Far from the ruins, beneath a sky starless and crushed under endless night, the demons moved.
Not marched. Not crawled.
Flowed.
Like a wound torn into the world, they emerged from fractures in the earth—shapes wrapped in shadow, their forms half-remembered, smeared across the veil of reality like charcoal rubbed raw. They were the forgotten, the undone, the stillborn dreams of sleeping gods. There were no eyes among them, no mouths. But the air around them trembled with the ache of voices that had never learned to scream. The land wept in silence.
At the center of the spiral that wound through their host walked a being untouched by time, draped in bone and twilight. A crown of molten silver hovered above its head—not placed there, but grown, like something alive. Where it walked, grass
