The Flesh That Crawled From Skyfire

The rain over Orivalt's Ruinspire Ward wasn't water. It was the sky's piss—acidic, laced with soot, and it hissed where it struck the hot slag and rusted iron that passed for streets. Tonight, it fell with a vengeance, for the sun itself was dying.

Above, a celestial wound bled across the heavens—a solar collapse, the High Theogarchy called it. A holy omen. Down in the gutters, it was just another misery. Another reason for the darkness to feel heavier, for the rot to smell sharper.

It was into this world of rust and ruin that he awoke.

Flesh. Raw, cold, and agonizingly mortal.

He lay naked in a slurry of mud and offal, the acid rain stinging the unfamiliar canvas of his skin. A body, his. A mind, a shattered mirror reflecting an eternity of silence. There were no memories, only echoes. The ghost of omnipotence. The faint, phantom-limb ache of a power that could unmake stars.

Now, he couldn't even stop his teeth from chattering.

A boot slammed into his ribs, driving the air from lungs he hadn't known he possessed. He gasped, a wet, pathetic sound. The impact was a supernova of pain, crude and absolute.

"Look at this one," a voice snarled, thick with cheap slum-ale. "Fresh meat. Still warm."

Calloused hands, smelling of grease and blood, grabbed him by the arms, hauling his limp form from the muck. He was light. So terrifyingly, disgracefully light. Three figures loomed over him, their silhouettes jagged against the dying, blood-red sun. Slumlords. Vultures in human skin, their eyes glinting with the dull cruelty of men who had long ago traded their souls for an extra bowl of gruel.

"The Warden wants another sacrifice for the Skyfire," the first one grunted. "This one's clean. No brands. The gods prefer their offerings unspoiled." He spat a glob of brown phlegm that sizzled next to the naked man's head.

They dragged him through the labyrinthine alley, his bare feet scraping over broken glass and what felt horribly like bone. He didn't fight. The will was there, a cold, hard diamond of intent buried deep within his new, fragile heart, but the flesh was weak. The connection between command and action was severed. He was a king trapped in a peasant's body, and the body was screaming.

They threw him onto a makeshift altar—a splintered wooden table stained with things darker and older than the rain. One of the men pulled out a jagged knife, its edge notched and hungry.

"A prayer for the Warden, a soul for the fire," the man began to chant, his voice a low, mocking drone as he raised the blade.

The being on the table—the man who would one day be called Ravi—did not move. He did not blink. He simply stared up at the man with the knife. His eyes were flat, empty pools of gray, reflecting the dying sun without a trace of fear or defiance.

And in that emptiness, the slumlord saw something that stopped his heart.

It wasn't anger. It wasn't hatred. It was a void. An abyss so profound, so utterly final, it threatened to swallow the very light from the sky and the breath from his lungs. He felt as though he were an insect looking into the lens of a telescope, and the eye on the other side belonged to the end of all things.

The man's hand froze mid-air. A tremor ran through him, a violent shudder that had nothing to do with the cold. What… what is this thing? The knife suddenly felt impossibly heavy. His tongue was a lead weight in his mouth.

Dread, cold and absolute, coiled in his gut.

Then, it happened.

No sound. No flash of light. Just a silent, instantaneous pulse of wrongness that rippled through the alley.

A wave of pressure, like the world holding its breath and forgetting to exhale. The slumlord holding the knife simply… ceased. He didn't explode or fade away. One moment he was there, a man of flesh and malice, his face a mask of dawning terror. The next, only a faint shimmer of disturbed air and the clatter of his knife hitting the cobblestones remained.

His existence had been revoked.

The other two men stared, their jaws slack. Their brains, slow and thick with ale, struggled to process the impossibility. There was no body, no blood, nothing. Just an empty space where their companion had stood. They hadn't seen anything. They'd only felt it. A deep, primal terror that screamed one word into the core of their being: FLEE.

They scrambled back, tripping over themselves in a desperate, animal panic, and vanished into the shadows of the alley, their whimpers swallowed by the endless rain.

He was left alone on the ritual table. He pushed himself up, his new muscles screaming in protest, his joints grinding. A flicker of something ancient sparked behind his eyes, lost and furious. It was a question, forged in the silence of dying nebulas.

What was I?

A low growl answered from the end of the alley. A new patrol. Heavier boots, cleaner armor. City enforcers. They hadn't seen the event, only the result: a naked, unclaimed body next to a fallen knife. Property.

"Another one for the Pit," one of them said, his voice flat with the boredom of routine brutality. "Get the collar."

They dragged him once more, this time toward a massive, barred cage sunk into the ground. The sign above it, rusted and bent, read: Sector 9 — Breeding Cattle. It was a nightmarish pen where slaves, dissidents, and the unlucky were kept before being sold for labor or slaughtered for sport. They locked a heavy iron collar around his neck, the cold metal a final insult, and shoved him inside. The gate slammed shut with a clang of finality that echoed through the ward.

He landed in the mud amidst the other broken souls. Dozens of them, huddled in the filth, their faces hollowed out by despair. But as he stood, they shifted away. A ripple of unease spread through the cage. They didn't know why they moved. They just knew the air around this new arrival was colder than the iron bars, heavier than the ceaseless rain. It was the chilling, silent aura of a predator forced into a cage with its prey.

He slid down against the bars, the rain plastering his dark hair to his brow, his gaunt frame a study in misery. He said nothing. He did nothing.

He just watched the rain, feeling its sting. And for the first time in a billion forgotten years, he began to truly feel. It started with a low, unfamiliar burn in his chest, a poison he had gifted his creation long ago.

Rage.