The low ceiling of the makeshift hospital felt unreal, too peaceful after the chaos. Sunlight filtered through dusty windows, tracing golden patterns on a floor littered with sheets and abandoned medical equipment. The air smelled of disinfectant, but also of something more fragile—as if every breath could still shatter the precarious balance of this moment of calm.
Seven slowly opened his eyes.
At his bedside, Barachiel was watching him, wings folded yet still imposing, the light gliding over them with an almost painful brilliance.
"You seem surprised," the Archangel said, his voice softer than usual.
Seven blinked, trying to gather his memories. Only confused fragments remained: Malakiel, an intense pain, the freezing void of the Fall—and then nothing, like a torn page from a book he had never finished reading.
"What happened?" he finally whispered.
Barachiel inhaled, his gaze drifting into the void for a moment, as if reconstructing the battle in his own memory before recounting it.
"Many fell, Seven. The population was exposed to the Awakening en masse. Eryndor is no longer quite a city, now—it has become a spiritual land right in the middle of the human world. What you see here is only a fraction of the scar."
"And Kael?"
The name slipped out before Seven had even finished gathering his thoughts, like a reflex older than memory itself.
"She lives," Barachiel said. "Which is saying a lot, considering what she went through. The ritual siphoned a good portion of her life force, and she is left with aftereffects that even the Aether won't be able to completely erase—scars on her wrists, on her arms, where the filaments dug in. But her heart is beating, and her mind is intact. She has been asking for you ever since she opened her eyes."
Something loosened in Seven's chest—a weight he hadn't had the time to name before this very moment.
"Where is she?"
"Two beds down. She's sleeping, for now. Don't rush her."
Seven nodded slowly.
He remained silent for a few seconds, his eyes lost in the sunbeams piercing through the dusty windows. Yet, one question remained. Something floating within the fragments of his memory without ever managing to take a precise form.
He finally turned his head toward Barachiel.
"And Malakiel?"
The Archangel's gaze shifted.
Barely.
But enough for Seven to notice.
"Dead," Barachiel said simply. "By a hand you don't remember lending."
Seven frowned.
An absence had just taken shape in his mind. Not a randomly missing memory. Something more precise. A presence whose face he couldn't quite recall, but whose weight he could still feel.
"I... I did that?"
Barachiel took a few seconds before answering.
"In a way."
He looked away toward the window.
"It's not my place to fully explain what happened out there. You will understand with time. Or you may never fully understand. Both are possible with that kind of power."
Seven remained motionless.
He didn't understand.
And yet, deep down, a part of his being seemed to recognize something he couldn't name.
A dull anxiety settled in his chest.
As if he had just borrowed something without knowing who it belonged to.
"Will you come with us to Eden?" Barachiel asked.
Seven looked up.
He stared at the Archangel for a few seconds, then slowly shook his head.
"No."
His voice was weak, but his decision was not.
"This world, these people, what I've seen and done here... it's not over. I won't leave until I figure out what I need to do. And if that means walking alone, then I'll walk alone."
A faint smile, almost imperceptible, crossed Barachiel's face.
He placed a hand on Seven's head—a rare gesture of warmth coming from him.
"You're a real pain in the ass, you know that?"
Seven offered a weak smile.
"I get that a lot."
Barachiel let out a small chuckle, then his expression grew serious again.
"Take care of yourself, kid. What just happened here... it was only a prelude."
His gaze hardened.
"Beelzebub never takes an interest in something just once out of mere curiosity. If he comes back, it's because he has already decided you're worth a closer look."
Seven didn't answer.
Barachiel straightened up, his wings slowly unfolding.
"Rest. And go see Kael when you have the strength."
Then he vanished in a silent flash.
Seven stood alone for a few seconds.
He looked at his hands.
They were trembling slightly.
He didn't know what they had done.
He didn't know who, or rather what, had taken control of his body.
But one thing was certain.
Something had come back with him from Eryndor.
And he wasn't sure he wanted to find out what it was.
*
Seven went there as soon as he could stand, ignoring the protest of his still-weak legs. Kael lay beneath a gray sheet, pale-faced, but her breathing was steady, almost peaceful. Bandages covered her wrists, discreet beneath the sleeve of the hospital gown.
He sat on the edge of the bed without a word and waited.
She opened her eyes a few minutes later, blinking against the light, before her gaze landed on him and anchored there.
"You look awful," she murmured, her voice raspy but her tone exactly the same as usual.
"You too."
A ghost of a smile crossed her lips. Then it faded, replaced by something more fragile.
"I was scared," she said, her voice lower. "I remember the pain. The voices. And then... nothing, until now."
Seven looked down at the bandages on her wrists. He didn't know exactly what had happened during those hours when he had yielded his place to something greater than himself—but he knew, with simple and blunt certainty, that he hadn't been there for her when it mattered most.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I should have gotten here sooner."
"You got here," Kael said. "That's already more than I was hoping for, at one point."
She reached for his hand under the sheet, and he gave it to her without hesitation.
"Stay," she said. "Just for a bit. No need to talk."
He stayed.
*
Later in the afternoon, Seven found Liah sitting alone on the collapsed steps of what had once been the sanctuary entrance. She was looking at the sky, now a softer, almost ordinary gray, as if Eryndor itself were trying to relearn how to breathe normally.
He sat down next to her without a word.
"You're thinking about him," he said; it wasn't really a question.
"I'm thinking about a lot of things," Liah replied, without taking her eyes off the sky. "Malakiel. What he was to me, before he became what he became. What it means, to have loved someone like that without ever truly knowing them."
She paused, her fingers playing nervously with the hem of her torn sleeve.
"He said you would bring me what he couldn't give me," she finally added, a little embarrassed to say it out loud. "I don't really know what he meant by that."
Seven remained silent for a moment, searching for a response that would sound neither too light nor too heavy.
"I don't know either," he admitted. "But I can try not to disappoint you. That's something, at least."
Liah finally turned her head toward him, a tired but genuine smile lighting up her exhaustion-lined face.
"That's already a lot," she said.
They sat side by side for a long time, without adding anything else, watching the gray sky of Eryndor slowly take on an almost familiar hue.
*
The next morning, the Eden squadron gathered in the great plaza where the final assault had been launched a few days earlier. The archangels, their armor still scarred from the battle, stood in silent ranks while Barachiel oversaw the final preparations for the return portal.
Nicole Lawyer stepped forward, alone, her tactical coat still stained with dried blood, her glasses pushed up onto her forehead.
"You're leaving," she observed, more than she asked.
"Eden needs its squadron," Barachiel replied. "And Eryndor needs to rebuild without a celestial army planted on every street corner."
Nicole nodded, then, against all expectations, she held out her hand.
"Thank you," she said, her voice dropping its usual irony for once. "Sincerely. We wouldn't have held out without you. Without you, in particular."
Barachiel shook her hand, caught slightly off guard by the sincerity of the gesture.
"You held this city together with string and homemade poisons," he said. "I think you would have managed even without us."
"Maybe," Nicole said, with a smirk. "But I'd rather not test the theory a second time."
She took a step back, crossing her arms.
"If you ever need a hand down here again, the Legion of Vestiges is staying. We have nowhere else to be, and Eryndor is our city, whether we chose it or not. You know where to find us."
"Count on it," Barachiel replied.
The portal opened behind him, a maelstrom of silver light tearing through the air. The archangels began to pour into it, rank by rank, in an almost ceremonial order.
Around the plaza, survivors had gathered to witness the departure. Some applauded, others wept in silence, grateful despite all that had been lost. But still others stood back, faces closed, arms crossed—those who had lost loved ones under the rubble while Heaven took days to intervene, those for whom no victory could ever make up for the delay.
"You were supposed to protect us!" a voice cried out from the crowd, bitter, broken by grief. "Where were you when my family was burning?!"
Barachiel did not answer. There was nothing to say that wouldn't have sounded hollow in the face of such pain. He simply bowed his head slightly, a gesture that was neither an apology nor a denial, just a silent acknowledgment of the weight that question carried.
Then he turned one last time to Seven and Liah, who had hung back.
"We will see each other again," he said simply. "Take care of yourselves. And Kael."
"Count on it," Seven replied, returning almost the same tired smile Barachiel had offered him a little earlier.
The Archangel vanished into the portal. One by one, the remaining archangels followed him, until the silver light folded in on itself with a silent breath, leaving Eryndor alone with its ashes, its survivors, and the slow promise of rebuilding what still could be.
Seven stared at the empty sky for a long moment. Then, without a word, he reached his hand out to Liah, who took it without hesitation.
Together, they made their way back down to the makeshift hospital, to Kael, to everything left to do.
Later that day, Seven walked alone to the small makeshift cemetery the Legion of Vestiges had set up on the outskirts of the ruins. A simple row of stones, some barely engraved, others still bearing hastily scrawled names.
He stopped in front of one of them. He laid down a few flowers he had found, miraculously intact, in a garden spared by the fighting. His fingers brushed the cold stone for a moment.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say that Nils hadn't already heard, that night, in the rubble—*tell me how it ends*. Seven didn't know how it would end yet. But he knew, now, that he would stay to find out.
*
Miles away, in a city still intact, a man walked alone down a silent alley, indifferent to the nocturnal bustle surrounding him.
He wore a long, dark coat, impeccable despite the dust of travel. His slightly wavy black hair framed a face of austere beauty. But it was his eyes that would have frozen any passerby attentive enough to meet them—pupils of an abyssal black, ringed with a scarlet that seemed to pulse softly, like a heartbeat.
Blain Adonaï stopped at a street corner, turning his gaze toward the horizon where a faint, residual glow of Aether still tinted the night sky—the distant echo of what had just unfolded in Eryndor.
He had felt nothing for the thousands of dead whose spiritual echoes he had picked up that night. Neither compassion nor horror. Only a form of clinical interest, the same he would have given to any other symptom of a world refusing to correct itself.
What interested him was not the ruined city. It was what it had revealed.
An anomaly. An Awakened capable of making a Blasphemy bend. A being that not even his family's most exhaustive archives listed in any known classification.
Blain raised a hand to his chest, where a scarlet tattoo—the first words of a Book he had mastered since childhood—pulsed softly beneath his skin, as if sharing his interest.
"Eryndor," he murmured, almost to himself.
A thin smile, devoid of any warmth, graced his lips.
"I can't wait to be there."
He resumed his walk, disappearing slowly into the darkness of the alley, leaving behind the silent promise of a judgment yet to come.
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✧ END OF VOLUME I ✧
THE ASHES OF THE BEGINNING
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