When Melissa crawled out from the ruins, all that met her eyes were those colossal petals that had cleaved the battlefield, rising from the corner of the Butcher's Pit like the stone circles of some ancient rite.
"I…I'm actually still alive."
After a brief daze, Melissa patted herself all over; aside from a few scrapes, she was more or less unharmed.
A few minutes ago, Melissa had still been in the cell, ceaselessly preaching the doctrine of the Blazing Sun to the others, when a sudden quake struck. Falling bricks and stones buried many people, yet Melissa, relying on her frail body and years of experience living amid rubble, somehow clawed her way out of this desperate dead end alive.
She looked around; she could see shattered corpses hanging from the tips of the petals. From somewhere out of sight, crazed howls and violent tremors rose without pause, as if two Celestial Gods were locked in combat there, their unseen shockwaves rippling outward.
