[Oraniel]
Oraniel climbed higher above the rooftops, desperate for some vantage point that made sense of what he was seeing. His wings strained against the air, his breath ragged as he tried to keep his thoughts from spiraling. The city of Oros had never looked dim before. It had always gleamed with unwavering clarity, as if carved from a single piece of living marble. But now everything seemed to blur at the edges, as though the world were painted on a surface that someone had begun wiping away.
He slowed for a moment, hovering to gather himself, but the pause only made the changes more apparent. A building near the far district wavered, its outline softening and then sharpening again in brief pulses. Another structure leaned inward and then snapped back into its original shape, except the color of the stone had faded to a paler shade. The longer he looked, the more he noticed. The murals that adorned the Academy dome were duller. The statues along the Forum walkway had lost the luster of their marble finish. It was as if all of Oros had been drained of a thin layer of life.
Oraniel swallowed hard. He turned toward his apartment, hoping the sight of something familiar would steady him. But as he descended toward the avenue, he froze in disbelief.
A section of the street was missing. Not cracked or broken. Simply gone, replaced by a smooth bowl of pale blue emptiness. It curved gently downward as if it had always been part of the world. The void did not look dangerous, yet the unnatural wrongness of it made Oraniel's hair rise.
A moment later, the void expanded. Only slightly, barely an inch or two, but the change was unmistakable. The edges of the street dissolved slowly and then slipped away like mist.
Oraniel stepped back midair, wings beating harder as panic took hold. He climbed again, rising above the dissolving neighborhood. But with every meter upward, the world beneath him looked more fragmented. Large swaths of the outer districts had already lost their structure. Some towers flickered, fading in and out of existence in jittering pulses. Others vanished completely, leaving behind patches of that soft, humming emptiness.
What made his stomach twist was not the disappearance itself. It was the fact that the other angels continued walking as if the world remained solid. One angel crossed directly over an area that had vanished moments ago, and as she stepped into the empty space, the world briefly re-formed under her foot before dissolving again the moment she passed.
Oraniel's voice cracked as he called out, not that anyone could hear him from this height. He felt faint. The city below resembled a memory that someone was slowly erasing. The places he had known since arrival, the corridors he had walked, the training plazas he had studied in, each one looked fragile and translucent.
He turned away and raced toward the inner districts, hoping that some part of Oros remained untouched. But with every direction he tried, the dissolution was there too. A plaza that should have been bustling with angelic scholars flickered and lost half its structure. The remaining half hung suspended with no support, defying gravity for a brief moment before dissolving entirely. Bridges collapsed silently into nothing. Waterfalls of light and water that once sprouted from tall statues now froze mid flow and vanished.
His chest tightened. The fear he felt was not a sharp panic but a growing, suffocating dread. He could not escape it. The city was vanishing around him faster than he could comprehend, and he had no way to stop it or slow it down.
Oraniel angled sharply upward again, searching for higher ground and trying to outrun the advancing void. His wings trembled from exertion, but he kept pushing, driven by the instinctive terror that if he stopped, he would be swallowed by the emptiness below.
The air grew thinner as he ascended. A great tower stood ahead, part of the old Forum, its highest platform still intact. It rose above the dissolving city like the final remnant of a once perfect world.
Oraniel rushed toward it, trying not to look at the void spreading beneath him. He reached the platform and landed hard, almost stumbling as he touched down. He took a moment to steady himself, gripping the stone railing.
What he saw below made his stomach drop.
Oros was no longer a city. Nearly everything had vanished, leaving only fragments of architecture suspended above the pale void. Towers blinked in and out of existence like exhausted flames. A few streets remained, then dissolved before his eyes. The last edges of the Academy dome sank into nothingness.
The angels below continued to move along pathways that no longer existed, their forms faint and unreal in the shifting light.
Oraniel backed away from the railing, careful to stay near the center of the platform. His thoughts whirled violently, and each breath felt shallower than the last. The city he had known, the city he thought was eternal, was falling apart like sand slipping through his fingers.
He needed to get higher. He needed to escape the advancing void. He needed to understand what was happening.
And above all, he needed to survive long enough to see what lay beyond this unraveling world.