[Elias's POV]
I stared at the camp I'd once called home—the cradle of my nightmares, the grave of my past. Memories stolen. Potential butchered.
My hands shook. Not from the cold. Not from fear.
From the silence.
Slaughter. Destruction. Death. Nothing else. No cries for mercy. No shouts of victory. Just the flies, already thick in the heat.
Was this what he'd wanted? To drown the world in blood? Half these souls hadn't even known whose war they were dying for. Not enemies. Not allies. Just… bodies.
I still remembered his face—the brother who'd stolen extra rations for me. Who'd hummed lullabies when I burned with fever.
Where was that boy now? Buried beneath the weight of vengeance? Or had he never existed at all?
I didn't know. And that—more than the corpses—made my stomach turn.
The battle was ending.
The last of the Angels were being hunted like rats, scattered and desperate, their defiance crushed beneath the weight of inevitability. No honor. No final stand.
Just bodies hitting the dirt, one after another, forgotten as soon as they fell.
No one cared that they were just pawns in a war between giants. Their lives were footnotes, their deaths mere punctuation in a story that never belonged to them.
But none of that mattered right now.
Where is he?
My heart pounded against my ribs, my breath ragged. Where is my brother?
Could he even win against Victor? Or had he already fallen, just another corpse among the rest?
No. I couldn't think like that. I had to keep moving. I had to find Talia.
I sprinted across the battlefield, boots slipping on blood-soaked ground, the stench of iron thick in the air.
The dead sprawled beneath me, faces frozen in expressions of pain, of rage, of disbelief. Angels, Spiders—it didn't matter.
Just lifeless husks left in the wake of a fight they were never meant to survive.
My mind twisted, unraveling.
One woman.
Hundreds of bodies.
Mother's hazy face.
The nameless dead.
This was the weight of vengeance. The cost no one ever put into words, the blood price Rowan had been warned about over and over again.
Something latched onto my leg.
I froze.
A hand—calloused, shaking, slick with blood—clung to my boot, weak but desperate. I looked down.
A man, maybe forty. Old for the slums.
He was missing a hand, the stump still oozing, pooling beneath him. His ribs barely moved, his breath shallow. But it wasn't the injuries that struck me. It was his face.
Tears ran tracks through the grime on his cheeks. His mouth trembled, struggling to form words.
His eyes—hazel, dimming—locked onto mine.
Not his family. Not his friends. A stranger. Me.
His lips parted, his voice a broken whisper drowned in blood. "P-please..."
He coughed, choking, but forced himself to go on.
"Find my two k-kids..." His chest convulsed. "Tell them... daddy won't be home for a w-while."
The words hit like a fist to my gut.
A father.
Just another body in a war he never had a say in. One more link in a chain of shattered families.
Another name that would fade, leaving nothing behind but hungry mouths and empty doorways.
Before I could ask their names, his eyes had already dulled.
His grip slipped away. His body stilled. Dead.
Tears blurred my vision, but I kept moving.
The dead were everywhere, their blood soaking into the dirt, their faces frozen in the final moments of terror or agony.
I forced myself to look away, scanning the battlefield for something—someone—who wasn't just another body.
Then I saw him.
Tobias stood rigid over a corpse, his back to me, shoulders hunched like the weight of the world had finally broken him.
His knife hung limply at his side, but his gaze was fixed downward, locked onto the body at his feet.
I didn't recognize the dead man. But Tobias did.
I ran toward him, pushing past fallen warriors and discarded weapons. My breath came in sharp gasps, but I didn't slow.
"Tobias!" I called out.
No response.
I reached him, hesitated only a moment before resting a hand on his shoulder.
He jerked back like I'd burned him, knife flashing up in reflex. His eyes were wild—haunted—before they found mine. Recognition settled in, and with it, something worse.
Sorrow.
His usual smirk was gone, stripped away like everything else in this hellish day.
"Hey, Elias," he said at last, his voice hollow, scraped raw. "What are you doing here? It's still not safe."
It wasn't concern. Just a fact. Like the air was still thick with smoke and the bodies were still warm. Like death hadn't quite finished its work.
"Have you seen Rowan?" My voice came out tight, uncertain. Did he even deserve to be saved?
Tobias exhaled sharply, glancing back at the body on the ground before shaking his head. "No clue," he muttered.
"My guess? Gideon's shack. Maybe still fighting. Maybe already dead."
The words were blunt. Empty.
The battlefield stretched around us, endless and indifferent.
"Have you seen Talia?" I asked, though doubt laced my words. "With her strength, she might be able to help Rowan."
Tobias just shook his head. Then his gaze flickered towards the dead man at his feet, something unreadable flickering in his eyes. Then, barely above a whisper—"Rest well."
And just like that, he turned and walked away.
I watched him go, his silhouette fading into the haze of smoke and blood.
A part of me wanted to call him back, to say something, anything, that might keep him from sinking deeper into whatever abyss had swallowed him.
But what was the point? We were all drowning in the same damn thing.
No. I couldn't falter. Not here. Not now.
I forced my legs to move, pushing forward through the carnage.
The ground beneath me was slick, the air thick with the stench of blood, sweat, and rot.
Every step threatened to drag me down, to force me to acknowledge the sheer weight of what surrounded me.
A flicker of silver caught my eye—someone's weapon, abandoned beside an unseeing corpse. My breath hitched, but I tore my gaze away and kept moving.
Somewhere in this chaos, Talia had to be here. She had to.
But my mind wouldn't stay focused. Instead, it wandered to Alicia—the only person I could ever truly call a friend.
She wasn't here. She hadn't seen this.
Thank the gods.
I wasn't sure she could have taken it. Hell, I wasn't sure I could take it.
A fresh gust of wind carried the stink of death, so thick it nearly made me gag. I clenched my jaw, swallowing the bile that rose in my throat.
Just keep moving.
One foot in front of the other.
Through the blood. Through the bodies.
Then I saw her.
Talia.
Her bright orange hair, once vibrant, was now darkened with blood, strands clinging to her face like dying embers drowned in the aftermath of battle.
My breath hitched, and before I could think, I was already sprinting toward her, feet pounding against the ground, ignoring the bodies, the blood, the ruin.
She heard me. Unlike Tobias, she turned the moment I called her name.
Her eyes found me, tracing my figure, reading the exhaustion in my stance. And just like Tobias, her expression was hollow, carved from sorrow. Again and again, the same damn look.
No other outcome.
"What is it, Elias?" she asked, voice gentle in a way that felt forced—like she was trying to hold herself together with brittle kindness.
But I saw the cracks. She was breaking. Just like the rest of us.
"Come with me to Gideon's shack," I said. "Rowan must be there."
She hesitated. Just for a breath. Then, with a slow, weary nod, she fell into step beside me.
The journey was silent, awkward words exchanged only to fill the void, neither of us willing to confront what lay ahead.
My thoughts drifted as we walked—flashes of the past mixing with the bloodied present.
The shack wasn't far, but by the time we reached it, it felt as though an entire lifetime had passed beneath my feet.
It looked... different.
The place where Gideon once sat me down, forcing me to drag my fingers over letters I barely understood.
The place where he got into my head, making me do things I had always dreaded.
Now, it was just another ruin in a city of corpses.
We stepped through the gaping hole in the wall, the remains of the past crumbling beneath our feet.
Talia looked at me. I looked at her.
She was apprehensive.
And for good reason.
The moment we stepped inside, I saw him.
Rowan.
My brother.
But something was wrong. Horribly, irreversibly wrong.
He was crouched over a body, Victor's lifeless corpse sprawled beneath him, the blood pooling thick and dark like ink spilled across the floor. ,
But it wasn't the body that made my stomach twist. It wasn't even the gore. It was Rowan himself.
He looked like an animal, shoulders hunched, chest rising and falling in erratic gasps. His face—once so familiar—was twisted, eyes wide with something close to madness.
His lips curled, breath ragged, fingers twitching at his sides as if they didn't quite belong to him anymore.
Then his eyes flicked toward us.
I froze.
Talia tensed beside me.
Those eyes.
Twin pools of crimson, deep and unnatural, reflecting the dim light like a predator catching its prey in the dark. A shiver clawed its way up my spine.
Then he spoke.
"Elias!" His voice cracked as he grinned, teeth bared in something that wasn't quite a smile. Then he laughed—loud, jagged, unhinged.
"I did it!" He gasped between breaths, his whole body trembling. "I finally avenged her!"
Silence.
I didn't speak. Neither did Talia. We only stared, watching as he beamed like a child who had finally won some long-lost game.
But this wasn't victory.
This was… something else.
His skin—his neck—patches of it were gray, mottled like flesh left too long in the sun. Rotting. My stomach twisted. He looked beaten down, exhausted, his body barely holding itself together, and yet there was something electric in the way he stood.
Then he coughed.
The first time was sharp. The second was wetter.
Then blood.
So much of it, spilling from his mouth in thick, crimson streams, splattering across the floor, drenching his hands. He shook, body convulsing, but unlike before, I didn't move. I didn't reach for him. I only watched, a cold dread settling in my bones.
This isn't him.
This isn't Rowan.
This is something else.
When he finally straightened, he took a step forward. Then another.
My breath hitched.
Terror.
Real, raw terror crawled up my throat like bile. I wanted to move. I needed to move. But my legs refused to listen.
His hand reached for me.
But it wasn't his hand.
It wasn't the hand of my brother—the one I grew up with, the one that used to ruffle my hair when I was younger, the one that once felt human.
This hand was something else entirely.
Gray. Decayed. The flesh peeling at the edges, like it had been dead for far too long.
And before I could stop myself, before I could think, the words ripped from my throat.
"Stay away."