New Year's Party (8)

I stood there, staring at the empty hallway where Alastor Creighton had just walked away, leaving behind a silence that weighed heavier than any words he'd spoken. My thoughts churned, a roiling sea of uncertainty and disbelief.

Of course, I knew what he was talking about. The novel had covered it all in painstaking detail. Yet this—this—was a massive deviation. A crack in the story's foundation, one I wasn't sure I could mend or navigate.

Lucifer Windward. The name alone carried enough weight to crush mountains. He was hope personified. The beacon of humanity's future. The Second Hero.