The first thing I felt was heat.
Not the clean kind from a forge, but the heavy, choking heat that lives inside burning wood and blood. When I opened my eyes, the world was nothing but red and black. The city was gone. Vel Ruin, or what was left of it, smoked around me, buildings sagging like corpses.
I pushed myself up. The ground was slick. Armor plates and limbs tangled together beneath the ash. Every shape was a body.
Silence. No cries, no orders, no wind. Just the slow crackle of what was still burning. I tried to swallow, but the air tasted like metal.
Then the air trembled. For a heartbeat, I thought it was smoke choking the sun, but then the light itself dimmed. Not fading, not clouded. Just gone.
The world blinked.
A single, deliberate pulse of darkness rolled across the ruins, washing over the broken towers and the bodies at my feet. Shadows stretched, twisted, and then snapped back as the light returned too suddenly, too cleanly.
I stared upward, breath caught. The sky should not move like that. Clouds do not close. But there it was again, a slow dimming, a shudder through the air, as if something immense above the world was closing an unseen eyelid.
Each time it happened, the fires flickered lower, the colors bled out of the world, and the silence grew heavier.
By the third blink, I was no longer sure if it was the heavens or my own mind shutting and opening again.
And yet, beneath the smoke, I could almost feel the rhythm. A pulse, steady and patient, like the world itself had a heartbeat.
A wet cough broke the stillness.
I turned sharply. A soldier lay twisted on the stones, armor melted into his skin. His chest moved once, barely.
I knelt beside him. "Hold on. Don't.."
His hand shot out and clamped around my wrist. The strength in that dying grip made me flinch.
"Easy," I said, trying to pry free. "You're safe, I…"
He was not listening. His lips were moving, spilling fragments of words I did not know. The rhythm of them crawled up my arm, settling behind my teeth. The air around us thickened until each syllable shook the air.
The soldier's eyes rolled back. Light leaked from the corners. My pulse matched the sound.
Then pain.
It started as warmth, then turned into knives. Something entered my palm, not metal, not touch, but a rush of burning life. My skin split, and the smell hit me like rot and iron.
I screamed. The man did not stop. His voice rose until it was a single, breaking note. And then he fell silent.
When he released me, smoke rose from my hand.
A mark was there, charred and perfect, a circle with lines curling outward, thin as veins. An eye. Not a drawing, something alive pressed into the flesh.
It blinked.
I scrambled back, clutching the wrist against my chest. The dead man's face still wore a smile.
"Gods… gods, no…"
I tried to rub it away. Nails tore skin, dirt filled the wound, but the mark stayed. It glowed faintly under the grime, pulsing like a heartbeat.
The world tilted. Every sound seemed to stretch thin. Fire hissed slower, ash drifted in graceful patterns. I could feel the air moving through the ruins, each current brushing against my skin like thought.
Then came the whisper.
Not from around me, but from inside the mark, a vibration that was not sound but meaning.
Wake.
I froze.
The Eye in my palm throbbed once, like it was answering something far above. I looked up. The sky blinked again, and for the brief instant of darkness, I felt it looking back.
Not heaven.
Not a god.
Something older. Something that wanted to see through me.
When the light returned, I was still kneeling among the corpses, my hand burning like a brand, my name lost somewhere in the smoke.
And I knew, with a certainty that tasted like ash, whatever had looked through the sky had found me.