* 🕊️ ⠀ ⠀

/      thank you for being patient with me,       wyn. 

/      ill drop you a starter and whatever i owe tonight.       and that reply was good.  

/       while some connections are /formed/ on earth.     there’s connections like ours forged above in heaven.       and all things of heaven forever remain. 

⠀⠀⠀[      smoke filtered outward in dense waves as the hiss of broken machinery echoed through the ruin. wülfric dropped into position with the ARX rifle braced firmly against his shoulder, thumb sliding across the thermal scope mounted above the barrel whilst the targeting system blinked ERROR across his visor.      ]
            
            
            ⠀⠀⠀alpha to raven. backup has arrived. what’s our status?         [      his jaw gritted, peering through the tablet strapped against the back of his left arm. each scrape of his boots against the ruined floor became a testament to his fury, and the worst part was not the elimination of what now remained as mortal decay. twas the cincture of her voice still caught in the back of his mind.           floor by floor he searched, growing impatient by the second. static tore through the signal repeatedly, frustration sinking into each hyper sonic round he released down abandoned corridors whilst strange crimson matter splattered against the walls and broken steel. the filtration unit at his back hissed sharply every few breaths, struggling against the contamination levels flooding the sector.     ]
            
            ⠀⠀ alpha to raven, do you copy?  [        pressing two fingers against the comm at the side of his helmet, wülfric lowered his voice and kept moving. the UV attachment fixed beneath the rifle barrel cut pale streaks through the dark whilst warning symbols bled red across his visor.        but the second his gaze lowered toward the floor, he froze. a strange glimmer moved beneath the fractured concrete as though the ground itself had split open into another realm.      ]

⠀⠀⠀   [          (f)uck.         the signal flashed on his wristwatch in the middle of the conference. every eye had turned to him, silence having become seldom a reckoning.        wülfric disabled the sound, excused himself; and left the room. the comm had carried gaia’s message through, along with static noise caught in the background. but the anomaly, the strange sound, did not register as heavily to the backup team. it had on his system. it took him roughly twenty minutes before he was suited and geared, exiting the grid with wall-e. reinforced combat plating locked across his chest and shoulders beneath the black tactical coat, oxygen harness secured tight along his spine with twin filtration canisters clipped against the lower rig. the visor of his helmet flickered faintly blue against the radioactive storm warnings feeding through his display. spare magazines lined the front cincture of his vest beside two flash (b)ombs, morphine injectors, UV flares, and a combat knife magnetized to his right thigh. an ARX rifle rested heavy against his back while the sidearm holstered beneath his left arm carried hyper sonic rounds specifically calibrated for anomaly breaches.              he rode the turbo x motorbike, engine tearing through the dead sectors whilst radiation sirens bled across the outer grid. commissioning several commands through the wrist interface, he arrived exactly fifteen minutes later to the wreckage of what remained of sector one.
            
            ⠀⠀⠀    in open [f]ucking daylight. the sun itself seemed triggered by radioactive sound, blaring violently through the fractured remains of the structure whilst blackened clouds churned overhead into a massive storm. there was neither backup nor the credential properly submitted into the mission log, taken instead as a one wing retrieval. the soldier wasted not another second before pulling free the flash (b)ombs and launching them into the corridor.      ] 

⠀⠀⠀   [ a  static buzz rasped through his earpiece, cutting in and out with a faint distortion. the visor display flickered, lines of coded readouts layering over one another, signal strength, heat signatures, biometric scans, each failing to hold steady. the colours broke apart in uneven bands, thermal ghosts where nothing should have been. wülfric swore he felt the air shift against him despite the sealed plating of his suit, filtration humming low at his collar, the weight of it pressing firm across his shoulders and spine. ] 
            
            ⠀⠀⠀   what do you see?    [ he could tell by the tone alone she rolled her eyes. irritation seeped through her voice, thin but present. his jaw tightened. he reached up, fingers brushing the control at his temple, cutting the live feed. better she did not see what lay ahead. the ruin alone turned the stomach. ]      run the scan again. my system’s getting interference down here.

⠀ ⋆CHARACTER ANALYSIS: 
             ⠀⠀ ZARA (G) BEAUMONT. 
            
             ⠀ ❪ .. ❫ the elders of the beaumont house used to whisper a strange thing. a story that returns every two thousand years, slipping back into the world like it never left. they say love is an orbit drawn by God, a circle humans keep trying to complete but always fall short of. somewhere inside that orbit, a fairytale was born. unfinished, & /interrupted./ stolen before its ending could settle into place. some souls, they claim, are born only to carry the weight of that broken tale. zara beaumont, the lone child of a family polished to perfection, grows up pretending she doesn’t hear the fragments. pretending the omen isn’t hers. pretending her great great great grandmother’s fate isn’t waiting for her like a shadow that knows her name. she runs from it. from the prophecy. from the quiet panic of being chosen for something she never asked for. but fate has a way of circling back, even when you refuse to look at it. and zara finds herself slipping into a world that doesn’t belong to the living alone. a place where gods still argue in forgotten languages and monsters remember the taste of ancient wars. a place where the past isn’t dead, only sleeping.
            
             ⠀ ❪ .. ❫ then he appears. a man carrying dust from an empire swallowed by time. an empire that once thrived in the hidden oasis of old arabia. he looks at her like he’s seen her before. like he’s been waiting for her to return from a life she doesn’t remember living. he calls her the lost princess of a kingdom erased from every map but one. the one written in bloodlines. and suddenly the fairytale she tried to outrun isn’t a story anymore. it’s a door opening. and it’s calling her by name.