[Malach]
The riots even reached Laketown.
This quiet, well-kept quarter of the capital, with its tree-lined streets and calm lakeside pathways, had always felt insulated from the world's chaos. Tonight it shook like the rest of Albion. Shouts echoed between manicured lawns. Lights flickered in stately homes. Sirens, distant but constant, cut through the night. Even here, panic seeped into the cracks.
Malach imagined the entire world was writhing in the same terror.The angels, silent for nearly a thousand years, had awakened from their long quiet. Whatever purpose they now carried was not peace.
It was death.
For twelve unbroken hours, calamity howled across the continent.Storms the color of bruised steel churned above the city, flashes of sickly green lightning cracking open the sky. Gale winds ripped entire trees from the ground. Fires sprang from nowhere, swallowing neighborhoods in spirals of yellow-blue flame that melted stone as easily as wood. Beasts shaped like people and born from twisted flesh and roamed through villages and towns, slaughtering everything in their path. Water from the taps and reservoirs turned a murky brown, thick enough to stain pipes.
It felt as if the world had been inverted.
And in that chaos, Malach worked.
He performed ritual after ritual until the skin of his hands felt flayed. He cut new places with shaking precision: the pads of his fingers, the side of his palm, even the thin skin between thumb and index finger. He needed fresh blood to fuel one more ritual each time. Every success steadied him and the people relying on him, but every attempt grew harder. His vision blurred. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His own breath sounded ragged in his ears.
One by one, the staff around him fell. Some collapsed from exhaustion and never woke. Others choked as the air briefly turned thin and metallic. A few simply stopped moving, their hearts unable to withstand the crushing pressure that swept through the district like invisible tides.
By the final hour, Malach could barely lift his arm.
Then the calamity receded.
The storms folded inward and vanished like dying embers. The fires curled in on themselves until they shrank to meek orange wisps and then dissolved into thin smoke. The beasts disappeared without trace. Even the strange pressure in the air eased.
Silence flooded the world.
Once the internet signal returned, Malach grabbed his tablet with trembling fingers. He did not need to search long. Every platform and every news channel showed the same viral video.
A single angel stood on the human side of Eryon's great walls.
Not walking. Floating. Completely still. Suspended a few feet above the ground. The camera captured every detail clearly. This was the only angel anyone on Earth had seen in almost a millennium.
Its wings were white, whiter than bone, a color so void of warmth it felt unnatural. Its long hair hung in the same dead shade. Its robes were thick and layered, ceremonial in appearance, yet it caught no sunlight. It was midday in the recording but the angel did not glow or reflect. It looked unreal, almost like a painting pasted into the scene.
Its body was tall and thin with proportions that appeared almost correct but slightly off. Its face resembled that of a human yet something in the arrangement felt wrong. The expression was blank. The wide open eyes stared directly at the person filming but the pupils seemed to look past them, as if studying the air inches behind the lens. The lips were slightly parted, the teeth visible, but the mouth did not close.
Then Malach saw what it held.
In its left arm it cradled the severed head of a man. His eyes had been gouged out, leaving dark pits. Thick stitches held his lips together with coarse thread. In its right arm it cradled the severed head of a woman. Her eyes remained but the eyelids were missing, leaving her gaze forced wide open. Her mouth hung slack and her tongue had been removed.
Malach felt something inside him collapse.
A crushing black pressure pressed against his skull. His ribs tightened as if an invisible grip seized his chest. He sensed a darkness deeper than night, a malevolence powerful enough to swallow the world. The angel's presence radiated an omen of apocalypse.
And Malach could not scream.
His vision reddened. Thoughts shattered into meaningless noise. He clutched at his head and fell to the floor, writhing as pain burst behind his eyes like exploding stars. His breath came in broken gasps. His hands scraped along the wooden floorboards, seeking something to hold but finding nothing.
He could only wail, the sound thin and ragged, as the image of the angel replayed in his mind with perfect and unbearable clarity.
The world was ending.And an angel held the proof in its arms