The twelve hours passed with mechanical precision.Populations evacuated in concentric circles around the cathedral ruins. Government forces establishing checkpoints, ensuring civilian compliance, creating dead zones where only military personnel remained. The operation was smooth, practiced—humanity had learned from the angelic purges. Had developed protocols for supernatural threats.The Baptized watched from the cathedral's highest intact point. Vex had rigged surveillance equipment salvaged from the ruins, giving them access to military communications and news broadcasts both."First wave is conventional forces," he reported, tracking movements on a cracked tablet. "Tanks. Artillery. Anti-aircraft installations in case you try to fly out. They're treating this like siege warfare against fortified position.""Second wave?" Sariel asked."Experimental weapons. EMPs modified to disrupt supernatural essence. Sonic devices calibrated to interfere with flame-based abilities. Looks like

The rubble shifted.Stone ground against stone, a mountain of debris groaning as something beneath it refused to stay buried. Dust clouds billowed upward, catching the harsh glare of military spotlights that had already begun sweeping the crater's edges.Azrael's hand broke through first.Fingers blackened with soot, trembling with exhaustion, clawing at concrete and twisted rebar. The Black Flame flickered weakly along his arm—barely visible, barely alive, but still burning. Still refusing extinction.He pulled himself upward through tons of wreckage, every movement sending agony screaming through his body. The bomb's force had done what artillery couldn't: broken something fundamental inside him. His essence reserves were nearly gone. His wings—manifested in that desperate moment of shielding—hung in tatters of shadow and ember behind him.But he was alive.The crater stretched around him like a wound in the earth itself. Glass-smooth stone where sand had fused under impossible heat

The fortress had been carved from the mountain itself.Not built—carved. Centuries of runoff and geological pressure had hollowed massive chambers from living stone, creating a network of caverns that human militaries couldn't detect and satellite surveillance couldn't penetrate. The rebel angels had found it first, then fortified it with wards that predated the Goddess's current reign.Now it served as neutral ground for those who had nowhere else to gather.Azrael descended through passages lit by crystalline formations that pulsed with ambient essence. The Black Flame responded to their resonance, flickering brighter as he approached the central chamber. Behind him, Sariel and Maya moved in silence—the warrior and the witness, united in apprehension about what awaited below."How many confirmed?""Thirty-seven," Sariel replied. "Representatives from all twelve rebel bases, plus independent cells we've only recently established contact with. The Cascadian delegation alone brought ei

The blade dissolved before Marcus's body hit the ground.For three heartbeats, nobody moved. The defenders stared at their leader, at the corpse bleeding across rubble, at the impossible speed of judgment delivered without trial or deliberation. The angels watched with predatory stillness, weapons still trained but fingers hesitating on triggers.Kelean broke the silence with soft laughter."So much for freedom of choice."The words hit like acid on an open wound. Azrael felt the Black Flame pulse—responding to his fury, his shame, his desperate certainty that he'd done what needed doing even as doubt clawed at his conviction."He murdered two thousand people." His voice was raw. "Sold them out to die so he could save himself.""He chose survival over loyalty to your cause." Kelean's blade remained leveled at Azrael's heart. "Isn't that what you preach? The right to choose one's own path? Or does that only apply when they choose your path?"Movement from behind the angelic lines. Two

Her foot touched earth.The impact registered not as sound or vibration but as fundamental shift in how reality functioned. Gravity hesitated. Time stuttered. The laws governing matter and energy and existence itself paused to acknowledge something that existed before laws, that had written the rules creation followed.And then rewrote them.The rift above New Portland—above the entire world—flared with brilliance that should have blinded everyone looking but somehow didn't. Because this wasn't light meant for mortal eyes. This was light as concept, as principle, as the original template from which all lesser illumination descended.Through that light, she descended.Not walking. Not flying. Simply becoming progressively more present, as if she'd always been there and reality was only now noticing. Distance collapsed around her convenience. Scale became negotiable in her proximity. The human mind tried desperately to process what it was seeing and settled on approximations that were s