CHAPTER 65: ASHES AND WITNESS

  Earth did not announce itself.

  It assaulted.

  Sound arrived first.

  Too much of it.

  Shouting layered over shouting.

  Overlapping until language collapsed into panic.

  Fire engines screaming, sirens tearing at the air like wounds that refused to close.

  Metal folding and striking metal, the shriek of stressed beams and twisted frames vibrating through bone.

  The wet crack of something structural giving way beneath weight it was never meant to carry.

  Smoke followed.

  Not drifting.

  Crawling.

  Thick and oily, dragging itself low through broken streets and collapsed walls like something alive and resentful.

  It clung to skin, to fabric, to breath.

  Every inhale tasted wrong.

  Heat pressed close.

  Not clean fire.

  Not holy.

  Burning plastic that stung the eyes.

  Burning oil that coated the throat.

  Burning things that had names a second ago.

  Gabriel anchored the fold at the edge of a ruined thoroughfare.

  Boots settling into ash and shattered glass that crunched softly under his weight, each step too loud, too intimate against the chaos.

  The sound felt indecent.

  His wings tucked tight without conscious thought, feathers folding inward, instinctively minimizing their profile in the narrow space.

  Open wings here would catch debris.

  Fire.

  Attention.

  He cataloged the risk and closed it away.

  Helel stepped out beside him with a grin already half-formed.

  Sword resting across his shoulder like a prop he hadn’t decided how to use yet.

  His posture was loose, theatrical, a practiced deflection against the way his eyes sharpened as they swept over the destruction.

  “Well.” Helel said, voice bright, almost cheerful.

  His gaze tracked a collapsing wall.

  A fleeing group of civilians.

  A burst of gunfire down the street. “This place has personality.”

  Gabriel didn’t answer.

  He was already busy counting.

  The bodies moving.

  Bodies not.

  Food stores burning.

  The smell of scorched grain mixing with rot.

  Water sources ruptured or contaminated.

  Liquid running dark through gutters clogged with ashen debris.

  Mortals, civilians both young and old, clustering toward anything that looked like authority, protection, or certainty.

  Their fear moved in waves, pulsing, predictable and devastating.

  Armed factions splintered into uniforms that meant nothing once blood hit them.

  Colors stopped mattering the moment survival took over.

  A familiar ache settled behind Gabriel’s eyes.

  Too much data.

  Not enough permission.

  Eternal Hosts phased in at staggered points along the street.

  Some cloaked in human approximation.

  Some not bothering.

  Wings flashed briefly before vanishing.

  Light bent.

  Then settled.

  The air tightened around their arrival like a held breath.

  Recon from Logistics moved immediately, dispersing into practiced patterns.

  Eyes already scanning for supply routes, casualty density, and choke points.

  Attendants shifted into triage formation without waiting for instruction.

  Keeling beside the injured.

  Pulling the faint living from rubble with quiet urgency.

  Hands worked fast.

  Faces stayed composed.

  This was not framed as training.

  No one had said it was—

  But Gabriel felt the weight of the watchful silence anyway.

  The kind that measured without comment.

  The kind that recorded.

  “Listen, this will be our priority.” Gabriel said calmly, already moving.

  His voice cut through the noise not by volume but by certainty, steady as a line drawn in ash.

  He passed a crate of ration packs to an Eternal Host kneeling beside a collapsed wall, hands already bloodied, knuckles slick and red.

  “Children first. Then the injured. No escalation unless provoked.”

  The Host hesitated, eyes flicking toward a nearby skirmish where gunfire cracked sharp and fast, the concussive thud of impact rattling loose debris above and behind them.

  Gabriel met their gaze.

  “Remember, systems before fanfare.” He said, voice steady, unyielding.

  The Host nodded once and moved.

  The decision locked in.

  Helel watched the exchange with a tilt of his head.

  Grin dimming just a fraction as his gaze followed the Host’s retreating form.

  “You know.” Helel said, stepping around a crater and flicking ash off his boot with the other’s end. “If we took out the loud ones over there—”

  He gestured vaguely with his sword, the blade catching fractured light through smoke. “— This war would definitely calm down. Fast.”

  “And then explode later, you mean,” Gabriel replied without looking.

  He knelt beside a woman clutching an empty cooking pot like it was a shield, her hands shaking hard enough to rattle the thin metal.

  He removed it and pressed a filled water pouch into her palms instead, closing her fingers gently around it.

  “With interest.” He then added.

  The woman stared at Gabriel like he was an answer she did not trust.

  He held her gaze anyway.

  She was the one who sent the request.

  One of many who remembered to ask.

  And so the Eternal Realm answered.

  She drank, tears cutting thin clean lines through soot on her face, leaving pale tracks that looked almost like recognition and then forgiveness.

  Gabriel sighed.

  Helel exhaled through his nose, a sound caught halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

  He crunched his nose, looking almost like a kid.

  “You’re no fun.” Helel muttered lightly.

  “Yet I’ve been told, very effective.” Gabriel replied.

  They moved deeper, silent and carefully.

  The street narrowed into an open square that was once a market full of life.

  The geometry of it was wrong now.

  Broken by collapsed stalls and burned-out vehicles.

  Produce rotted where it spilled, crushed into the dirt, the smell sickly sweet beneath smoke and char.

  Heat rose unevenly from the ground.

  Pockets of warmth pressing through their soles.

  Reminding them where fire had passed and where it still waited.

  Lazy spirals of black rose from something still burning at the far end.

  Children ran past them.

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  One barefoot.

  One bleeding.

  Both laughing too loudly.

  Innocents.

  The sound rang sharp and wrong against the ruin.

  Brittle like a glass under pressure.

  Helel flinched.

  Just barely.

  “You shouldn’t spoonfeed a future,” Helel muttered, more to the ground than to Gabriel. “Or it will never learn to survive.”

  Gabriel heard him anyway.

  “But we can slow its collapse with hope. Give it time to learn.” Gabriel whispered. “That is what matters.”

  Helel heard him too.

  And he asked, sharper now. “For how long?”

  He planted his sword’s tip down into the ash, leaning on it like a cane, like a marker driven into scorched earth. “We leave. They keep starving. They keep killing each other. We come back later and we call this restraint?”

  Gabriel finally looked at him.

  His expression was not angry.

  It was tired.

  “Knowing the outcome doesn’t absolve the action,” Gabriel said. “But nor does it invalidate it.”

  Helel opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  His jaw worked, teeth grinding once before he smoothed his expression back into something careless.

  Moral noise pressed in from all sides.

  A man was searching frantically.

  Then screamed, collapsing over a body.

  Already still, stiff and cold.

  The cry reached Helel’s ear.

  Too high.

  And too young.

  Something that felt too familiar and chilled him to the bone.

  A disguised Eternal Host argued with a local leader over territory lines drawn in chalk and fear.

  A building collapsed two streets over.

  The sound heavy and final.

  The concussion rippling like thunder through the square.

  Helel’s fingers twitched.

  The pain reminded him too much about his own.

  He wanted to get out and check momentarily on Suryel.

  Space bent, just a hair’s breath.

  Ash lifted, swirling where it should not have moved.

  Gabriel felt it instantly.

  The pressure shift.

  The wrongness.

  The prelude.

  He did not raise his voice.

  Did not command.

  He just looked at Helel, who felt it.

  Gabriel raised a hand and said, quietly, “Not yet.”

  The fold snapped back into place, reality settled with a soft, offended recoil, like something slapped out of alignment and forced to behave.

  Helel’s jaw tightened and his eyes flicked away, then back, bright with too much feeling he refused to name.

  “Every time.” Helel said lightly, too lightly. “You always ruin my dramatic exits.”

  “Someone has to.” Gabriel replied, already turning away.

  They continued to work.

  Hours passed.

  Food distributed that would not last.

  Water purified that would be fouled again.

  Truths recorded by Scribes that would not be acted on, not yet, flagged and filed into systems designed to move slowly but with purpose.

  Gabriel sent messages upward and sideways through channels that valued accuracy over urgency.

  Each one felt like an apology he couldn’t afford to make.

  Helel fought where he was allowed to.

  Fast.

  Brilliant.

  Definitely enjoyed.

  Overkill disguised as necessity.

  His sword flashed through smoke and fire.

  Movements precise and devastating, cutting arcs through thick heated air.

  Steel rang against steel, the impact shuddering up his arms, sparks bursting like brief stars against ash-darkened skies.

  He placed himself between civilians and danger without thinking when they remembered to call and asked aloud, permitting help.

  Laughing as he disarmed combatants with humiliating ease, boots sliding in soot, breath burning into his lungs.

  Blood darkened his sleeves.

  He ignored it.

  Gabriel noticed.

  But he said nothing.

  Then the air changed.

  It always did, right before things went wrong.

  Flies appeared first.

  One.

  Two.

  Then soon too many.

  A black shimmer rolled in with an unnatural wave, crawling over rubble, bodies, living skin.

  The buzzing drowned out everything else.

  With a low, maddening chorus that crawled beneath thought and into instinct.

  Eternal Hosts froze in the middle of motion.

  Helel’s grin vanished and he raised his blade again.

  “Well,” He said softly, eyes narrowing. “That’s new but familiar—”

  The swarm parted before he could finish.

  Belial stepped through the ash like he owned it.

  Smile lazy, eyes bright with a delighted contempt.

  His gauntlets flexed, the metal creaked softly as if it was eager.

  Behind him, the flies thickened, coalescing into a shape that hummed with hunger and rot.

  He was accompanied by, Bel, Lord of Flies.

  A hellion who’s been staying in the Mundane Realm longer than in the Abyss.

  The square seemed to tilt as if gravity started to pull incorrectly.

  Pressure coiled in the air.

  Heavy and invasive.

  It started to compress lungs, pressing down on shoulders.

  Human fear spiked.

  Sharp enough to taste, coppery and sour.

  “And here I was thinking this was a charity event?” Belial drawled.

  His gaze slid to Helel, assessing, amused. “Yet you brought a sword, how quaint.”

  Gabriel felt it then.

  The other presence.

  Not loud.

  Not obvious.

  But absolutely known.

  Samael watched from somewhere just out of sight.

  A pressure at the edge of awareness.

  As if he was pulling strings that did not need to be visible to be lethal.

  This was not their fight.

  Not like this.

  Not here.

  Helel shifted, already calculating angles that didn’t exist.

  Routes that closed as fast as he imagined them.

  Gabriel’s hand closed around Helel’s forearm, grip firm.

  “We can’t,” Gabriel said. “Not without command.”

  “I know!” Helel snapped.

  Then stopped himself.

  His breath shuddered once before he forced it steady.

  His eyes burned, furious and helpless and aching with it.

  “I know.” He repeated calmly.

  Belial laughed, the sound sharp and delighted.

  Then the flies surged forward like a living tide—

  The first impact hit hard.

  A Hellion lunged through the swarm, blade arcing toward Gabriel’s exposed flank with surgical intent.

  Samael’s directive carried in the strike, cold and precise.

  Indirect.

  Yet effective.

  Helel reacted without thinking.

  Steel met steel, the collision rang long and loud enough to hurt.

  Pain flared white-hot as the Hellion’s blow glanced off, tearing through Helel’s side, heat and agony bloomed together.

  He staggered.

  Teeth bared.

  Boots sliding in ash and mud, but he stayed upright, positioning himself between Gabriel, rations, and the rest of Logistics against the swarm.

  Another Hellion followed, then another, coordinated and relentless.

  Helel spun, parried, twisted low, letting momentum carry him through a cloud of debris.

  Ash filled his mouth and lungs.

  Smoke burned his eyes.

  He moved anyway.

  The air split.

  Shadow folded inward.

  Silence fell like a blade.

  Light lashed outward, binding, severing, erasing presence rather than flesh.

  The Abyss crew formed and continued their attacks in front of him.

  Behind him, Logistics raced to spread the rest of the brought rations and resources as reality strained.

  The ground started to shudder beneath the pressure.

  “I’ll try buy time so call for reinforcement or ask for permission to withdraw this mission." Helel said, voice low and final. “Now!”

  Bel hissed in irritation as his minion flies burned away in pockets of nothingness.

  While Belial continued to laugh nearby not caring when asked by fellow hellions to help.

  Samael’s attention sharpened, amused and displeased in equal measure.

  Gabriel didn’t hesitate.

  He raised his wrist, writing the message immediately.

  Fingers moving through a sequence that burned as it sent.

  A message shot upward through the Archive Tower.

  Michael.

  Hostile escalation.

  Abyss breach.

  Retrieval required.

  The response came not in words, but in pressure.

  The order came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

  Return is affirmative.

  Help is on the way.

  The fold, the threshold between Realms tore open bigger.

  Yael, Michael and the Eternal Realm’s Sentinels arrived, crashing through the threshold, wings flashing, daggers and gladius ready.

  Yael attention merely flicked on Helel where he was thrown at and remained lying on the floor before he took the opportunity to flatly joke. “Are you on floor moping duty?”

  Helel rolled his eyes with a scowl before Yael helped him to stand with a grin. “Shut up.”

  Their presence carved a clean corridor through the Hellions, forcing back the swarm and giving Gabriel and Helel room to maneuver.

  Helel moved despite the pain, blood dark against his side.

  Eyes locked on Gabriel’s back as he guarded it with vicious focus.

  For reasons he already knew were Samael’s.

  The Messenger was being targeted.

  And so was anyone or anything he started to care about.

  He glanced across the battlefield, tracking Yael beside Michael.

  Unease tightened his chest as Hellions pressed harder toward Yael, misjudging strength, testing assumptions.

  Michael was there, watching every angle.

  Correcting every mistake.

  Michael also held his own suspicion and was now very much aware of it since they have stepped into this battle.

  Most of the Hellions parted around him and converged behind him.

  Focused toward Yael so the Commander remained, watching the younger brother’s back for once.

  He remained silent, guarded, and noticed every affirmation of pattern.

  Soon everyone from both Recon and Sentinel managed to cross the threshold back into the Eternal Realm.

  The last thing Gabriel saw was a child standing at the edge of the destruction.

  Smoke curling around them.

  Ash streaked across their face.

  Eyes wide, unblinking, reflecting fire and wings and things that should not exist.

  Looking straight at him.

  As if watching.

  Witnessing.

  The moment branded itself behind his eyes.

  Then they were gone.

  The Eternal Realm received them in silence.

  Too clean.

  Too still.

  Helel shoved his sword back into its sheath with unnecessary force as they cleared the threshold, breath hitching as he held his side.

  “Whew. I don’t know about you all.” He said, voice brittle, forcing a grin that didn’t quite land. “But I think that went great.”

  Gabriel didn’t respond.

  He was already logging the loss of rations.

  Far away the Mundane Realm kept spinning.

  And that absence sat between all of them, unspoken, heavy as ash in the lungs.

  Michael tapped Gabriel’s arm while Yael greeted Helel with a smile and helped him up.

  Everyone looked up as a group of Attendants and Healers approached with efficiency and silence, already bring in support to help.

  In the Eternal Realm.

  It was night.