The western sector had been quiet for three days.
That should have been the first warning.
Athena had noticed the silence. Had filed it away in the back of her mind, next to the fractures she couldn't map and the prayers she couldn't answer. But she had been too busy rebuilding the map table, too tired to chase ghosts.
She should have sent someone to check.
She didn't.
The attack came at dawn. Not the dawn of a new day—dawn didn't exist anymore in Heaven's cracked twilight. Just the moment when the light shifted from pale to paler, when the guards on the western fracture changed shifts.
Azrael's angels struck the soul stream like a blade through cloth.
No warning. No negotiation. No demand for surrender.
They fell on the stream of light—the thin, endless river of souls flowing from the Citadel to the underworld—and began to cut.
Not capture. Not redirect. Sever.
