The stone beneath Raven's bare heels was slick with a century's worth of accumulated grease and the cold, sweating condensation of the deep tunnels.
He didn't stand like a hero. He stood hunched, his spine a jagged line of knotted muscle and old scar tissue that itched with every shallow breath. The air in the sub-basement smelled of wet fur, rusted iron, and the sharp, stinging stink of ammonia.
His fingers twitched. He was looking at a crack in the concrete, wondering if the structural integrity of the pillar beside him would hold if he had to throw his weight against it. He felt the grit under his ragged toenails. He felt the sour taste of bile rising in his throat.
Then the pressure came.
It wasn't a sound. It was a sudden, violent increase in the weight of the atmosphere. Raven's knees buckled, the cartilage in his joints popping like dry twigs. The shadows didn't move; they were obliterated. A searing, clinical brightness tore through the ceiling, forcing Raven to screw his eyes shut so hard the muscles in his face cramped.
The Lord was there. Not as a man, but as a vertical slab of absolute, blinding density.
Raven spat a thick, stringy glob of saliva onto the floor. His chest heaved. The skin on his forearms, covered in the dull, faded ink of a thousand years, began to blister.
"Raven," the voice didn't ring out; it ground against his skull like a millstone. "The hiding is done. The cycle is broken. You have not washed your hands; you have only learned to hide the stains in the dark."
Raven didn't answer. He couldn't. His throat felt like it had been lined with crushed glass. He forced his eyes open, the glare burning his retinas until the world was nothing but hazy, painful shapes. He saw the Lord's hand—a long, glowing extrusion of sheer force—reaching out.
He didn't run. Raven lunged.
It was a clumsy, desperate explosion of movement. He slipped on a patch of wet moss, his hip hitting the concrete with a dull thud that sent a jolt of white-hot agony up his side. He scrambled, his fingernails tearing as they clawed for purchase on the rough stone. He wasn't thinking about honor. He was thinking about the heavy iron pipe he'd seen discarded near the sump pump.
He grabbed it. The metal was freezing, the rust biting into his palms. He swung it with a grunt that was more of a wheeze.
The pipe didn't hit the Lord. It hit the aura around him. The vibration traveled up Raven's arms, shattering the small bones in his wrists and sending a shockwave through his teeth that made them ache in their sockets. He dropped the pipe, his hands numbing instantly, hanging limp and useless at his sides.
The Lord moved. It wasn't a step; it was a shift in reality. A fist of pure, solid light slammed into Raven's solar plexus.
Raven didn't fly backward. The force was too concentrated. He folded over the blow, the air driven from his lungs in a wet, choking spray. He felt his ribs snap—one, two, four—the jagged ends stabbing into the soft tissue of his lungs. He hit the floor face-first, the taste of dirt and iron-rich blood filling his mouth.
He tried to push himself up. His left arm gave way, the wrist buckling. He used his chin to haul himself forward, a pathetic, animalistic drag through the grime.
"Fight," Raven hissed, the word coming out as a red bubble of froth. "Come on... you golden... bastard."
The Lord's foot—a heavy, radiant weight—came down on the small of Raven's back. The sound of his spine compressing was like a bundle of dry firewood snapping under a boot. Raven's scream was caught in his throat, a silent, vibrating agony that turned his vision into a smear of grey.
Light-chains, thick as a man's thigh and vibrating with a low, humming frequency that made Raven's ears bleed, snaked out of the floor. They didn't just wrap around his limbs; they seared into them. They cauterized the flesh as they tightened, the smell of burning hair and scorched meat filling the small room until Raven wanted to vomit. He was hauled upright, his broken arms pinned back, his head lolling against his chest.
The Lord leaned in. The heat was unbearable. It felt like standing too close to an industrial furnace.
"You have failed the penance," the Lord vibrated. "You are a cancer that adapts to the cure. No more bodies. No more hiding in the skins of the innocent. You will start as nothing. You will be stripped of the memory of your crimes, but the weight of them will remain in your marrow."
Raven looked up, his face a mask of sweat, blood, and grime. He began to laugh. It was a broken, rattling sound.
"I'll just... find the door... again," Raven whispered.
"There is no door," the Lord replied. "This is my command. You will be cast into the storm. You will seek a vessel that can withstand the friction of your soul, or you will be torn apart by the very wind."
The Lord raised both hands. The light didn't just shine; it ignited.
Raven felt his skin begin to peel back. The tattoos—the crows, the names, the dates—began to glow with a sickly, necrotic purple before they simply disintegrated. His muscles began to liquefy, the heat reaching his internal organs. He felt his heart stop, then restart, then burst.
The explosion was silent.
A shockwave of white-hot energy expanded outward, vaporizing the concrete walls, the rusted pipes, and the very air. Raven's body didn't just die; it was unmade. It shattered into a million microscopic shards of bone and ash, a violent discharge of matter that left a scorched crater in the earth.
In the center of the ruin, a single, jagged spark of black-and-grey light remained. It was Raven's soul—shorn of its history, stripped of its meat, but still vibrating with a core of pure, concentrated defiance.
The Lord reached into the center of the spark and flung it.
Outside, the sky was a bruised, angry purple. A bolt of lightning, wider than a city block and twice as loud, tore through the clouds. It didn't strike the ground; it became a conduit.
The soul was sucked into the electricity. It traveled through the atmosphere at a speed that tore the grey spark into a thin, agonizing wire of consciousness. It screamed through the air, searching. It wasn't looking for a person. It was looking for a frequency. It was looking for a body that was already broken enough to let it in, but strong enough to keep from shattering under the impact.
Thousands of feet below, in a city of glass and greed, a young man was falling. Or perhaps he was being born.
The lightning struck a high, silver spire. The current flowed down the steel skeleton of the building, carrying the jagged, screaming spark of Raven with it. It surged through the wires, blew out the transformers, and finally, violently, found its mark.