The voice disrupted the souls destined to survive, shattering the grip they held on the warmth of their homes with a frequency that felt like a serrated blade dragged across a glass sky, and that single whisper cracked the very foundation of the empire. Arush looked up to see the tree had been skinned of its dignity, its ancient wood bleeding with the heavy, cloying stench of rotting meat that hung in the humid air like a physical shroud, while every heart in the park beat with a desperate, frantic envy for the freedom of a bird that could simply fly away from the unfolding nightmare. Arush lunged as something moved within the canopy—a mass of sheer muscle and predatory intent ready to tear the threads of life with a single, curved claw—and as his eyes vibrated with the strain of tracking the impossible, his heart pounded with the rhythmic war-drums of dum-dum, a heartbeat that felt less like life and more like a countdown to an execution. Within his crimson eyes, a sun held its own renaissance, moving like an ocean of prehistoric fish fighting to survive the crushing, suffocating weight of a dark sea that intended to swallow the light forever.
The Sinner stalked the thick branch with claws embedding deep into the pulpy wood and breath that came as a toxic fog of ionized blood, while Arush tracked the black, orange, and white patches on her fur that shifted like a kaleidoscope of death, his teeth chattering in a jagged, manic grin as he whispered, "This isn't a damn Sinner... it's a nightmare born from fear and fed on the scraps of our forgotten courage." "Your eyes ask for mercy while your spirit prepares for a funeral," the Sinner hissed, the sound echoing as if it were coming from inside Arush's own skull, "while I owe you a debt to be fulfilled with your own bloody flesh, a payment that will be collected in pieces and celebrated in screams," and she paced the bark like a model on a catwalk of thorns, her claws moving through the air like a painter—an artist of sheer will, carnage, and the beautiful geometry of a corpse.
Mohit's knuckles turned white as his grip on reality slipped and he fell like a dropping wine glass shattering against the indifferent earth, pain injecting into his body like a venomous serum as the embroidery of claws across his chest began to weep crimson tears, but Arush didn't look back as he signaled Sanvi to save the others—a final, silent goodbye in a war declared with nothing but a broken arrow-tip and a heart full of black embers. Arush stood on the bark with his leg trembling as a voice echoed from the deepest cellar of his heart, singing, "Rolling in the deep to elope with death, making her mine while taking the ring and dancing on the grave of the sun," and he looked at the Sinner and giggled, his knuckles weeping against the rough wood as the splinters bit back, asking with a voice that had forgotten how to be human, "Bastard little cat... do you want the bloody cotton wool or are you just here to watch me burn?"
He dropped, swinging his weight until he hit the ground with a jolt of high-voltage current that turned his nerves into white-hot wires, his spinal cord feeling like a weeping maiden begging for mercy under the weight of a cathedral, as he looked up past the silver moon-rays to see the White Hawk vanish into a cluster of thick, pulsating veins—a nest that looked like a naked, open wound in the sky, dripping its infection onto the world below. He moved through the canopy singing his dark song, his hands shredded by splinters as they left red prints that the wood drank greedily like a thirsty parasite, and as blood dripped onto his face and pooled in the cracks of his lips, he moved his tongue to taste the iron-heavy reality and whispered, "Man... the chewing gum is getting salty, and the flavor is starting to taste like the end of the world."
Below, a river of red flowed where the coast was not made of stones but of dead humans—a bridge of corpses spanning the gap between the living and the forgotten—and Sanvi led the way, stepping past pulled-out livers that looked like shiny, dark fruit and severed limbs that still twitched with the memory of motion, while her legs remained chained by a weightless guilt, her soul pulling her back toward the abyss as a voice mocked, "Will you be a scared dog whimpering in the shadows, or will you die in glory with the boy who invited the fire?" Sanvi chose the blood and turned back toward him to make death inevitable, while behind Arush, the blood falling from his calf took on a physical weight, shading the invisible feathers of the air into orange and black stripes that mirrored the predator above. The Sinner was claiming the tree, her roar a countdown to the extinction of everything Arush had ever known, and as his grip loosened, his nails fell away to tumble toward the earth like dead cells returning to the dead, leaving him with nothing but raw, exposed nerves and a soul that refused to go quiet.
Arush reached for the final branch, his shoulder extending as the cavity between his bones struggled to move and his nerves went numb, the voice in his head finally fading into the agonizing silence of a blackboard scratching within his ears until his consciousness was nothing but a void. He blinked in that split-second of muscle failure and gravity claimed the debt of his human body; as his grip loosened with a sob that was swallowed by the wind, he fell backward in a slow-motion descent toward hell, watching the sky move further away like a lover who had found someone better. As the drum of his heart thudded with a dying, flickering spark, Arush looked at the hawk whose eyes were fixed on him with a cold, clinical curiosity as he fell, and he whispered with the last of his air, "Take me to heaven with you, for I have seen enough of the earth to know it has no place for me."
Then the twenty-foot fall came with the weight of a mountain, and as Arush hit the ground his facial bones cracked with a sound like dry branches breaking in a storm, his jaw falling apart and his eye sockets striking the earth with a rush of blood that turned his vision into a red kaleidoscope before he felt a jolt like a high-voltage current being fed directly into his brain. A jagged white bone—his tibia—came straight out of his leg, tearing through the muscle and skin like a spear, and the pain didn't just grow but colonized every cell in his body, a conqueror taking over a fallen kingdom as his blood dripped into the thirsty soil. Arush couldn't move but he crawled with a frantic, animalistic energy as a heavy thud sounded from behind his back, and though he couldn't turn because his neck was broken and his perspective was shattered, he still crawled with his jagged bone sticking to dead leaves and mud while he tasted his own iron and felt the "Clinical Cold" starting to freeze his heart. Then came a voice like gravel grinding on silk, saying, "Life is too short to live and too long to suffer... give up now and let the nothingness take the wheel," and Arush stopped in one place as his soul was dragged out of his body, banging his hand against the earth in a rhythmic, desperate chaos of thump-thump-thump.
The Sinner came closer, putting her heavy, matted paws on his back and her jaws near his shoulder, the heat of her hunger radiating off her skin, but Arush pulled a pen with a metal tip from his pocket and with a sharp, mechanical click, he stabbed her face as she chuckled, leaving a foul, rot-scented breath behind until a crystal shard struck her neck alongside a voice crying out of the darkness, "Get up, Arush! Don't you dare let it end in the dirt!" Arush looked toward the voice of Sanvi, and though he couldn't stand his ground or even feel his own limbs, he extended his arm toward her while weeping in a madness born of desperation to be saved from the monster that owned the night. But the Sinner bit his shoulder, her jaws growing into his body and turning in a U-shape until the teeth came out the other side in a spray of bone and fabric, and the pen fell from his hand as Arush finally stopped struggling, his eyes going wide and motionless as he watched the stars through the blood.
Sanvi looked at Arush's motionless eyes and his wide-open torso soaked in blood that turned his shirt into a heavy, wet weight as the Sinner moved toward her with a predatory grace, and Sanvi stood frozen in time and horror, her boots soaked in blood that claimed the ground like a deathly crown of a queen who had lost her kingdom. The Sinner took her steps toward her, whispering that the wine gets sweeter when preserved for decades but stays creamy and tender when it's new, and every step grew closer to Sanvi as she prepared to feast on the beauty and the fear that radiated from the girl. Then, a round of shots fired with a scream of "Move!" and it was Ujjwal, his hand half-chewed with a single bone taking the load of his whole forearm as his skin turned to a map of blood, standing like a mountain in front of Sanvi—a knight standing between his Queen and the inevitable Death.
From the tree, claws grew deep and the Hawk looked at Arush's broken form and spoke, "Did he grow toward something else... or did he simply lose interest in the struggle of being alive?" as she looked toward him dipped in the blood of the soil like a fallen god. Arush looked at Sanvi as his eyes blurred and he saw flames that only he could see—flickers of an impossible light smelling of roses and ozone—as a voice of a demon in a man with a tail that whipped through time spoke into his ear, "How pity... to see someone like you stay down while you are on the verge of the Dark Sun; I lend you my power, but the interest will be paid in souls." Arush looked at the figure as steam rose from his wounds, the "Negative Energy" melting and stitching his flesh together as the dark, flamed figure whispered with a chuckle that sounded like grinding tectonic plates, "Human evolution... I see a masterpiece in the making," before disappearing into the thin, electrified air.
The Sinner moved closer toward Sanvi and Ujjwal to lunge and end the line, but suddenly a flame came from the side with a blinding, physics-defying speed as Arush put his hand on her teeth, lifting them with a raw force that made the Sinner's neck snap back, red flames covering his face while a tail of black fire erupted from his spine. As he slammed the Sinner down and straddled her stomach, she struggled with her claws, tearing at his new, burning skin, but Arush grabbed them and pulled them out of her flesh with a series of wet, sickening pops, breaking her teeth with a force that he then stabbed back into her own chest. Sanvi looked at Arush and the pure, concentrated rage that radiated from him as the flames took over the darkness of the park, and Arush put his flaming hand into the Sinner's mouth and screamed in a fury as the blazing red flames grew dense, consuming the air and the shadows alike.
"JAI BHAVANI!!"
Breaking the jaw and tearing the flesh with a strength that belonged to a different dimension, he turned the Sinner into a cloud of black dust and grey ash, and as Ujjwal's camera flickered red in the dying light, Arush turned his back and took a step toward Sanvi and Ujjwal. Sanvi looked at Arush as he reached toward her cheek, and even in the burning fire of his new skin, it never hurt her as her crystalline tears fell and turned to liquid in the heat of his presence, and she spoke with a voice that trembled, "Thanks for life... you owe me, and I owe you the truth." Arush looked at Ujjwal as he grabbed the camera and crushed it in his grip, the plastic and glass grinding into a fine powder, speaking in the voice of a beast that had swallowed a man, "Keep my secret... soldiers, or the fire will find you too."
As the helicopters hummed in the air like mechanical insects, Arush looked at them both before vanishing into a smoke of darkness, leaving behind a trail of scorched earth and a legacy of blood. He knew that the transformation was not a gift, but a debt—a burden that would weigh heavier than the twenty-foot fall that had broken his human self. The voice from the nothingness whispered one final time, echoing in the silence of his mind as he fled into the trees:
"Fire is an element that needs to be sustained; it needs fuel like coal. But you won't need coal—you will need the cold, sharp edge of pain to grow beyond the Abyss and touch the sun that the White Hawk hides."
-ARUSH SALUNKE