CHAPTER 2: THE CINDER-FALL IN PARIS (II)
The sound was not a sound. It was the death of silence, a primordial, absolute roar that seemed to originate from the breaking point of reality. It hammered into them, a solid, crushing wall of force that stole the air from their lungs and the thought from their minds.
Aurelia was thrown backward like a ragdoll. Time fractured, stretched into a series of horrific, slow-motion snapshots.
The train car behind them, a marvel of modern engineering, contorted in a shriek of protesting metal that was a living, dying thing. Its elegant silver skeleton buckled like tinfoyl, grotesquely beautiful in its destruction. Then it simply erupted, torn apart from the inside not by simple fire, but by a voracious, blinding white energy that seemed to suck the colour and sound from the world, leaving only a vacuum of pure, incandescent fury. The heat that followed was not the warmth of flame, but the dry, sterilizing heat of a star's birth, searing the air in their throats.
Shrapnel and glass became a horizontal, buzzing storm of malignant insects. A spear of twisted metal seat frame whistled past Aurelia's head, so close she felt the wind of its passage tear at her hair.
In a moment of pure, panicked, animal instinct, the chaotic, unpredictable thing living inside her—the talent her mother despised as a 'deviation'—flared to life without her consent. It was a subconscious, desperate mimicry of a minor shielding ability she had passively absorbed from a nearby commuter earlier that day. A shimmering, unstable, amoebic aura flickered into existence around her, a phantom shield of borrowed, imperfect power.
CRACK.
The shield held, but just barely. It was enough to deflect a killing blow, to turn a spear of metal into a glancing tear that ripped through her sleeve and sliced a deep, burning line into the tender flesh of her wrist. But it was not enough. Not enough to prevent a larger, twisted piece of debris, a jagged shard of the world's end, from embedding itself in the arch of her foot with a sickening, wet thud that was both a sound and a feeling that vibrated up her entire skeleton.
The pain was immediate and searing, a white-hot brand that threatened to eclipse everything. But her personal, screaming agony was a mere footnote in the epic of horror unfolding around her. It was a whisper in a screaming choir.
Her eyes, stinging with acrid smoke and the dust of pulverized concrete, fought to focus through the hellish, dancing shadows cast by the incandescent, unnatural fires that burned with a silent, hungry intensity.
They found Gwen.
And her heart did not just stop; it froze, a solid, painful block of ice in her chest.
A long, twisted steel rod, a piece of the train's eviscerated skeleton, had been launched like a javelin from a titan's hand. It had impaled her friend, pinning Gwendolyn's vibrant, warm, living body to a mangled flight of stairs like a butterfly on a cruel collector's display. The image was seared into her retina, a tableau of such absolute wrongness that her mind recoiled. The brilliant fire of Gwen's hair was muted under a fine, grey shroud of dust and death.
"No!"
The scream was ripped from Aurelia's throat, raw and guttural, a sound she didn't recognize as her own, a animal sound of pure, undiluted denial. Ignoring the excruciating fire in her own limbs, the warm, sticky seep of blood down her leg, she crawled forward, the rough, hot concrete tearing at her knees and palms. The world had shrunk to this single, horrifying image, this ten-foot journey across a newly formed hellscape.
"Gwen! Gwen, don't you leave me! Don't you dare! Please, please, wake up!" she sobbed, the words tearing her throat raw. She finally reached her, grabbing Gwen's limp, terrifyingly cool hand, her own blood-slicked fingers slipping on the skin. She pressed her ear to Gwen's chest, ignoring the sticky warmth there, and a fragile, broken sob of relief escaped her—a faint, thumping, galloping rhythm echoed there, a ghost of a heartbeat, stubborn and alive, fighting against the metal that had stolen its home.
Alive. Still alive.
Her eyes, blurred with tears and soot, fell upon an identical wooden fox talisman lying in the dust and debris beside Gwen's outstretched, slack hand. The sight was a punch to the gut, a surreal, heartbreaking detail in the nightmare. Her own fox was still clutched in her firm, white-knuckled grip, a tiny, useless wooden god.
A stark, black-and-white memory flashed behind her eyes, vivid and cruel: The "Blackheart" National Zenith Tournament. The roar of the faceless crowd. Her own adaptive mimicry, a chaotic, brilliant mirror of any power she witnessed, perfectly complemented by Gwen's disciplined, elegant pyrokinesis and razor-sharp strategic mind. They had been an unstoppable team, a whirlwind of synchronized power. But the written Aptitude test was her eternal undoing. Her papers, as she said, were swapped. A test she, in a twist of cruel, cosmic irony, still passed, but which nearly got her disqualified entirely until her mother's distant, cold intervention. Gwen had taken first, the gold medal gleaming around her neck. Aurelia, second, the silver a symbol of the "interminable gap" she had spoken of minutes before, now feeling less like a statement and more like a terrible, fulfilled prophecy.
The wail of sirens grew from a faint, hopeful promise to an overwhelming, physical presence that vibrated in the chest, a new, mechanical heartbeat for the dying station. Figures in reflective uniforms moved through the thick, choking smoke like angels of death and salvation, their faces grim set masks against the horror.
An ebony-skinned paramedic with kind, weary eyes and a woman with a ruddy, wind-beaten complexion and a surprisingly calm demeanor approached their little island of tragedy. The woman knelt, her face a study in professional calm, but her eyes, a startlingly familiar azure, held a deep, unsettling stillness, like the quiet at the center of a storm. She offered a graceful, optimistic smile that seemed utterly alien, a relic from a world that had ceased to exist minutes ago.
"What are your names? Yours and hers?" she asked, her voice soft but steady, a lifeline thrown into the chaotic sea.
"I'm Aurelia," she choked out, her gaze locked on Gwen's ashen, beautiful face, desperately searching for a flicker of consciousness. She coughed violently, a raw, cloying smell of some strange, floral pollen—unplaceable and wrong in this setting of smoke and metal—cutting through the haze, rid the air of any last vestige of clean breath. "She's Gwen... Gwendolyn Smythefield, she's hurt... please, help her. Please."
"Okay, I will. There's no problem. Just remain calm," the woman named Iris said, her voice almost hypnotic, carrying a cadence that was both soothing and strangely commanding. "We're here now. Everything will be alright."
For a full minute, Iris seemed lost in a profound, unsettling thought, her eyes fixed on Gwen's face as if searching for a ghost in her features, a flicker of something that went beyond medical assessment. It was the look of an archivist who had found a lost, crucial text. Then she blinked, returning to the moment with a slight, almost imperceptible shake of her head. "I'm—I'm sorry for that. I'm Iris Mittlehill. Nice to meet you." The bizarre, heartbreaking formality hung in the toxic air between them, a moment of surreal social etiquette in the heart of hell.
Aurelia didn't reply, her thick, cold exterior the only dam holding her shattered, screaming insides together. The strange pollen still clawed at her throat, an irritant in the midst of catastrophe, forcing another wracking, painful sneeze that sent fresh jolts of pain through her wounded foot.
"Your cough and sneezes are severe. Any allergies?" Iris looked at her, with a pathetic, penetrating sympathy that felt too deep, too personal for a first meeting in the bowels of a catastrophe.
"Pollen..." Aurelia managed to blurt out between hacking coughs, the confession spilling out in a wave of miserable, mundane detail against the epic backdrop of destruction. "It drives me nuts. It won't be long before my skin peels off my flesh, extreme itching starts... my skin colour turns utterly dark in patches... and my blood feels like it's shrinking in my blood vessels... and I fall unconscious. Numerous times. It's a full-system... catastrophic failure." She hated the weakness, the irrelevance of this confession now, of all times.
Iris looked back at Gwen, but now her expression was different—more lost, more calculating, than it had been moments before. It was the look of a puzzle-solver who had just found a crucial, unexpected piece. She expertly and swiftly wrapped a bandage around Aurelia's bleeding wrist, her movements efficient and sure.
"Aurelia, hold Gwen's hand, okay? Everything will be alright, just have faith," Iris said, her words now imbued with a motherly, profound concern that Aurelia hadn't heard directed at her in years. And faith was what Aurelia hated most; she had never been, and would never be, optimistic. "And most importantly," Iris continued, her voice dropping to a near whisper that was somehow clearer than a shout, "I'll do my best to help your sister. We'll take her to the hospital, you can come along."
Sister.
The word detonated in the space between them, hanging in the toxic, particulate-filled air, unclaimed and unexamined, yet heavy with unthinkable, universe-altering implications. It was a key turning in a lock Aurelia never knew existed.
But numbly, her mind short-circuiting, grief and shock overriding all higher function, Aurelia obeyed. She gripped Gwen's terrifyingly cold, lifeless hand while Iris took the other. A miasma of suspicion, thick and choking as the smoke, enveloped Aurelia's thoughts. This is wrong. She's wrong. How does she know? Why would she say that?
With a coordinated heave, they pulled. Gwen came free from the grotesque metal spear with a sickening, wet, sucking sound that Aurelia knew would be etched into her memory forever, a sound she would hear in her quietest moments. Aurelia gestured frantically, wordlessly, for the ebony-skinned man to help lift Gwen's limp, broken body onto the waiting stretcher.
As they wheeled her away, the bright, sterile confines of the ambulance swallowing her best friend whole, the adrenaline that had been a steel cord holding her together vanished, snipped clean through. It left a void, a sudden, devastating emptiness. The world tilted on its axis, the frantic lights of the emergency vehicles smearing into long, blinding streaks of red and blue, and then everything—
—went pitch-black. It was a void, a silencing of all senses, a profound nothingness that was more absolute than any sleep. It felt like a face-to-face battle with the epitome of death, and she had lost.
A void of silence and numbness. An absolute nothing.
Then, a voice, gentle but firm, pierced the void, coming from a great distance: "Aurelia? Can you hear me?"
"Come, help me!" A shriller, more urgent voice cut in, closer.
"She's gone unconscious, help her up!" Another, frailer voice echoed, laced with panic, right beside her.
She was still slightly tethered to reality, a single, frayed thread of consciousness holding on. The voices faded, muffled and distorted as if she were sinking deep underwater, pulled down by a weight she couldn't fight. It was like she was being transmigrated, pulled from one reality to another, but she was trapped in the nothingness, a spectator to her own dissolution.
Her own voice was a frail, distant echo in the overwhelming, suffocating darkness. "Where... am I?"...
And in that consuming dark, behind her eyes, a single line of crisp, silver text, alien and elegant, shimmered into existence for a fraction of a second before the blackness consumed her completely.
[RUNEWEAVER INTERFACE: BOOTING... HOST VITALS CRITICAL... STANDBY...]