No one noticed the sky cracking at first.
The battlefield was already chaos, steel ringing against steel as horses screamed and smoke rolled across the plains. Fire devoured the dry grass in slow waves, and the war between the northern alliance and the empire had dragged on long enough that the ground was soaked so deeply with blood that the earth itself had turned to mud.
Lyria could barely breathe.
She wasn't a soldier. She had never held a weapon before today, yet when the capital fell when the walls burned and the nobles fled, anyone who could stand was thrown into the war. Even girls like her.
The spear in her hands felt too heavy, the wood rough against trembling palms. Her arms burned from holding it. She didn't even know who she had stabbed earlier; she only remembered the warmth on her fingers and the stunned look on a stranger's face.
A horn sounded somewhere in the distance, sharp and urgent. Then another followed, and slowly, strangely, silence began spreading across the battlefield in uneven pockets, like ripples moving through still water.
People were stopping.
Not because they had been ordered to, but because something was wrong.
Lyria looked up.
A thin white line cut across the sky.
At first it looked like lightning frozen in place, a pale scar stretching across the clouds. But the line did not fade. It widened slowly, silently, and light bled through the opening—not sunlight, but something colder, something too clean to belong to the world.
The wind died.
Smoke hung motionless in the air. Flags stopped moving. Even the roar of battle dulled, as though the world had been pushed beneath deep water.
Someone nearby dropped their sword. It struck the ground with a small, lonely sound.
Then the pressure came.
It crushed down without warning, slamming into her shoulders and driving her to her knees. Soldiers fell around her. Horses collapsed. Weapons slipped from numb fingers as strength seemed to drain from the world itself. Lyria hit the mud hard, the impact knocking the breath from her lungs.
Her heart pounded wildly, as if her body understood something her mind could not.
This was not magic.
Magic had limits. Magic could be resisted, countered, understood.
This felt older.
The crack in the sky tore open wider.
A figure stepped through.
He did not descend like a person, nor did he fly. One moment the air above the battlefield was empty, and the next it was occupied, as though the world had shifted to place him where he wished to stand. Long dark hair drifted around him, untouched by wind. His clothes were simple, almost ancient in design, black and silver, unmarked by dirt or blood. His face was calm and distant, the expression of someone looking at something already gone.
Where his eyes moved, space seemed to bend.
Someone screamed. Then many did.
Soldiers tried to crawl away. Some prayed. Some sobbed openly. Others simply stared, too terrified to move.
Lyria couldn't look away, though she didn't know why.
His gaze swept across the battlefield, and wherever it passed, things disappeared. Not burned. Not torn apart.
Erased.
A section of soldiers vanished without a sound. No blood. No bodies. Only empty space where they had stood moments before.
Her mind refused to understand it.
He lowered his hand slightly, and more of the world blinked out of existence, swallowed by a silence that felt deeper than death.
This is how we die, she thought dimly. Not by sword. Not by fire. But by something that should never have woken.
His eyes moved again.
They landed on her.
Everything inside her went cold.
There was no anger in his expression, no cruelty, no emotion at all. Only quiet, distant evaluation, as if she were no different from the mud beneath her knees.
His fingers lifted.
The air around her twisted, and the ground beneath her began to dissolve into blackness, as though reality itself were being peeled away.
Lyria squeezed her eyes shut.
I don't want to die.
It wasn't a heroic thought. It wasn't brave. It was small, desperate, painfully human.
I haven't even lived yet.
The pressure tightened
and stopped.
The silence that followed felt wrong, like the world had taken a breath and forgotten how to release it.
Slowly, she opened her eyes.
The battlefield behind her was gone. A vast section of land had simply ceased to exist, leaving a smooth, empty scar carved into the earth.
But she was still there.
Kneeling in the mud, heart racing, breath coming in uneven pulls.
Untouched.
The figure in the sky was still looking at her.
For the first time, something shifted in his expression. A faint crease formed between his brows, a small fracture in his distant calm.
Confusion.
His hand lowered, and the crushing pressure that filled the air changed. It did not disappear. It focused.
Centered on her.
He tilted his head slightly, studying her as if she were an impossible result.
Then, quietly almost to himself he spoke.
Why does your existence remain.
Lyria's throat tightened. She had no answer. She didn't even understand the question.
But she understood one thing with terrifying clarity.
The being who could erase armies, who had torn the sky open like cloth, had found something in her that should not exist.
And he was not going to let her go.