The battlefield had gone quiet—but only for a breath.
That silence, unnatural and suffocating, hovered like the calm before a cataclysm. All eyes had turned toward Azrael, still kneeling amid the broken stones of the ruined eastern field. His sword trembled beside him, no longer a mere weapon—but a vessel that hungered for what it once was.
Blood soaked the ground beneath him, but it wasn’t his wounds that stunned the onlookers.
It was the light.
A slow, blinding radiance unfurled from his core—not magic, not fire, but something older. The air shimmered with heat as the very essence of his being began to shift. The wind stirred in strange directions, bending unnaturally around him as if recognizing something divine.
The Blade of Dawn was awakening.
Kara—no, Seraphina—stood several pa
