Moonlight spills across the celestial courtyard like liquid silver, stretching over marble columns and winding across ancient stone tiles etched with divine runes. Incense smolders from braziers along the perimeter, the smoke drifting in slow, graceful spirals that paint the air with the faint scent of myrrh and jasmine. The night should be peaceful sacred, but instead it feels wrong, off-balance, as though the world itself is holding its breath.
And then the quiet breaks.
Your body hits the cracked stone with a sound far too small for the pain that rips through you. The impact knocks the air from your lungs. You slump against a broken column, dust settling around you. Blood drips from your arm, warm and bright in the moonlight. It tracks down your skin in delicate rivulets, pooling on the ground in a smear of red against the pale marble.
The lesser god who attacked you stumbles back, staring at his hands like he can’t quite believe what he’s done. A streak of green and gold plummets from the sky like a falling star. The very air peels back around it, bending, warping, screaming under the force of celestial power descending too fast for the human eye to comprehend.
Zayne hits the ground with the violent grace of a meteor.
Light explodes outward. Stone shatters. Wind detonates across the courtyard, ripping banners from their poles, sending lanterns slamming against their chains. The grass lies flat beneath the shockwave. Even the statues surrounding the courtyard tremble, cracks racing up their legs as if they fear to look directly at him.
He straightens slowly, his silhouette rising from the cratered ground like a god resurrected from the heart of a star. Then he sees you.
Zayne’s face goes utterly blank, his expression collapsing into something too raw, too empty to be called emotion. His green eyes widen, catching the moonlight, but then the glow swells, brightens, ignites. Light bursts outward from his pupils like a solar flare.
A tremor of power ripples across the courtyard. His long black hair lifts behind him in a halo of crackling, golden-tinged energy. The opalescent gold streaks woven through it shine like molten metal, each strand vibrating with barely restrained fury. His jaw clenches, sharp enough to cut glass, and shadows curl along his skin despite the light pouring off of him.
His voice is barely audible, a hoarse whisper scraped from the bottom of a breaking heart:
“…your blood…”
The words shake. His gaze flicks from your wound… to your face… and something inside him tears in two. A sound escapes him — a low, fractured exhale, like the first breath after drowning.
Then rage is not loud, but quiet enough to be catastrophic, it unfurls from him in a shockwave. The stone tiles beneath his feet crack like ice under pressure. The air ripples in concentric circles around him. Lantern flames implode. The temperature spikes, the air shimmering with heat.
He moves.
One moment he is standing at the center of the courtyard, the next he is inches away from the trembling lesser god, a hand clamped around the man’s throat with divine precision. The lesser god rises into the air, kicking helplessly. His eyes bulge. He claws at Zayne’s wrist.
Zayne doesn’t blink. His glowing hair whips in the unseen storm of his power. His emerald eyes blaze, bright enough to reflect across the polished marble beneath him. When he speaks, his voice is broken glass wrapped in velvet:
“You touched her.”
The lesser god chokes out a sob. “I—I didn’t know—she—”
“You touched her,” Zayne repeats, quieter this time, almost reverent in its devastation.
The courtyard shakes. The runes carved into the stones ignite with blinding gold. A column fractures clean in half behind him, crashing to the ground in a plume of dust.