he'd occupied, the afterimage of light still
hovering in her eyes.
Below, the lesser demons began to move again, confused, hungry, sniffing the air where a man
had been. She rolled backward from the ledge and crawled, fast and silent, heart thudding. Find
him, she told herself, and hated the way it sounded like a vow.
In the demon realm, Moruki landed on something that was not ground so much as a memory
of ground. It flexed under him, black and fibrous, like woven hair soaked in tar. The sky was a
ceiling of ribs.
Somewhere in the distance, a choir tried to remember a hymn and failed, turning it into a low
animal moan. His scars burned, then cooled into a steady glow, as if they'd finally found air
meant for them. Torioni descended in a lazy spiral, wings wide, enjoying the echo his feathers
made against that bony vault.
Welcome, he said, dragging the word out, savoring it. Depth's enough that your little accidents
won't spill into your precious streets. Moruki clenched his fists, his new heartbeat, the other
one, thumped once, slow and amused.
Open, a presence urged in the back of his mind, familiar now. The fallen angel's heat twisted
into a new shape. Open everything.
No, Moruki hissed. Not again. He remembered flashes that weren't his, a city edge curling
inward, a hurricane of light eating buildings like bread.
Screams, sky splitting wider. A moment when he'd felt infinite, and nearly made the world
match that feeling. Torioni's eyes shone.
You remember, he crooned. How close you came to ending it all, how beautiful. He tapped the
keys against his beak.
Only one way out, Moruki, defeat me, take my keys or die trying, either way I win something.
The lesser demons were here too, shadows darting at the edges, but they held back. This was a
ring, a stage.
Torioni wanted an audience. Moruki's scars rearranged, lines thickening, forming angles like a
lock seeking its key. He felt the limbo sense in his skin, the places where the world was thin.
Torioni swept low, fast as a thrown blade. Show me the door, he laughed. Moruki braced and
felt the omen inside him rise, hungry ancient, wearing the angel's stolen warmth like a mask.
Irony, the presence whispered, and the word hit him like a name. The cruel joke of it, holy
power coiled in a body the world already feared. Moruki stopped fighting the swell, not the way
he had last time, clawing at it like a drowning man clawing at the sea.
Here, in this place that was already damned, he let it fill him and aimed it. His scars flared from
white to a deep swallowing black, as if light had been taught despair. The air in front of his
palms tightened, pulled inward.
The choir moaned bent, notes stretching thin. Torioni's grin faltered for the first time. Moruki
spoke through clenched teeth.
You want a door? He pushed. A black hole of limbo opened, small as a fist at first, then
widening with quiet appetite, not loud, not flashy. It simply decided gravity belonged to it.
Dust, ash, and the distant moans were dragged toward the void. Torioni tried to climb, wings
snapping open, but the pull caught him mid-beat. His keys shrieked as they scraped against
each other, metal and bone and living things protesting.
Torioni's talons dug for purchase on the tar ground and failed. Moruki held the black center
steady, arms trembling, dreadlocks lifting as if underwater. Torioni lunged anyway, forcing
himself forward on sheer fury, beak aimed like a spear.
Moruki widened the void a fraction, the demon realm answered with a pleased, deep sigh.
Torioni's legs, everything below the knee, stretched, thinned, and tore away as if reality itself
had decided those pieces were negotiable. The severed parts vanished into the black without a
splash.
Torioni screamed, not in pain alone but in outrage, wings beating wild as blood-dark mist
sprayed into the air and was immediately devoured. Moruki released his breath in a shaky,
brutal laugh that wasn't entirely his. The omen inside him purred, and Torioni, hovering legless
in the sick air, stared at Moruki with a new kind of hunger, less playful now, more reverent.
Again Torioni rasped, voice cracked with joy and wrath. Do it again. Moruki's arms shook as he
shaped the second void, holding it in front of him like a judgment he hadn't asked to deliver.
The demon realm leaned toward it, the ribbed ceiling seemed to creak, as if something
enormous shifted in its sleep. The black circle ate sound first, then light, a perfect absence that
made his scars prickle like fresh stitches. Torioni hovered, leg stumps already bubbling with
wet, furious regrowth.
He laughed through a beak, wet with his own mist. Yes, that, make it hungry. Shut up, Moruki
said and drove the void forward.
The air folded, tar ground peeled into threads, Torioni snapped his wings, but instead of
dodging with speed, he reached two clawed fingers toward nothing, toward Moruki's void, and
pinched. From the pinch a bird fell out, not a bird the way Earth remembered them. This one
was made of flayed shadow and hooked quills, its eyes two molten beads that rolled in terror.
It screeched once, a thin sound that tasted like pennies. Torioni flicked it into the path of the
void. The minion hit the absence and vanished mid-scream, sacrificed so cleanly Moruki's
stomach turned.
The void hiccuped, fed, satisfied. And in that fractional lull Torioni dropped like a blade.
Moruki's scars warned him too late.
Torioni's beak didn't stab, his claw did, it punched into Moruki's abdomen with obscene
intimacy, ripping through skin and muscle as if Moruki were paper. White-hot pain spread
outward in a blooming circle. Moruki's breath left him in a wet, involuntary sound.
Then the world became red and slippery. His gut spilled, warm loops slapping onto the tar
ground. They dragged as he staggered back, hands clapping to his belly on instinct, catching
what he could.
His fingers sank into himself. The other heartbeat in his chest thudded once, calm as a
metronome. Open.
The presence in his mind urged, velvet over teeth. Let it all out. Let it all go.
No, Moruki hissed, voice shaking. He gripped his own intestines with both hands, as if he could
hold his life together by force. The glowing scars along his ribs flared in angry pulses, trying to
decide whether they were bandages or doors.
Torioni landed on the tar ground, wings half-spread, legs already reforming below him, thin
tendons knitting into thicker cords, then into slick new calves. He tilted his head as if admiring
craftwork. I can grow, he said softly, can you? Moruki tasted bile and copper.
His dreadlocks hung into his face damp with sweat. He straightened anyway dragging his
spilling insides with him like a grotesque sash. I can fight, he said.
He moved before fear could clamp down. His first kick cracked into Torioni's ribcage with a dull,
meat-splitting thud. The demon skidded.
Moruki followed. A savage rhythm driven by the only rule left, don't stop. A punch to the beak,
another to the throat.
A knee that lifted Torioni's body with a spasm of feathers. Torioni tried to catch him claws
grasping for Moruki's wrists, but Moruki's scars flashed and the space between their hands
went slick and wrong, as if reality didn't want contact. Torioni's talons slid off, sparking.
Moruki's intestines swung with every movement, slapping against his thighs. Pain threatened
to gray his vision. He kept moving anyway, each strike a refusal.
Cade's voice remembered, cut through the haze. Something the soldier would have said if he'd
been here, don't admire the wound. Moruki spat blood and drove his elbow into Torioni's
temple.
The demon's head snapped sideways. Moruki pivoted and kicked again, low, hard, into Torioni's
new growing knee. Torioni shrieked, not with agony but with delighted offense.
That's it, he rasped. That's you. Moruki grabbed a fistful of oily feathers and yanked, dragging
Torioni close.
Their faces were inches apart. Torioni's eyes glittered with keys not keys, locks dreaming of
openings. Give me the ring, Moruki growled.
Torioni's laughter bubbled out, warm and rotten. Take it, Moruki headbutted him. The impact
rang through his skull.
Torioni reeled, wings flailing, and Moruki saw his chance. He planted his feet, ignoring the slick
drag of his own spilled life. He inhaled, the scars along his arms and chest rearranged, lines
tightening into angular geometry, as if a blueprint woke up beneath his skin.
He drew the darkness into his knuckles, not a void in the air this time, a void in his fist. The
space around his hand dimmed, light refusing to settle on his skin. The demon realm leaned in,
eager.
Torioni recovered mid-stumble and lunged, beak open, keys chiming somewhere just out of
sight. Too late. Moruki swung upward and drove his black hole punch straight through Torioni's
center.
There was no resistance. The demon didn't burst like flesh, he unmade like a story being
erased. Wings tore into strips of feather and ink, limbs sheared away, spinning.
A spray of black mist and pale bone flashed, then was devoured by the hungry point in Moruki's
hand. The structures nearby, ribbed pillars, dead arches, tar-slick ruins, shuddered as the
punch pulled at them too. Moruki clenched, forcing the hunger small, forcing it to stay
personal.
Torioni came apart in pieces, a wing thrown into the dark, a claw cartwheeling, a beak snapping
shut on nothing. The ring of keys chimed once, bright mocking, then the sound cut off as if
swallowed. Moruki staggered back, fists smoking with absence.
Silence fell, thick as mud. Then from far away in the ribs of the sky Torioni's laughter returned,
faint, echoed, undamaged by distance. As if the demon realm itself was laughing through him.
Moruki's knees buckled, the other heartbeat in his chest slowed, pleased. You didn't take the
keys, the presence whispered. Not accusation, amusement.
Moruki looked down at his belly. His hands still held his intestines, but they were, changing. The
glow of his scars bled into the torn flesh, knitting, tugging, pulling.
The pain became heat, then pressure, then the dizzy relief of tissue remembering how to be
whole. The world lurched. Grace lit, wind like iron and incense.
Moruki tried to grab at anything, keys, feathers, even Torioni's laughter, but his fingers closed
on air. He fell through cold, and woke on cracked pavement under a ruined sky. The smell of
ash and old gasoline replaced tar and incense.
His back lay against the same kind of broken city he'd left, but the light was different, paler,
human, wounded by smoke rather than bone. The fountain's distant hiss told him he was near
the plaza again. He sat up in a violent gasp and clapped a hand to his stomach.
Skin, whole. Only a constellation of glowing scars remained, brighter now, as if they'd learned
something they didn't want to forget. Moruki was alone.
No Torioni, no ribbed ceiling. Just the hollow city and the faint, almost imagined chime of keys
somewhere under the wind. He stood shakily, dreadlocks falling over his shoulders, and
listened.
In the distance, something moved through, the ruins. Soft, careful footsteps that were not
demonic. Moruki's scars warmed, sensing thin places in the air like bruises on reality.
Where are you? he whispered, unsure if he meant Torioni, the keys, or the part of himself that
had enjoyed the tearing. The presence in his mind answered with a gentle, terrible suggestion.
Open, and find out.
Chapter 3
Moruki moved toward the sound the way a starving man moved toward water, knowing it
might be poison, unable to stop. The ruined plaza opened ahead, the bone-filled fountain still
hissed faintly, spitting steam through cracked teeth of marble. Ash drifted in slow spirals.
A burnt-out bust lay on its side like an animal that had died trying to crawl away. His scars
warmed not in pain this time but in recognition, lines and angles under his skin tightening as if
they'd seen this geometry before. The other heartbeat in his chest kept a calm steady tempo.
Too calm. A figure stood near the fountain's edge, back turned, watching the smoke roll
between skeletal buildings. He was tall, wrapped in a dark mantle that didn't quite obey the
wind.
The posture was familiar in a way Moruki didn't have words for. Like muscle memory wearing a
body. The man turned.
Moruki's breath hitched, the face was older than the one he'd kept in memory, but the eyes
were the same, dark, lucid, carrying a measured violence like a sheathed blade. Braids were
pulled tight at the scalp and fell behind his shoulders. A thin circlet of metal sat in his hair, not
for beauty, more like a reminder.
Moor. The name came out soft, almost disbelieving, as if it hurt to speak it. Moruki's throat
tightened until the world narrowed to that one syllable.
Naudou? The man stepped closer. The ash didn't cling to him, nothing clung to him. Moruki saw
a flash of childhood, a courtyard of pale stone, hooves clattering beyond a gate, banners
snapping.
A hand on his shoulder, firm, instructive. A voice saying, if the song ever takes you I'll end it
before you end us. He swallowed.
I thought you were dead. Naudou's gaze flicked over him, shirtless, scars glowing like a map that
kept rewriting itself. I thought you were.
His mouth tightened. Or worse. They said the air with the broken light had finally opened.
Air, Moruki spat, bitter. Don't call me that. Naudou's eyes didn't blink.
Born ahead of you doesn't make me king. It makes me your shield. A pause.
And your blade if you turn. Moruki felt the presence inside him stir, amused. He remembers his
oath.
I didn't ask for any of it, Moruki said. His hands curled, empty. Even now, with his body
screaming to become a door, he couldn't reach for a weapon.
The idea slid off him like water off oil. I know, Naudou said, and there was something like grief
behind the discipline. You never wanted the centaur throne.
You only wanted to be left alone with your fists. Moruki tried to answer but the air shifted. A
chime, bright, obscene, threaded through the wind.
The shadows above the plaza folded, and Torioni dropped into them like a falling sin made
flesh. Oil black wings spread, dripping darkness that evaporated before it hit the ground. His
legs, once unmade, were whole again, though the joints were wrong, bending with too many
options.
In one claw he held something small. Moruki saw the braid first, the shaved sides, the tight plait
running back. Then the face.
Sara Vance's head dangled from Toriyoni's grip like a trophy stolen from a god. Her eyes were
still open, glassy and furious. Blood slid down her throat in lazy sheets and pattered onto the
pavement.
Around her wrist, the rosary was still wrapped like a chain, beads slick with red. Moruki's body
went cold. No, he said, but it came out like a prayer he didn't believe in.
Torioni's beak clicked, delighted. Oh yes. Your little witness.
Your little guide. He lifted Sara's head higher as if showing it off to the ruins. She ran so well.
Humans always do, when they think their legs can out-negotiate fate. Moruki's scars flared,
crawling up his ribs, eager to open. Naudou didn't move, but the air near his hands shimmered
as if reality was holding its breath.
Torioni leaned forward, eyes glittering. Did you enjoy your vacation, Moruki? While you were
flinging your pretty hunger in my realm, I was busy finding a way back. His wings rustled and
the sound was like pages tearing.
And while you were gone, while you were bleeding and learning, I used the distraction to
harvest your plaza. He gestured with Sara's head toward the surrounding streets. Moruki saw
them then, bodies tucked into doorways, sprawled behind wrecked cars, piled where they tried
to climb.
Not demons, people. Scavengers, refugees, anyone foolish enough to hear noise and come
running. Torioni's laughter bubbled.
They thought the light man would save them. They thought a door could be a wall. Moruki's
mouth filled with copper, rage pressed up against his teeth trying to become a scream.
Naudou's voice came low, dangerous. Drop her. Torioni's beak widened in a grin that wasn't
possible for anything that used to be a bird.
Oh what, weapon master? Will you carve me into ribbons again? I adore when you try. The
presence inside Moruki whispered, open, eat him. Eat the world that made you.
Moruki stepped forward, dreadlocks swinging, bare feet on cracked pavement. You don't get to
touch people just to make a point. Torioni's claw tightened.
Sarah's head lulled, blood slipping faster. Moruki's scars snapped into alignment. The air in
front of his chest dimmed, as if light itself remembered fear.
He thrust his palm forward. A beam of black hole absence lanced out, silent, razor straight, a
strip of nothing that erased dust in its path. Toriyoni flicked sideways with impossible agility.
The beam sheared through the fountain's edge instead, turning stone to drifting grit that
vanished mid-fall. Too slow, Torioni crooned. Naudou moved.
Something manifested in his hand with a sharp metallic sigh. First a hilt, then a blade pouring
out of emptiness like moonlight being forged. The sword was longer than any practical
weapon, edges too clean to be made by human hands.
Naudou crossed the distance in a blink. The blade sang once. Torioni froze mid-taunt as lines
appeared across him, fine at first, then widening.
His body separated into multiple pieces with a wet, shocked sound, wings and torso and limbs
sliding apart like a puzzle losing its will to stay assembled. Sarah's head dropped. Moruki's hand
shot out on instinct and caught her by the hair before she hit the ground.
Her eyes stared past him, unseeing. But the rosary beads clacked softly against his wrist. The
sound felt like judgment.
Torioni's pieces tried to twitch toward each other. Naudou's sword dissolved, flowing in his grip,
reforming into a massive hammer whose head looked like it had been carved from the concept
of impact. He swung.
The first strike flattened Torioni's wing into the pavement with a sound that shook dust from
broken windows. The second pulverized a claw. The third drove the beacon to the ground so
hard, the concrete cracked in a spiderweb.
Naudou kept hitting, methodical, merciless, smashing each piece until Torioni was nothing but
oily stains and scattered feathers that smoked at the edges. For a heartbeat there was only the
hiss of the fountain and Moruki's ragged breathing. Then from somewhere under the shattered
concrete a faint chime answered, like keys turning in locks that weren't there.
And Torioni's laughter, thin as a wire, curled up from the cracks. Moruki stared down, Sarah's
blood warm on his hands, and felt the other heartbeat in his chest quicken with hungry
approval. Naudou rested the hammer on his shoulder, eyes still on the broken ground.
That wasn't an end, he said quietly. That was a message. Moruki's scars prickled, sensing a
bruised thin place in the air nearby.
An invitation. He looked at his brother, then at the bloodied rosary in his grasp, and finally at
the trembling seam in reality that wanted to open. Survival, he realized, wasn't just staying
alive.
It was deciding what you were willing to become to keep breathing. Face the truth. Go towards
reality.
Moruki lowered Sarah's severed head as if it were something fragile instead of a trophy
drenched in fresh insult. Her braid stuck to his palm. The rosary beads clung to his wrist,
clicking with each tremor in his hand.
Naudou's eyes cut across the plaza, already counting angles of attack. Her body. Moruki
swallowed blood that wasn't his.
He followed the pull in his scars, heat like a compass needle, and found her in a collapsed
shopfront, half buried under plaster and ash. Torioni hadn't bothered to hide it. Cruelty loved
to be witnessed.
Moruki knelt. He set Sarah's head at the torn neck. The cut looked too clean, like the world had
been edited.
Open, the velvet voice in his skull coaxed, it's easier when you stop pretending you're a man.
I'm not doing it your way, Moruki whispered. He pressed his hands to her throat, one on the
seam, one over her sternum.
His scars brightened, lines tightening into a pattern he felt rather than understood. The second
heartbeat in his chest answered, steadying him like a metronome. The plaza dimmed.
It wasn't darkness, it was absence, light stepping aside for something older. Moruki inhaled ash
and held it. When he exhaled his eyes filmed over, as if the world had poured milk into them.
The last thing he saw was Naudou taking position above him, weaponless for a breath and then
not. Steel poured into his hand from nowhere, shaping itself into a long sword with a sound like
a bell struck underwater. Then Moruki's sight simply stopped.
He fell inward. In the astral there was no sky, only layers of pressure, like walking through
stacked sheets. He could feel Sarah the way he could feel a wound, a missing weight, a torn
direction.
Threads of her trailed away from the body, whipped by some current that didn't care about
human names. Let her go, the omen purred. You can always make another guide, you can
make a city.
Moruki moved without eyes, following the tug in his scars. Each step was a decision not to
surrender. A shriek cracked the air in the living world, Naudou's warning heard through bone.
Bird things came. They spilled from alleys and vents in the broken mouth of the fountain,
humanoid torsos on backward jointed legs, beaks split with too many teeth. Others dropped
from skeletal balconies, wings half formed, talons hooking into concrete.
Still more burst from beneath the street as if the pavement were only skin. Naudou met them
like a closing gate. His blade became an axe mid-swing, cleaving a beaked head that tried to
bite his throat.
The axe turned into a lance that pinned a screeching body to a bus's ribcage. It flowed into a
halberd, hooking two demons at once and tearing them open in a wet spiral. He didn't shout,
he didn't plead.
He worked. Moruki blind and kneeling felt the tremor of each impact through the ground. A
heavy presence surged toward him, three larger avians, taller than men, wings spanning
wrecked storefronts.
In the astral their hunger looked like black mouths. Naudou's breath hitched, metal screamed,
the giant's coordinated beak snapping for his neck. Moruki's scars flared, he split his attention
like tearing cloth.
A second Moruki stood up beside Naudou, pale unreal stitched from astral glare and scar
geometry, a doppelganger with no warmth. It moved faster than muscle should allow, catching
one giant's jaw with both hands and twisting until bone popped like a snapped branch. Naudou's
weapon turned into a curved katana and took the second giant's head in a clean arc.
The third brought its talons down at Moruki's physical body. In the astral Moruki found Sarah,
she was curled around herself in a corridor of gray wind, eyes wide still furious even without
lungs. The rosary on her wrist shone like a chain of small anchors.
Hey, Moruki said, though sound had no place here. He offered his hand anyway. Her gaze
locked onto him, distrust sharpened into a weapon.
Then something softened, recognition or simply refusal to be taken. She reached, Moruki
grabbed her and pulled. The world slammed back into him.
He snapped upright, vision returning in a violent blur, just in time to intercept the descending
talons. He drove his shoulder into the creature's chest, lifted and body slammed it onto the
street hard enough to crater the asphalt. Before it could screech, he wrenched its neck
sideways until the spine went slack.
Behind him Sarah's body arched. Moruki's scars shone, threads of light sewing what Torioni
had severed. Sarah convulsed once, then sucked in air like it was a stolen resource.
She bolted upright with a raw gasp, fingers clawing at her throat. What? Her eyes found
Moruki's glowing skin, found the blood, found Naudou turning a boomerang blade into a maul
and turning a demon into paste. Oh hell, no time Cade would have said, if Cade were here.
Naudou flicked his wrist and something compact formed in his hand, a crossbow with a short
barrel and a box magazine. Built like a stubborn answer, he shoved it towards Sarah. Burst,
don't waste bolts.
Sarah's hands took it automatically, tools before prayers. She tested the weight, jaw tight. I'm
dead for five minutes and you hand me a prototype? Less talking Naodu said, and his weapon
became a chain-bladed flail.
Sarah raised the crossbow and fired. Three bolts snapped out in a tight line, punching through
a demon's eye ridge, throat and sternum. It dropped without ceremony.
Moruki surged forward, dreadlocks whipping. He broke one demon's neck with a forearm,
kicked another's head clean off, then opened a thin strip of void that erased a wing mid-beat,
sending its owner cartwheeling into a burning car. They fought through streets that used to
have names.
Naudou led, carving a corridor toward the city limits, changing weapons as if the armory lived in
his bones. Sarah kept pace in the wake, laying down stuttering bursts that stitched demons to
walls. Moruki stayed between them in the worst angles, scars humming whenever reality tried
to split.
The gates rose ahead, old stone teeth and bent iron half-collapsed but still marking an edge.
They reached it on a hill of feathers and black blood. A pillar stood beyond the gate, taller than
the surrounding ruins, and on its crown perched something that made the air feel watched.
Torioni. Not the oil-winged thing from before. This was a tengu-shaped monument to hunger,
talons like hooked sickles, hair flowing in a dark river, wings layered like storm clouds.
And the face, woman's face, too perfect, too familiar in its angles. It smiled with Sarah's mouth.
Sarah's crossbow lowered.
Her pupils widened, her breathing slowed as if the world had offered her a gentler ending.
Sarah. Moruki snapped.
She didn't blink. Torioni's laugh rolled down the pillar like warm syrup. Oh, little scavenger,
you came back prettier.
Naudou stepped in front of her. Don't look. Sarah leaned as if to see around him.
Moruki's scars crawled, sensing ki's turning somewhere deep. The ground under their feet
shivered. Toriyoni opened its arms like a blessing in dove.
It struck the earth head first. The impact boomed through the city's bones. A shockwave
punched outward, tossing Moruki and Naodu back a step, slamming Sarah into the gate hard
enough to rattle iron.
Dust geysered up in a towering bloom that swallowed the skyline. Somewhere under the roar, a
thin, obscene chime sounded, locks opening where there were no doors. And Sarah, still half
tranced, whispered, He's beautiful...
Chapter4
Her whisper didn't fade after the shockwave. It grew. Her shoulders loosened.
Her mouth parted, breath spilling out in a soft, broken sound that wasn't fear and wasn't relief.
Something between hunger and prayer. Moruki lunged.
She moved first. She vaulted the bent iron of the gate like it was a low fence on a sunny day,
boots scraping sparks from stone, braids snapping behind her. Her eyes never left the crater of
dust where Torioni had struck the earth.
Sara! Moruki's voice tore at his throat. She didn't hear him. Or she did and didn't care.
The dust thinned. Torioni rose from it, as if the impact had been a bow. The tengu shape
unfolded, wings layered like storm sodden banners, talons digging into fractured street.
And that stolen, perfect face, Sara's face, smiled at Sara with intimate recognition. Sara's hands
shook around the crossbow Naudou had given her. The weapon tracked not Torioni but Moruki.
Moruki saw it a beat too late. The first bolt snapped past his cheek and buried itself in a
concrete pillar. He cartwheeled, dreadlocks whipping ash, scars flashing as if trying to warn him
faster than nerves could.
Sara, stop! Her expression tightened like a lock turning. I have to! She breathed, and it sounded
like devotion. Two bolts followed.
Moruki flipped behind the broken husk of a taxi, felt one sheer the air where his ribs had been.
Naudou stepped into the line of fire. Sara fired at him without blinking.
The bolts didn't reach him. They bled into nothing mid-flight, dissolving into gray motes that
winked out as if ashamed to exist. Naudou's gaze stayed on Torioni.
His voice went cold. I knew you would try. He lifted his hand.
Metal answered. Knives, daggers, hatchets, too many to count, appeared above him in a
suspended rain, their edges catching the thin daylight like teeth. Torioni tilted his head,
amused.
The chime in the air sharpened as if invisible keys were testing invisible locks. Moruki's scars
tightened into geometry. Heat ran in straight lines across his chest.
His doppelganger stepped out of that heat, pale, half-lit, a version of him made from the
astral's rules instead of Earth's. It didn't speak. It kicked.
The nearest blade snapped forward like it had been fired from a cannon. Then another. Then a
dozen.
Each one struck with a brutal precision, redirected mid-air by the doppelganger's feet, heel,
instep, toe, turning Naudou's hovering arsenal into a storm with intent. Torioni blurred. Wings
folded, opened, folded again.
Talons clicked off blade edges. The stolen face smiled, even as steel-shaved hair thin slices off
its cheek. Moruki ran straight through the hail.
He used the doppelganger's timing, like a drumbeat, letting each kicked blade force Torioni to
shift, to angle, to commit. Then Moruki jumped. His knee drove into Torioni's spine with a
crack that sounded like a doorframe splitting.
Torioni pitched forward. Blades found him. Steel punched into wing joints, pinned feathers to
flesh, stitched black blood into the air.
The doppelganger's footwork didn't stop, it kept redirecting, keeping Torioni from recovering,
keeping the body in motion, hurtling, tumbling, like a thing being rolled downhill. Naudou's
weapon became a sword the size of a street sign, then larger, then impossibly massive, a slab
of sharpened night. He drove it down through Torioni's torso.
The blade sank with resistance, as if the demon's insides were thick with tar. Naudou's eyes
flared. A brief ring of light under his irises.
The sword changed, not into another weapon, into an answer. A pulse swelled inside the metal.
A low thump that Moruki felt in his second heartbeat.
Naudou ripped the sword free in a single clean motion. The space it left behind detonated. The
blast was not fire, it was pressure and bell sound, a concussive shock that folded dust into a
wave and threw Torioni into a violent spin.
Moruki and Naudou moved together, brothers by blood and by necessity, one flipping, one
pivoting, each landing a kick that redirected Torioni again, again, again, sending the tengu
body pinwheeling through the air like a broken compass needle. Torioni laughed as he spun.
Then he stopped laughing.
Two shapes tore free from his shadow and hit the street with wet slaps. They were smaller,
closer to the oil-feathered form Moruki had fought in the other realm, slick wings, beaks split
too wide, bodies that smoked at the edges like burning ink, minions. They rushed the brothers
with practiced fury.
One slammed into Moruki, driving him back over crumbled stone. Moruki caught the beak in his
hands and felt it bite down, teeth grinding against bone. He twisted, scars flaring and opened a
hairline of absence across its throat.
The cut didn't bleed so much as vanish, the creature's shriek became silence. The other minion
met Naudou and actually held him. For a moment Naudou had to work, shoulders tightening,
weapons shifting too fast to name, blade, hook, hammer.
Each strike met with wing and claw, each parried with unnatural strength. Moruki's eyes darted
upward. Torioni was already moving.
The Tengu wings beat once and the demon rose above the street, rising through falling ash like
a king through curtains. Sara ran to him. Not stumbling, not dragged.
She threw her arms wide as if she'd been waiting all her life for the impact. Torioni caught her.
He didn't hold her gently.
He held her like a prize. He climbed with her into the sky, higher than the ruined rooftops,
higher than the broken towers, until she was only a shape against the bruise-colored clouds.
Sara's voice carried down in ragged bursts, half sob half laugh, calling a name that wasn't his
and was… Moruki tried to go after her.
The minion on him dug talons into his side, anchoring him. Pain flared white. Moruki slammed
his head back, broke its grip, and tore it apart with his bare hands, scars burning so bright the
world briefly looked bleached.
Naudou ended his opponent with a single motion. The weapon in his hand became a thin spear
and slid clean through the minion's eye ridge. It collapsed, twitching, evaporating into black
mist.
They looked up together. Torioni's silhouette bent over Sara. There was no mercy in the angle
of it.
A wet sound drifted down. Something dark reigned in strands. Sara didn't scream.
Her body jerked, then slackened, then jerked again as if her nerves had been rewired to adore
the thing harming her. Her face, when Moruki caught a glimpse, was split by a smile too wide
for sanity. Torioni's laughter rolled across the sky, warm and intimate, like he was sharing a
joke only she could understand.
Then the wings folded. Torioni dropped. He landed somewhere beyond the gate, out of sight
with a thud that shook loose stones.
Moruki and Naudou sprinted. They found Sara first. She lay in a spreading pool, body ruined to
the edge of recognition, breath shallow and uneven.
Her eyes were open. They were still shining, not with health, with worship. Her lips moved.
Moruki crouched close enough to hear. He chose me, she mouthed, and it sounded like
gratitude. Naudou's jaw clenched so hard the tendons stood out.
He scooped what was left of her into his arms with care that looked like rage in disguise. Moruki
turned. In the rubble near the impact point, something chimed.
A ring of keys, bone, metal, things that didn't belong to either, half buried, still trembling as if
each one remembered a different lock. Moruki's scars answered the sound. The patterns on his
skin crawled toward the keys like iron filings toward a magnet.
He snatched the ring. The moment his fingers closed around it, the chimes changed pitch,
lower, satisfied. Torioni's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, threaded into wind.
Humans make such easy alters. They kneel to whatever touches their emptiness. Moruki bared
his teeth.
You didn't break her, you drugged her. Is there a difference? Torioni asked, delighted. Naudou
stared into the great distance as if seeing older battles stacked behind this one.
This is why we were picked, he said quietly, and the air around him tightened. Why we were
made to stand between. Moruki's second heartbeat thudded once, heavy as a verdict.
The ruins beyond the gate stirred. Humanoid bird things poured in, dozens, then more.
Feathers slick with oil, limbs too long, mouths full of teeth, drawn by the key's call or Torioni's
command.
Moruki lifted the ring. His scars flared and rearranged, lines aligning with the teeth of the keys
as if reading them. A door appeared where there hadn't been one, an upright seam in the air,
thin and trembling, leaking gray light.
Naudou backed toward it, cradling Sara. Moruki held the threshold while the horde hit. He
opened strips of void that took wings, legs, throats.
Naudou's free hand threw weapons without looking, each one becoming what it needed to be
mid-flight. Still they came, the air filled with chimes and shrieks and the smell of burnt feathers.
Moruki's scars burned hotter, warning him that the door wouldn't hold forever, that reality
hated being used like cloth.
Now he snarled. Naudou stepped through. Moruki followed.
The ring of keys clutched so hard it cut into his palm. As the seam closed behind them, the last
thing Moruki heard was Torioni's laugh, fading, patient, like a lock that had just learned the
shape of his hand. "It's our job, brother, to get them to see reality.
We are the difference makers. We must make them see reality. We must go towards what is
real." Moruki proclaimed.