18.2

The void was silent.

Not the silence of night, nor the silence of emptiness — but the silence that comes before a truth too large for sound. The void trembled with heat that wasn’t heat, light that wasn’t light. The Mundis bent and fell away, as though it were no more important than the song of an egret in the marsh.

A shadow descended fast, wings shimmering in the light-that-was-not-light, a hundred claws reaching out to tear the life from Roisin’s battered corpse.

She stepped out of Mundis with the quiet certainty of someone who had never once been denied entry. Her wings were neither black nor white, but the colour of absence — the shade left behind when something has been erased from the world. They folded behind her like the closing of a Bible at the end of an exorcism.

For there was no doubt. This was an exorcism; an expulsion of a spirit. Not in the name of God, but in the name of the world.

She stepped to one side, the fractal essence of the tiny demon flowing through her limbs like a shot of pure adrenaline after a coma. She took a single step and moved the distance of a thousand stars.

Yabamiah twisted as his target vanished,

His wings fluttered as he recovered from the failed strike, each pair of wings closing and unfurling in slow, deliberate arcs — each feather a blade of fire, each movement a hymn. The air around him shimmered, bending under the weight of his presence. A heartbeat later, or a thousand years, he caught up with Roisin.

As they faced each other across the endless void, he spoke for the first time.

“You are not welcome, Azrael.”