- Unverified civilian broadcast, origin unknown
There was no sudden quiet where the city could pretend the worst was over. The Hole in the Earth remained exactly where it was—vast, raw, unmistakable. Its edges did not retract. Its pressure did not resolve. The cracks that split streets and buildings stayed open, jagged reminders of weight redistributed without permission.
The city lived, but it did not heal.
Rommulas stood amid the aftermath and felt heavier than he ever had before.
Oblivion did not return.
There was no flicker of it, no distant hum suggesting it might come back if he reached hard enough. The absence wasn’t violent anymore—it had settled. Whatever Oblivion once anchored outward had sunk inward permanently, compacted into him like sediment under unbearable pressure.
He tested his footing once and immediately felt the difference. The ground remembered him now—but not kindly. Distance still lagged slightly. Gravity still questioned him. Every movement required intention.
Wing Ridden Angel remained.
Changed.
The wings no longer felt like instruments of power or refusal. They were braces—structural supports holding a body that had accepted a permanent load. The violet veins that threaded through the white light glowed faintly, not with threat, but with endurance. The wings were a part of him permanently.
Rommulas understood then, without ceremony or revelation:
He was not a savior.
He was not a solution.
He was a stabilizing presence—one that would never get lighter again.
The Hole in the Earth churned beneath the city, not obedient, not hostile. Just there. A wound that refused metaphor. The kind of damage that didn’t ask nor could be redeemed.
Rommulas stayed standing because sitting felt dishonest.
Katie was alive.
That fact came to him first as pressure relief—small, fragile, but real. He found her pinned where the antenna had driven her through, the metal twisted by secondary collapses but no longer moving. Blood had soaked her clothes and the glass beneath her, dried dark and tacky at the edges.
She was conscious. Barely.
“Hey,” she rasped when she saw him. “Tuh—took you long eh—eh—nough.”
Rommulas dropped beside her immediately, grounding carefully so the shift wouldn’t worsen her injuries. He didn’t touch her at first, afraid of what movement might cost.
“You’re alive,” he said.
Katie snorted weakly. “Hate tuh—to disapuh—puh—point.”
He swallowed. The weight in his chest shifted, settling heavier.
Her refusal hadn’t vanished with the damage. Even impaled, even bleeding, Katie remained defiant—eyes sharp, jaw set like the world still had something to answer for.
“Roan?” she asked.
“Dead,” Rommulas replied.
She exhaled slowly, relief and pain tangling together. “Good.”
There was no celebration in her voice, no triumph. Just closure.
Her survival was not mercy, it was proof. Proof that Roan’s framing had been wrong—that removal had not been necessary, that consequence could exist without erasure. That refusal could endure.
Rommulas stayed with her until he knew that she would not bleed out before help—or whatever passed for it now—could reach her.
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When he stood again, the Hole in the Earth shifted beneath him, acknowledging the redistribution.
Mira was harder to find.
Not because she was hidden—but because the space around her felt… empty.
Rommulas felt it before he saw her: a pocket where empathy no longer reached outward, where sensation had collapsed inward so completely it left a hollow.
She sat amid debris that had once been part of a building’s interior—chairs fused to walls, fragments of signage embedded in concrete. Her posture was upright. Alert.
Her arms were gone.
Not severed cleanly. Not dramatically. Just… absent, as if the concept of them had been erased from the space around her.
She was conscious.
Her eyes tracked him immediately.
“Mira,” Rommulas said softly.
She didn’t respond at first.
Then she blinked, slow and deliberate. “The Hole in the Earth’s still active,” she said. Her voice was flat, hollowed out. “Pressure’s uneven. We’ll see secondary collapses for days.”
He knelt in front of her.
“You’re alive,” he said again, as if the repetition might make it easier.
“Yes,” she replied. No emphasis. No gratitude.
She glanced down at where her arms should have been, then away again, like confirming a known variable. “I can’t feel them. That’s… efficient.”
Rommulas felt something fracture inside him that had nothing to do with power.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Mira looked at him then—not angry, not accusing, just present. “Don’t,” she said quietly. “If you apologize, you’re asking me to grieve right now.”
She inhaled slowly. “I don’t have time for that yet.”
Her scream—earlier, raw and endless—had burned itself out. What remained was orientation. Assessment. A mind snapping into place around absence without collapsing.
“I can still track damage,” she continued. “Empathy’s… compressed. But it’s there, just not outward.”
She paused, then added. “We’ll need to reroute evacuation corridors. The cracks won’t stabilize on their own.”
Rommulas nodded.
Her loss did not break her.
It became a reference point, and that terrified him more than if she had fallen apart.
Julius was found later.
Not calling for help. Not moving much at all.
He lay against a slab of concrete near the edge of the deepest region, shirt torn, torso marked with deep, jagged bitemarks that had burned and healed wrong all at once. The wounds were angry and dark, scars already forming in uneven patterns across his chest and ribs.
He was alive.
Barely breathing.
When Rommulas knelt beside him, Julius’s eyes opened.
“Is it quiet?” Julius asked.
“Yes,” Rommulas said.
Julius closed his eyes again, relief flickering briefly across his face. “Good.”
There was no hum of Lullaby around him.
No trace of it at all.
The absence was total.
Julius seemed to feel it too. He shifted slightly, wincing, then laughed once—soft, humorless. “It’s gone,” he said. “I kept reaching for it. Habit, I guess.”
Rommulas didn’t answer. He may have lost his Fracture, but he still had another. He had no way of understanding how Julius felt.
“I don’t know who I am without it,” Julius continued, voice distant. “I was a nobody before Lullaby awakened. Everything I understood myself through is… irrelevant now. Gone.”
He opened his eyes again and stared at the fractured space above them. “I’m just a person again. A nobody.”
The words weren’t bitter. They were stunned.
Rommulas helped him sit up carefully, grounding the movement so the space wouldn’t punish him for it. Julius leaned heavily against the support, breathing shallow.
“You survived,” Rommulas said.
“Yes,” Julius replied. “Quietly.”
There was no triumph in it. No framing. Just a fact.
And Rommulas knew Julius would have to learn what survival meant without a framework that told him how to exist.
That learning would be slower than injury.
The city continued to fail around them.
Not catastrophically.
Honestly.
Sirens wailed in distant sectors, uneven and delayed. Fires burned where no one could reach them yet. People moved through the streets cautiously, not panicked now—just alert, watchful.
“Those fucking Fractures!” A distant man yelled.
Frankfurt learned the wrong lesson once.
This time, it learned nothing comforting.
The Hole in the Earth persisted. Never fading. Never closing.
It may have not been an enemy anymore, but it was the final straw in labeling Fractures as a dangerous species.
Rommulas stood at the edge of it, feeling the permanent weight settle deeper into him. Oblivion did not answer when he reached inward. Wing Ridden Angel held him together as best it could.
He would carry this. Everywhere. Always. He was not a god. Not a savior. Not even a solution. He was a line the world could lean against when it had nowhere else to put its weight, even if it denied him.
Far above—far enough to be irrelevant, close enough to observe—Summer Breeze stood on a rooftop that hadn’t yet decided to fall.
He watched the city bleed.
Watched people move.
Watched Rommulas stand without ceremony at the center of something that would never resolve cleanly.
He did not smile.
He did not frown.
“Necessary,” he murmured to no one.
Then he turned away.
The Hole in the Earth remained.
That created an intolerance towards Fractures.