Chapter 3

The flaming sword sank through Daedalus’s armor and into whatever lay beneath without resistance. The angel hunched forward, shoulders heaving up, hands still on the hilt as gold ichor poured from his chest.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then something shattered, breaking with the sound of glass and chimes and a distant avalanche. Light erupted from the point of the angel’s blade, racing along the lines of his armor, bursting outward through every fracture and seam.

A ring of force tore across the courtyard, vaporizing Daedalus with it.

Devourers disintegrated where the wave touched them, their bodies flying apart into fine ash as stone shattered and walls folded, the very ground buckling.

Pyre had one last glimpse of Old Danar.

The old man had managed to reach the outer line of the scorched circle, where he turned at the sound, eyes widening as the light fell on him, heat stripping him to ash in a matter of moments.

Fire, pressure, and sound blended into a single white roar as Pyre was flung backward, his body lifted and hurled through a low stone wall, the broken spear torn from his hand.

The world spun, and then, there was nothing.

No sound. No light. No pain.

Only a dark, drifting quiet.

Pyre did not know how long he lay there. Moments. Months. Maybe years. A single breath held in the lungs of a dead world.

But then a spark woke inside his chest.

Small, stubborn, and hot.

Pyre gasped awake, and air rushed into his lungs. He choked, coughed, and rolled onto his side, retching weakly against stone that felt like it had been baked in an oven. His body ached in a distant way, and his clothes were half-burned, crusted with ash.

When he finally lifted his head, everyone around him was gone.

A haze of ash stretched out in all directions across the colony and world beyond. What had once been the streets and walls was now a flattened expanse of gray, broken only by half-melted stones and the fused remnants of metal.

There were no bodies. No Devourers. No militia. No angels. No mud or rain. Only char, emptiness, a low fog, and something rising in the distance.

A cathedral? Pyre thought as he pushed himself up onto his knees. How…

He staggered to his feet.

The sky above was now a dull, unremarkable gray, storm clouds blown apart by the blast.

The world had ended, yet Pyre was still here.

He dragged in a breath that tasted like ash and death and heat-scorched stone. Pyre turned in a slow circle, trying to understand why he lived when everything else had been erased.

What happened to Farreach?

A flicker of light caught his eye.

At the center of the crater where Daedalus had knelt lay a fragment of the angel’s sword—only the lower half, the upper third severed cleanly away in the blast. It still glowed faintly, heat rippling from its jagged edge.

Pyre’s vision pulsed as he staggered toward the weapon. The world was too empty. He kept expecting to hear someone—a voice, a cry for help, the scrape of Devourer claws—but nothing answered. Only silence. Only ash. Only the impossible cathedral he had seen in the distance, a place that should not have existed.

Maybe I should go there, he thought. But first…

Pyre knelt beside Daedalus’s broken blade.

He hesitated, then reached for it. After everything that had happened, there was nothing left to lose.

The moment his hand touched the fragment, something answered.

Not words, not a voice, but a presence. A faint burning at the edges of his soul, as if the blade recognized him, or as if Daedalus’s final power was somehow trapped inside the metal.

Pyre closed his hand around the hilt, and pain answered at once. Not just physical, but soul-deep, a white-hot spike driven into something he had never known could break.

The fragment did not simply burn him. It merged with him, not fully, not completely, but enough to sear his palm, to flood him with alien heat as a strange black sheen crawled across the metal.

He stumbled back as strange whispers filled his head and dropped the blade.

When Pyre looked again, the fragment had changed color, blackened like volcanic glass, but still sharp. Still dangerous. Still alive. He forced his breath steady and picked it up again, the weapon no longer burning the same way.

Pyre turned his gaze to the cathedral he had seen earlier and froze as it grew even larger, pressing out of the scorched earth.

Am I dead? he wondered, the ground trembling beneath him.

A blast of magic erupted somewhere beyond the crater. A sound like stone groaning under divine weight rippled through the air. The force rolled beneath his feet, lifting dust in little spirals.

Where there had been only ruins and melted stone, the cathedral expanded, reshaped, building itself upward from the dead ground. It rose until it stood impossibly intact.

Its spires were wrong for the colony’s architecture. The angles did not match any mortal hand and the structure was taller than anything Pyre had ever seen, the cathedral-like something that had fallen out of heaven or been torn out of it and shoved here.

The sky above the cathedral rippled. No divine symmetry marked it like in Karastella’s arrival, only a thin, jagged tear as the cathedral unfolded, its stones separating and reforming.

Pyre staggered toward the structure, sword fragment in hand. He knew, instinctively, deeply, that something was inside.

As he neared the fractured entrance, he saw movement within the inner sanctum. Devourers?

No.

Their bodies were already dead, slashed apart, mangled, and arranged in ways that defied the physics of combat. They looked as though they had been killed without struggle, without resistance, without even a touch, as if someone had spoken a command and every monster had obeyed and torn itself to shreds.

Impossible, Pyre thought as he stepped through the half-formed archway and saw someone standing on the glowing seal at the chamber’s center.

A tall, white-haired figure. Ragged. Barefoot. Little more than a skeleton draped in ruined cloth and half a dozen swords of varying size strapped to his back.

The man held a blade loosely at his side and didn’t bother to look at Pyre, his attention fixed on the dim crystal hanging above the seal, its light flickering like a dying star.

“Who… are you?” Pyre asked, his voice scraped raw.

The stranger gave only a distracted grunt, as if the question barely registered.

Pyre asked again.

Only then did the strange swordsman turn. His gaze slid over to Pyre, then down to the fractured, blackened sword fragment in his grip.

The man went still, and everything stopped.