Worlds of Waves and Shadows

Fourty Six

Time.

What a funny thing it is. Treacherous yet fair. Completely unpredictable. Stopping for no one.

But it did for him; it bent for him. The one thing worth more than any amount of money, and he controlled it.

The acrid smell of smoke and ozone attacked his nostrils relentlessly as he stood in what used to be the Royal District of Atlantis. His heart hammered against his ribs, each beat a painful reminder that he might not live to see another sunrise. He peered over the rubble, his rugged features set in grim determination. The scene before him was chaos incarnate. Flames licked at ornate buildings, their gilded facades melting under the intense heat. Screams and howls of pain pierced the air, a cacophony of terror that sent chills down his spine.

The irony wasn't lost on him – how the very power he commanded had led to his downfall.

The creatures – for he lacked a better word to describe them – hovered above the destruction, their lifeless eyes scanning the carnage below. One of them, a girl with skin as pale as death, cocked her head as if trying to understand the insignificant beings scurrying beneath her. Rolan couldn't shake the feeling that he was nothing more than an ant about to be squashed.

So it had come to this. A grisly death after a life spent in vain. As an orphan who'd seen his fair share of trouble, Rolan had always expected to meet an untimely end. But not like this. Not in the mythical City of Atlantis, fighting creatures that defied explanation.

His gaze swept over the devastation, memories of his life on the streets of Moscow flashed before his eyes. The cold nights, the constant struggle for survival – it all paled in comparison to the horror unfolding before him. He'd thought joining the Atlantean cause would give his life meaning, a chance to be more than just another street rat. That's why, in contrast to the rest of his companions—Sarina and Kaenisa, he hadn't been mourning the life he'd lost. No, he had been liberated, blessed with a fresh start of something greater. He'd celebrated it, embraced it with open arms but now...now, he wasn't so sure.

Rolan's mind raced back to their arrival just hours ago. The mayhem, the screams of pain and fear, people begging to be saved. And then they had seen them – a girl and a boy, levitating at least three feet off the ground, surrounded by some kind of spherical forcefield, strong enough to deflect the barrage of bullets from the Imperial Army as if they were nothing more than annoying flies. Their skin was inhumanly pale, black veins crawling across their flesh like spiderwebs.

But that wasn't what had Rolan's hair standing on end. It was their eyes, devoid of pupils, rather, the deadly gleam within their milky stare that seemed to stare into the very fabric of reality itself. It had chilled him to the core. Still did.

"What... what in the Seven Hells...?" Kaenisa had muttered beside him, her cognac-amber eyes wide with a mixture of horror and fascination.

Rolan remembered glancing at his friend, taking in the intensity in her cognac-onyx eyes. Even then, in the face of insanity, with her raven hair matted with dust and her face streaked with grime, she exuded an aura of power that both awed and unsettled him.

Shaking off the memory, Rolan focused on the present. He needed to act, to do something. But what? Rolan's mind raced, replaying the moments after they'd arrived, sifting through what the general had told them.

Cazek's face, usually an impassive mask, had shown a flicker of... guilt, was it? "There seems to have been... an accident at the laboratory," he had said—when Zaira had asked for an explanation to the madness they'd stumbled upon—his words carefully measured.

"Um...with all due respect, sir, two flying kids don't exactly look like accidents that happened in the laboratory." Sarina asserted.

"Well, I mean, we never know. Your technology is pretty advanced..." He had shrugged, earning himself a myraid of glares at the time.