The sky changed at noon.Not gradually.Not the way weather changes — building from the horizon, darkening by degrees, giving the city time to read it and prepare.It just *changed.*One moment Sunville was bathed in flat winter light. The next, the clouds were there — massive, rolling, black at their centres and bruised purple at the edges — converging from every direction toward a single point above the financial district like something was pulling them in.People on the streets stopped walking and looked up.Traffic slowed.A woman on the corner of Fifth and Marlowe held her grocery bag against her chest and stared at the sky with her mouth slightly open.At the centre of it all — floating.Still.A single point of white light.---Demian didn't feel the altitude.He didn't feel the cold either, though the temperature had dropped eleven degrees in the time it took him to ascend. He didn't feel the wind tearing at his jacket or the pressure change that was making car alarms trigger

It started in her stomach.Not pain — not exactly. Something deeper than pain. Something that didn't have a name in any language she knew because nothing like it had ever happened to anyone before.Miranda sat upright in the dark.Her hand flew to her belly.*What—*The golden light came from inside her skin. Not from the surface. From somewhere beneath the surface — beneath muscle and bone — like something had been sleeping inside her for a very long time and had just, without warning, opened its eyes."He's using his power wrongly," she gasped.The words came out before she understood them.*I can feel it.*Across dimensions. Across the void between the Realms and Earth. Across every barrier that should have made it impossible — she could feel him. His rage. His guilt burning underneath it like fuel feeding a fire that was consuming everything around him.She could feel the wrongness of it.And something inside her *responded.*---Memphis was on his feet before she made a sound.Th

The collar hadn't arrived yet.Two men sent. Simple errand. The room still arranged around Diana kneeling in her chains, waiting for the next piece of her humiliation to be fastened around her throat — and then the building *moved.*Not shook.*Moved.* Like something enormous had pressed against its foundations and decided, at the last moment, not to push through.The windows rattled in their frames. A glass on the side table walked itself to the edge and fell. Someone grabbed a doorframe. Someone else said something that got swallowed by the second impact — deeper than the first, closer, a percussion that moved through the floor and up through the soles of everyone's feet and into their chests.Diana grabbed the floor with both chained hands.Outside the windows — where Sunville's skyline had been performing its ordinary evening routine — something was wrong with the sky.A column of dark air. Rotating. Touching the clouds from below like a finger pressed upward.Not quite a tornado.

Miranda woke before the barman did.She always woke first.It was a habit built so deep into her it had stopped feeling like a habit and started feeling like biology — that click of consciousness before dawn, sharp and immediate, no fog, no gradual surfacing. Just asleep and then awake and then already thinking.She lay still for a moment.Listened to the city.Sunville at four in the morning had a specific texture of sound. Different from the Alter Realms — which never went fully quiet, which hummed with the constant mechanical undertone of technology that didn't sleep. This was softer. Older somehow. The distant movement of vehicles. Someone's window unit. A dog making its complaint to the dark from somewhere below.*Human sounds,* she thought.*A human city.*She looked at the ceiling of the barman's apartment — low, water-stained at the corner, a crack running from the light fixture toward the window like a fault line — and felt the strangeness of being here settle over her proper

The first reports came in before dawn.Before the city was fully awake. Before the news cycle had assembled itself. Before anyone with authority had the chance to decide what the official version of events would be.Three military installations.One night.No survivors.---The anchor's voice was careful.Professionally measured. The particular cadence of someone delivering information they haven't been given permission to fully believe yet.*”Sources described these events as coordinated attacks on three separate Overlord military installations in the early hours of this morning—”*Footage. Aerial. Shot from enough distance that the detail was impressionistic — the shape of destruction rather than its specifics. Collapsed structures. Burned vehicles arranged in patterns that looked almost deliberate from above.*Almost.**"No survivors reported at any of the three locations…"**"— military intelligence has not yet confirmed — "**"— what appears to be photographs, now circulating