Renner Voss*
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They named it the Year of Ash.
But to Renner Voss, it was the year a god bled.
Esgard didn't fall in a single night. It rotted. Slowly.
A city dying from the inside out, weeks after the Demon Blade fell to his knees in the outskirts of the city, cradling a corpse that all said would rise as a great force in this city.
Ian and Eli's defeat didn't merely echo — it reverberated, like a curse scrawled across the city's bones.
Renner remembered the sky the next morning.
Gray. Silent.
The kind of silence that lingered even over screams. Fires still burned. Not with the heat of battle — but the indifference of afterthought. And beneath the acrid smoke, nobles clawed at one another like rats from a sinking ship, pawing for favors, forgiveness, or an exit.
He watched from the ledge of a ruined balcony, cloak heavy with blood. Not his own.
"I thought gods didn't bleed," he murmured to the wind.
But Ian had.
He had broken.
