The horizon bled red.
Snow fell from a sky that was not a sky but a burning ocean turned upside down, folding in upon itself like a wounded beast. Below it stretched the last breath of the Third Layer of Hell—a city so vast it seemed to breathe with the planet's own molten lungs.
Atlas stood upon a ridge of black stone and looked down upon it. His army—his church of the damned, the faithful of ruin and light—waited behind him in silence.
They were a congregation of contradictions: angels who had shed their halos, demons who had remembered prayer, mortals who had forgotten death. And he, the Guide who united them—neither savior nor destroyer, but something in between.
The wind that blew from the city beyond carried heat and incense. The air shimmered with the cries of the dying and the laughter of the damned.
Yet beneath it all was order—streets that spiraled in geometric perfection, towers that gleamed with alchemical gold, lights that pulsed like the heartbeat of a god.
