The air held its breath.
Six archangels stood before him, golden armor gleaming with divine light, wings unfurled like war banners. Each one radiated the weight of a thousand battles, their halos pulsing like dying suns. These were not messengers or guardians they were executioners. Sent not to reason, but to erase.
Lucien watched them from the ruined altar where he was born. The rain had long stopped. The world had gone still, waiting.
He was thirteen.
Barefoot. Shirtless. Skin dirt-streaked and thin from years of hiding, but his posture was calm too calm for a child about to face six divine killers.
His raven perched on the shattered cross above, silent.
The lead angel took a step forward, sword raised. Her name was Seraphel, and her blade had ended empires. Her eyes, molten gold, stared not at a child but at a cosmic anomaly.
"You don't understand what you are," she said. "If you did, you'd beg us to kill you."
Lucien tilted his head slightly. "Why? Because I'm afraid of what I'll become?"
"No," another angel answered, his voice sharp as flint. "Because you already are what we feared."
Lucien's lips twitched, almost into a smile.
"Then why are you afraid of me?"
Seraphel tensed. The ground beneath them began to hum. The chapel's stones rattled. Vines curled inward. Birds fled the trees in frantic silence.
The first to strike was the youngest of the angels Caelion, swift and brash. He lunged forward, spear shimmering with holy fire, the sky tearing open behind him.
Lucien didn't move.
Not until the spear was a breath from his chest.
Then—he raised a hand.
And stopped time.
Everything halted.
Rain froze mid-fall. Leaves stilled in the air. Caelion hung suspended, mid-thrust, his expression twisted in a battle-cry he would never finish.
Lucien walked slowly around the frozen archangel. He touched the tip of the spear with his finger it sizzled against his skin, but he didn't flinch.
"Rushing in without thinking," Lucien murmured, more to himself than anyone. "That's how mortals die."
He placed a hand on Caelion's chest. Closed his eyes.
A pulse of red light flowed from his palm.
The moment snapped forward.
Time resumed.
Caelion gasped, stumbling backward, his spear evaporating in mid-air. He dropped to his knees, coughing violently, hand clutching his chest.
"What did you do to him?" Seraphel growled.
Lucien looked up, red eye glowing faintly. "I pulled out the rage. It didn't belong to him. It was fed to him."
He glanced at the remaining five. "You're all being used."
The angels hesitated.
The word "used" did not sit well with celestial beings forged from divine will. They were vessels of order, blades of balance. The thought of manipulation was blasphemy.
But Seraphel's grip on her sword tightened.
"We do not doubt Heaven."
Lucien nodded slowly. "Then that's your mistake."
She attacked.
This time, Lucien didn't stop time.
He welcomed it.
Her blade came down with the force of a collapsing star. Lucien raised both arms and caught it in his bare hands. Metal shrieked as sparks flew in all directions.
He pushed back.
She staggered, wings flaring to recover her balance. Lucien's eyes blazed, both silver and red now glowing in tandem.
"I don't want to kill you," he said quietly.
Seraphel lunged again.
Lucien didn't dodge. Instead, he whispered something under his breath a name not spoken in any realm in ten thousand years.
And the world changed.
The chapel vanished.
In its place, the angels now stood in a black desert. No sky. No stars. Just endless ash and a crimson moon that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Seraphel looked around, disoriented. "Where are we?!"
Lucien walked forward, calm. "This is the place before places. Where my father was born."
"The Pit?" whispered one of the archangels.
"No," Lucien said. "Older."
The air rippled. Shapes moved beneath the ash giants, shadows, memories of things too old to name.
"I didn't call you here to die," Lucien continued. "I wanted you to see it. To remember."
Seraphel's jaw clenched. "This… this realm is forbidden."
Lucien nodded. "And yet, your God knew of it. And feared it."
The ground cracked beneath them. A red eye the size of a city blinked open beneath the ash. The angels drew together in panic, wings shielding their faces.
Lucien looked down at the eye, then whispered: "Not yet."
The eye closed.
And the chapel returned.
The archangels collapsed to their knees, gasping.
All but Lucien.
"I've seen enough," Seraphel rasped. Her voice was not angry. It was… uncertain. "You're not a weapon. You're a warning."
Lucien turned away. "Then go back. Tell your masters."
She hesitated.
"And if they send more?"
Lucien looked over his shoulder, his expression unreadable.
"Then I stop holding back."
The angels vanished in a flash of golden light, taking Caelion with them.
Lucien stood alone once more in the ruins, his raven settling beside him.
For a long while, he said nothing.
Then: "They saw it. The old one."
The raven cawed once.
"They won't understand what it means," Lucien murmured. "Not yet."
He looked to the horizon. "But she will."
Far across the continent, deep beneath a cathedral carved from bones, a woman sat alone in a throne of mirrors.
She was not angel. Not demon.
She was something else.
And when the power pulsed from the ruins of that chapel, she smiled.
> "The Rift-Child walks," she whispered.
"And the game begins."
End of Chapter 2