rlin could not move.
The flesh that once held centuries of defiance now felt like wet paper—a collapsed cathedral of magic, scorched nerve by nerve by Ouserous’s divine thunder. His limbs lay twisted at unnatural angles, fingers trembling in spastic flicks, not from pain, but from how thoroughly his body had been rewritten. The lightning hadn’t just pierced him. It morized him—broke past the final sanctums of his layered soul and carved silence into them.
And still... still he looked.
His eyes, bloodshot and cracked like molten glass, locked on two still forms beside him—Aurora and Loki. The two who followed him, loved him, feared him. Lay beside him like shattered statues. He could no longer tell if their chests rose.
Lightning buzzed faintly in the air like a gnat chewing through tal. His skin still hissed with the leftover heat.
He blinked. Slowly.
Aurora.
That girl... That foolish girl. Her golden hair was drenched red now. Not the ceremonial red she wore in court, but a deeper hue—real blood, real death. Her skin, once radiant with the quiet pride of the righteous, was pale. Pale like she had finally accepted the truth. Pale like a prayer that had not been answered.
She was still warm when he touched her hand. But barely.
And Loki—clever, laughing Loki—laid on his side, his eyes half-open, lips curled in a faint sneer even in unconsciousness. There were a thousand curses layered on his skin. So were rlin’s. So were Loki’s own. So were from their enemies.
But none of them had mattered.
None of them mattered now.
He had failed.
rlin’s throat contracted. No sound ca. But he tried anyway. A gasp. A breath. A curse. Sothing. Anything.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
He hated the gods. Hated them. From the first ti he reached out to the heavens, bleeding in a cavern of books and corpses, pleading for guidance—not miracles, just recognition—they had laughed. He rembered that sound. Cold, high, sterile. A choir of perfect voices echoing with derision.
They laughed at him not because he was weak, but because he was ’too strong. Too smart. Too curious. Too... mortal to reach the knowledge they had.
He rembered when he burned his first altar. The gods didn’t scream. They didn’t cry. They watched. Like vultures above a battlefield, knowing more would rise. That’s what they always counted on.
Continuity. Worship. A cycle of servitude fed by hope and fear.
And he hated that.
He hated them.
So when he t Aurora—when she knelt beside him in that burnt village and said she believed in him, not the stars, not the temples—he should have turned her away. Told her to run. But he didn’t. He let her stay. Let her fight. Let her believe.
And now she was going to die.... Maybe.
Maybe.
The ground shivered as he landed.
Ouserous.
His massive figure landed like a mountain’s final fall. Red hair wild, eyes glowing blue with webbed thunderbolts branching from his irises. He wasn’t just tall—he was unreal. A vibration in the air. A living contradiction. The son of Thor. A god in the most literal, crushing sense.
He didn’t even look at Aurora or Loki. Not even a glance. He looked only at rlin. At the heretic. At the insect who tried to rewrite heaven’s geotry.
Ouserous’s voice bood in rlin’s mind.
rlin wanted to spit. But his jaw barely moved.
His voice was like pressure. Like hands tightening around a world.
rlin coughed, a thin trickle of blood trailing down his beard. His lips barely moved.
But they did.
"You cunts... Even if you say snow is white... I’d call it a lie." His laugh was broken. "So why in your puny heavens would I ever apologize for?"
His eyes flared with finality.
"Fuck off."
A pause.
And then—
Ouserous sighed. There was sothing odd in his voice. Not frustration. Not sorrow.
Excitent.
He raised his hand.
Thunder.
A massive spear of lightning coalesced in his palm. The air tore open as it humd, white-hot and hungry, blinding in its purity. The pressure alone cracked nearby stone.
The thunderbolt surged down.
And then—
{Hold.}
The lightning froze mid-air.
It stopped. Inches from rlin’s heart. Screaming with power, trapped in ti.
A voice.
Footsteps.
Loki’s body stirred, rising from stillness like a dead man rejecting death itself. His bones cracked, his shoulder half-lted from earlier impact, one eye closed from swelling.
He threw rlin over his shoulder.
"...I will hold him... as long as I can... take him far... far away."
His voice was ragged. But his eyes burned.
Crack.
The law fractured.
The air around them shimred like broken glass.
Ouserous turned.
He looked at her.
Aurora.
Sohow—barely—she stood. Her legs shaking, her body torn, but her spirit shining like a dying star.
His gaze locked on her.
And she felt it.
That pressure.
Not just power. Not rage.
Death.
It wasn’t taphor anymore. It wasn’t prophecy. It wasn’t possibility.
It was a creature with a face, and a voice, and a na.
Her legs wanted to run. Her mind scread. Her stomach clenched as if all her organs had tried to flee her body. But she did not move.
Because she knew—running and staying were now the sa thing.
Both ant the end.
Crack.
The law—her law, the sacred human logic she had bent into being—shattered again.
The god moved.
His neck turned fully. A slow, deliberate gesture. Like a beast acknowledging a gnat not for its sting, but for its refusal to die.
His fingers twitched. Lightning snapped again.
Aurora’s knees buckled. But she kept standing.
Blood ran down her arms, down her inner thighs. She couldn’t breathe properly. She wanted to scream but all that ca out was a dry, rattled gasp.
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