The gods die quietly.
That's the thing that scrapes the grit from my teeth, standing on the broken floor of the throne room while Emperor Xal-Nagar dissolves into a pile of indifferent grey dust. Three thousand years of stolen blood, of breathing the life out of a continent, and he couldn't even summon the physics for a respectable scream. Just a wet, shocked gasp as the golden veneer of his Solar Mask fractured. It peeled away from the god-thing's face, a brittle shell shedding, and the raw, copper-smelling rot he'd been holding back for centuries finally surged out to consume the husk.
His heart-a dense, chitinous replacement-was weightless in my palm. The shock of having a god's core in my grasp was immediately eclipsed by the chilling lack of substance. It wasn't muscle; it was compacted dust and lies. It crumbled to nothing before I could lift the ash toward my mouth. I let the fine, dry particles sift through my fingers, each grain catching the last dying flicker of the room's blood-colored light.
My claws-permanent ivory spikes I still hadn't figured out how to fully sheath-scratched against the granite floor as I shifted my weight.
All around me, the Ziggurat of Sol-Veridad was taking its final breath. The Solar Mask, that monstrous lie of crystallized sun-magic that had kept the sky a suffocating copper for millennia, shattered. The sound hit me before the sight-a deafening, crystalline screech that bypassed the ear and vibrated in the bone. It was the sound of an empire's spine snapping in two.
Then: the sun.
Actual sunlight. Not the filtered, bruised copper glow of Xal-Nagar's shield, but the real, unfiltered, ultraviolet core of the star.
It spilled through the ruined ceiling, a sudden, searing beam that caught the silver threads of my hair and painted the motes of dust in the air. The light landed on my face, and for a half-second, my kidneys felt like ice. Every instinct, every whisper of the ancient poison in my veins, screamed CINDER. COMBUSTION. DEATH.
But the pain never came. The warmth was immediate, intense, and utterly real. The Void Pocket inside me-that hollow space carved by years of starvation-drank the lethal frequencies and left only the heat.
The Hunger, that deep animal need, stirred violently in my chest. A reflex, a shadow-beast rising to meet the sun's challenge. I slammed my will down on it.
The sun didn't hurt.
A cold, hard fact settled in my gut, heavier than the obsidian in my pocket: I am an aberration. Even among the fledglings, even among the ancient, blood-starved elders, the process that should have destroyed me left me unmade in a way that is utterly singular. Wrong, even for a monster.
The gods sold humanity a story about needing protection from the hungry sun. Another beautiful deception. The sun wasn't the enemy. They were.
The Red Scarf wound tight around my left wrist was clammy against my skin. The heavy, dark silk was still damp; I'd reopened the scar on my palm an hour ago, cutting through the thin layer of healing tissue to saturate the cloth in my own blood. The same scar I had sliced open four times now. The same hand that once stole a single sun-melon-risking a public flogging just to keep my father's hunger cramps from doubling him over. The same hand that, minutes ago, tore a heart out of a god's chest only to discover the organ was empty.
My right hand flexed, thumb rubbing against the small weight in my pocket. A piece of dark, almost black obsidian. It was carved into the rough shape of a soaring bird, edges worn smooth by seventeen years of friction against a father's calloused thumb. He carved it for me not long before I walked into the Pit. Before I became this perpetual, hungry thing.
He's still alive. I'd bet every drop of blood in my body on it. Hiding somewhere down in the Sump, watching the copper sky split open and believing the apocalypse has arrived.
He's not wrong. I am the disaster they've been waiting for.
The shadows ringing me rippled like disturbed water. They do that now-lean toward me, solidify if I press my will into the dark. Three days since the transformation. I've been this way for three days, and I'm already capable of things that take others decades to glimpse.
But the constant, dull ache of the Hunger is already back.
The grim math of my new life is unyielding: I have two days before the need screams so loud it blots out every coherent thought. I fed on Captain Izel's corpse an hour ago-a necessary, disgusting purchase that bought me this window of clarity. Enough time to stand here, in the ruins of my father's city, and watch it all crumble to fine ash.
Outside, the city was howling. Ultraviolet light was incinerating every vampire exposed to it-the Radiant Lords combusting in their silver floating manors, the guards burning on their patrol routes. Humanity, though, was dying too. Stamped into the ground by blind panic. Incinerated by uncontrolled fires ignited by the sudden energy fluctuations. Buried under the collapse of structures held together only by the blood-magic that abruptly flickered out of existence.
I saved no one.
The calculation is stark: I traded my humanity for the chance to save my parents, and then, without hesitation, I traded an entire empire for my own bitter vengeance.
I took one final look at the devastation. At the Sump, where I learned that love can be twisted into a weapon. At the High-Tier, where I discovered that gods are nothing more than overfed parasites. At the Pit, where I realized that innocence can be brutally killed, and something far more dangerous can rise from its corpse.
The sun-the real, truthful sun-bathed everything in a light that didn't lie.
I turned my back on the ruin. The vast, green jungle waited beyond the crater's broken rim. I would walk in there and vanish. Become a whisper. The Silver Demon who stole the sun.
Fine by me. Let them fear a legend.
My thumb traced the wing of the obsidian bird one last time. This isn't where the story starts. This is where it stops. The actual beginning-the messy, agonizing truth-is seventeen years and three lifetimes ago. Down in the Sump. Amid the ground-out dirt and the copper dust. In that precise, irreversible moment before a twelve-year-old girl with tired brown eyes decided that love was a thing worth dying for.