The rain hadn't stopped for three days. Not since the sky split open and something ancient fell through.
They called him Kael—though even that was a borrowed name. He didn't remember who had first given it to him, or why it felt like a chain around his neck. All he knew was that when he woke, naked and unburned in the crater where lightning had struck, the world began to rot.
Kael walked the edge of the city of Nira like a shadow dressed in stolen rags, his boots treading mud into every temple gate and burial stone. People whispered that death followed him. They were wrong.
Death obeyed him.