The storm hadn’t passed—it had followed him.
Thunder rolled above Saint Marrow’s Orphanage like a wrathful choir. Caelan stood at the mouth of the alley, his small frame casting a long shadow in the flickering streetlights. Every step he took left a faint scorch on the wet pavement, a soft hiss of steam and ozone.
His heart beat lightning. His blood ran cold.
He remembered their faces.
The men who had cornered him behind the orphanage. Who’d laughed as they pulled the triggers. Who didn’t even look back.
You will.
Caelan raised a hand, and the corpse-shroud rat skittered after him like a loyal pet, bones wrapped in lightning, half-rotted eyes glowing with stolen life. A whisper of death followed in its wake.
Then came the wind.
Sharp. Heavy. Wrong.
The sky above split open—not with lightning, but with light. A rift tore reality like paper, revealing a cathedral of clouds and fire. From within descended three figures clad in white and steel, halos burning like crowns of war.
Seraphic Executors. Agents of celestial law.
Their eyes were flame. Their blades, scripture.
“He has returned in defiance of the Cycle,” one intoned, wings unfurling like banners of judgment.
“A mythic class born of contradiction,” said another. “Unnatural. Unpermitted.”
Caelan stared up at them, face blank.
Then smirked.
“You’re late.”
Lightning arced around him, jagged and alive. Shadows coiled at his feet like cats ready to pounce. The rat-thing shrieked and burst apart—its essence ripped into a lance of black and white that Caelan hurled skyward.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Gravecurrent.
The bolt struck the first seraph square in the chest, searing through his armor and soul alike. He didn’t die, but he screamed—a sound that shook glass for blocks.
Caelan ran.
Caelan vaulted a dumpster and sprinted into the maze of backstreets behind the orphanage. The city pulsed with flickering neon and forgotten prayers, alleyways glowing sickly green where old enchantments still clung to the brick.
Behind him, the rift in the sky pulsed once, then shut with a sound like a slammed cathedral door.
But the Executors were still coming.
One crashed down onto the pavement behind him, concrete buckling beneath gleaming boots. A chain of radiant glyphs lashed out, snaking through the air toward Caelan like a living sermon.
“By decree of the Seventh Heaven, halt!”
Caelan ducked, rolled, and threw his hand behind him. Shadow peeled away from his palm and twisted into a glyph of his own—jagged, barbed, wrong.
Bolt of Absolution.
The glyph exploded into a forked blast of soulfire lightning, the kind that didn’t just burn—it judged. The pursuing Executor screamed as the bolt cracked through his shield and seared his grace. His armor shimmered, faltered, fractured.
Caelan didn’t stop to watch.
He cut through an abandoned subway entrance, boots splashing into ankle-deep water as he dropped into darkness. The echoes of his breathing mixed with the distant shriek of wheels far above.
The third Executor dropped into the tunnel behind him, landing in a burst of pale fire. Unlike the others, this one didn’t speak. He just advanced—silent and certain, sword dragging behind him like a guillotine’s whisper.
Caelan raised both hands.
Shadow swirled. Lightning sparked.
“Come on, then,” he whispered. “Let’s see how holy you really are.”
The Executor lunged—and Caelan met him with a scream of thunder.
Thundering Requiem.
The tunnel shook.
Power bled from his veins, tearing open old wounds that had barely closed. Blood hit the water, sizzling with radiant heat. Lightning and death exploded outward in a dome of black and white energy, the storm given flesh.
Every corpse in the forgotten tunnels stirred.
They rose.
Children who died lost in the dark. Junkies who OD’d beneath the city. Victims of things no one ever reported. Their souls fused with the storm, half-lightning, half-decay. Their eyes blazed with borrowed wrath.
They fell upon the Executor like a tide.
He swung once—twice—but it wasn’t enough. The dead were many. Hungry. Unfair.
Caelan staggered back, panting. His hands trembled, shadow dissipating like breath on glass.
The light from the storm dimmed.
Only one Executor remained—crippled, crawling from the alley mouth above, his armor cracked and bleeding holy flame.
Caelan limped to the edge of the platform and stared up at him.
“Tell them I’m coming,” he said, voice like thunder beneath the world. “Tell your gods that death’s got new management.”
He turned and vanished into the dark.
How often
