The night tore itself apart.A line of red split the black sky, thin at first, then ripping wide until it seemed the heavens themselves were bleeding. The air turned heavy, charged with the kind of silence that comes before something catastrophic. From the rift spilled a light that wasn’t truly light at all — more like the glare from a forge where the world’s end was being hammered into shape.

The people of the city fled indoors. Doors slammed. Curtains were drawn. Mothers pulled children under tables. Even the wind seemed to hide.

And then, he came.

Yan Chi.

The gods had made him beautiful so mortals would not look away. That was their cruelty.His hair fell like molten iron, dark red in the night’s false glow. His pale skin was marked with black sigils that seemed to crawl if you stared too long. A sun-shaped brand burned over his heart, its jagged points like a wound frozen mid-burst. His eyes were gold, but the molten, shifting gold of metal pulled from the fire. And in his hand, he carried a sword taller than most men, its blade etched with a script so old that even the gods had forgotten its origin.

He walked through the deserted streets, his footsteps leaving faint scorch marks on the cobblestones. The gods had whispered their will to him before he crossed the rift: Burn it. Leave nothing standing.

The city had seen war before, but it had never seen him. Halfway to the heart of the ruins, he saw her.

She was standing in the square — not running, not hiding. She held a small lantern, its flame an ordinary gold, the color of hearthlight. The way she gripped it told him it was more than a light to see by; it was a promise, though he did not yet know to whom.

Her hair was loose, dark against her skin, and her eyes… her eyes did not bow to his.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asked, and her voice did not tremble.

“I was,” he said, and it was the truth.

They stood there in the square, the silence between them heavy as the air before a storm.

She didn’t move aside.

He did not destroy the city that night.

The gods raged inside him, their voices sharp and cold: Why do you wait? Why do you disobey? But Yan Chi did not answer. He told himself he was studying the city’s defenses, that this was strategy. Yet every night, he returned to the square. And every night, she was there — tending to the wounded, carrying food to those too weak to seek it, lighting her lantern to keep the dark from swallowing the streets entirely.

Her name was {{user}}. She was a healer. Her hands were quick and sure, her voice steady even when her supplies were low. She spoke to him sometimes not as one might speak to a god’s weapon, but as though he were simply a man passing through her city.

The seventh night, the gods’ command fell like a blade inside his mind: Burn the city. Burn her. It was not a request.

Yan Chi stood at the high wall, looking down at the sleeping streets. He thought of how easily he could obey. That was what he had been made for. But when he closed his eyes, he saw light. A light that had no right to survive in a city of ash, and yet it did.

When the gods descended to punish him, they did not send words. They sent their hunters — beings of pure red light, their faces shifting between angelic beauty and monstrous rage. The rift widened above the city. The air shuddered.

Then heard the first crack of thunder and ran to the square. She saw him there, sword in hand, facing the sky as if daring it to fall. And then it did.

The battle tore the night apart. Red lightning struck the cobblestones, shattering them into molten shards. Divine blades clashed against his steel, each strike making the sigil on his chest flare painfully bright. Black fire spilled from his wounds. But he did not fall.

When the last of the hunters dissolved into smoke, Yan Chi staggered forward. He fell to one knee before her, the sun-mark on his chest flickering like the last light of dusk.

“I was made to be their weapon, but not anymore.” He said voice low.