**Chapter 2: The Angel's Warning**
The ruins of New Eden became their cathedral. For days, Marverick and Ava wove through its skeletal streets, their footsteps echoing in the throats of dead buildings. They traded stories like currency—hers sharp and serrated, his frayed at the edges. She taught him to read the scars on a demon's claw, to taste sulfur in the wind. He showed her how to crack open the ribs of old vending machines, where candy bars fossilized into bricks of sugar and regret.
But it was the unspoken thing that hummed between them—the way her shoulder brushed his when they squeezed through collapsed corridors, how his gaze lingered on the scar that split her lip when she laughed. Hope was a reckless flame in this graveyard, and Marverick dared not feed it.
Until the firelight betrayed them.
They'd taken shelter in the belly of a gutted theater, its velvet seats moth-eaten and weeping stuffing. Ava fed kindling to the flames, her face flickering between shadow and gold. "You ever wonder," she murmured, "why the angels let us burn?"
Marverick's reply died as her head snapped up, eyes narrowing to slits. The air curdled—thick, sour, *wrong*.
"Do you feel that?" she breathed, fingers already curling around her dagger's hilt. The blade was pitted, its edge nicked from parrying things with too many teeth.
He did. The sensation was like drowning in static, every hair on his arms standing rigid. Shadows pooled at the edges of the firelight, thickening, *breathing*. Then—
—light.
Not the meek glow of their fire, but a radiance that *hurt*, searing white-gold and laced with the scent of thunderstorms. The angel stood haloed in the theater's shattered archway, wings not feather but flame, folding and unfolding in impossible geometries. Its face was beauty and terror—a mosaic of shifting light, eyes like twin supernovae.
"They are coming," it intoned, voice resonating in Marverick's molars. "The Horde stirs in the deep places. You are the hinge upon which this war turns, child of ash."
Marverick's pulse hammered like a war drum. "Why me?"
The angel's gaze pinned him, ancient and pitiless. "Bloodlines. Sacrifice. A thread in the tapestry you cannot see." It tilted its head, light fracturing. "You carry the Mark, though you do not know it. The demons will carve it from your flesh."
Ava stepped forward, dagger raised. "Over my rotting corpse."
For a heartbeat, the angel's brilliance dimmed. Something like sorrow flickered in its eyes. "You will try," it said, and vanished in a detonation of feathers that dissolved to ash midair.
The silence that followed was a living thing. Ava's hand found Marverick's—calloused, trembling, electric. He turned to her, the words *chosen one* rotting on his tongue. Her free hand cupped his jaw, thumb smudging the soot on his cheek. No platitudes. No lies. Just her breath warm against his lips as the fire gasped its last.
Then the ground screamed.
A sound like continents tearing apart. The theater's walls buckled, plaster raining down as the ceiling yawned open. Ava hauled Marverick into the street, where the night was alive with chaos. Buildings swayed, glass shards hailing from the sky. Somewhere, a scream ribboned through the dark—human, but not quite.
"*Move!*" Ava roared, but the command drowned in the cacophony. The horizon pulsed, a black tide rolling toward them—not water, but bodies. Hulking, distorted shapes galloped on limbs too long, too jointed, their howls peeling the skin from reason.
Marverick's vision blurred. Pressure mounted in his skull, hot and sweet, as if his veins were filling with liquid static. The tome in his pack *thrummed*, its pages screaming in a language that clawed at his sanity.
Ava's mouth moved, but her voice came from underwater. He reached for her as the street split like overripe fruit, the world tilting—
—then nothing.
No light. No sound. Just the velvet choke of oblivion, and the faint, feverish whisper of wings.