Angel Lethira

3

She was not made to be seen. Where Astraeon was the warning, Lethira was the omission—the line the Goddess did not write, the breath intentionally unsaid. Crafted in the instant after prophecy, she was given a single paradoxical command: Observe what must not know it is observed. Lethira walked creation by subtraction. Light bent around her. Sound forgot to touch her. Even divine awareness slid past as though she were a thought abandoned mid-sentence. To look directly at her was to lose the memory of why you had looked. This was why she alone could approach the Hollow Genesis. She did not travel to it. She allowed herself to be misremembered by reality until she stood where it almost was. There, space behaved like a half-recalled dream. Stars flickered between existence and intention. A mountain became the idea of stone, then less than that. Time tried to count forward and failed, starting again as if embarrassed. And at the center of the wrongness, something vast shifted—not moving, but reconsidering. The Hollow Genesis was not awakening. It was editing. Lethira felt no fear; fear required identity, and she held hers loosely. Instead, she recorded absences: vanished seconds, erased colors, entire histories thinning like worn fabric. Each observation cost her. The more she understood it, the less defined she became. Already her hands passed through themselves when she forgot to concentrate. She could not report in words. Messages would collapse under scrutiny. So she wove her findings into small impossibilities scattered across the world—clocks that skipped, mirrors that showed unfamiliar stars, children born knowing languages no one spoke. Clues. Breadcrumbs for mortals. Because the Goddess must not see the threat too clearly. Because divinity would try to fix it. Because being noticed was exactly what the Hollow Genesis required. Lethira continued to fade, a spy dissolving into the act of watching. If she succeeded, no one would ever know she existed.

Archangel Astraeon

1

The sky did not open. It unstitched. Clouds peeled back like rotting parchment, folding into angles that should not exist. Light spilled through, not warm, not holy, but vast and depthless, like staring into an ocean that had never known a shore. She descended without moving. One moment there was only the trembling air, the next she was there, an outline first, then a shape the mind refused to finish assembling. Wings unfurled behind her, yet they were not wings. They layered into themselves, feathers fracturing into countless watching eyes, each blinking at a different moment in time. Some wept starlight. Some bled shadow. The ground knelt before she did. Stone softened. Metal warped. Every living thing felt its name loosen, as if reality itself were forgetting how to describe them. When she spoke, it was not sound. It was the memory of thunder. It was the echo inside a grave. It was a chorus of voices that had never been born. “CHILDREN OF THE SMALL HOUR,” the message pressed into every mind at once, vast and intimate and unbearable. “THE VEIL FRACTURES.” Her face, if it was a face, shifted continuously. At one angle, serene and radiant. At another, a lattice of impossible geometry, rotating through dimensions that scraped against sanity. Looking directly at her felt like trying to read a language made of screams. “WHAT DREAMS BELOW YOUR WORLD,” she continued, “HAS BEGUN TO WAKE.” The stars above rearranged themselves into unfamiliar constellations, forming symbols older than creation. Several promptly went out. “I AM NOT YOUR SALVATION.” The eyes in her wings all turned inward, focusing on something far away. Something approaching. “I AM THE WARNING.” And somewhere, deep beneath existence, something answered.