The gods favour their daughters... and it is the same with girls.
In Castibury, capital of the Kingdom of Loren. Though it no longer looked much like a capital.
More than half the city had been thoroughly destroyed. Even the castle wall had come down along half its length, the Judgment Tribunal's high tower had broken through the middle, and the silver-flame banners hung off the fractured stone columns.
Fires were still burning, and could not produce the colour that had once stood for judgment and for purification. There was only a layer of pale light. The observation windows on the topmost floor of the Grey Tower had shattered into ruin, and the workings used to record calamities, to seal anomalies away and to number and file every Relic had all gone out along the tower's body. From a distance it looked like row upon row of eyes that had been dug out.
There was no weeping in the streets. It was quiet, as though a creature called man had vanished from the world entirely.
During the first burning there had at least been people shouting for help, people praying, people running with children in their arms towards the treatment tents the Dawn Healing Order had thrown up, people kneeling at the Tribunal's doors begging for shelter.
But once the second burning began, those voices, and the people they belonged to, seemed to go out of the world altogether.
This world was like something a rubber had been dragged across. The existence of everything in it had grown fainter.
Human memory and what was written on paper alike had begun to disperse with the passage of time.
There were still a scattering of survivors on the streets of Castibury, and Seraphina was one of them.
The Sacred Mark on her chest had not entirely gone. A moment ago she had used everything she had to keep herself and a few citizens near her from being burned by that formless pale fire.
Now she was very nearly spent. Forcing her body upright, she meant to tell the people around her to go to the nearest Dawn Healing Order chapel, or to the Tribunal, and seek shelter.
But the man who had been beside her a moment ago was kneeling at the roadside with his wife in his arms, the wife who had not made it inside the barrier Seraphina raised in time. And in the next instant the grief on his face emptied out. His whole soul seemed to have been drawn out of him. His eyes went vacant, and the wife who had died and gone pale in his arms was simply dropped on the ground. He did not even know his own name. Like a walking corpse he stood beneath that pale sky and did not move.
Then the ordinary citizens Seraphina had just sheltered, one after another, had their souls drawn out of them the same way, and stood aimlessly under that sky.
Seraphina's head snapped up. Above her the star-tracks were breaking...
The look on her face changed. These were not ordinary stars going out. The whole sky was being torn open down the middle, and the star-tracks were snapping one after another and vanishing where they lay, as though blankness were eating them one by one.
Then a beautiful planet of deep blue ocean and some land appeared across the surface of the sky, close enough that the naked eye could judge how near it stood to this world.
And... that distance was growing smaller as time passed.
Seeing it, Seraphina did not know what to do, and instinctively began to pray. She put her palms together. Her silver-white habit was soaked through with blood by now, and the Sacred Mark on her chest was dimming a little at a time, as though somebody were drawing the starlight out of her body and leaving only pain and a breath that came ever more thinly.
The god she believed in did not answer her...
And at the same time, faintly, she seemed to hear somebody praying to her from very far away.
"Lady Saintess..."
"Lady Saintess..."
"Lady Saintess..."
The voices came up as though from the bottom of water, and scattered before they could reach her ears.
She lifted her head. At the centre of that pale sky a white figure hung.
Long silver-white hair fell down from it, the hem of its clothing like mist, or like pages blown open by the wind. The figure floated in the air without expression, standing quietly, with countless snapped threads hanging beneath its feet. The whole of Castibury looked as though she had turned it out of reality and into one blank page, and one more light stroke would leave nothing at all.
It had come... far too fast, so that no church and no organisation had put any corresponding emergency plan into effect. More than half of the whole of Castibury had been destroyed outright. It was simply a mass extinction.
And Seraphina did not know that the Kingdom of Loren was not alone in suffering it. On other continents and in the neighbouring countries this same pale death-light had struck, and the casualties there were worse still.
Some of the smaller cities had not survived the first burning, and had become dead cities entirely.
This inexplicable calamity... more precisely... the end.
Yes. The end. The Pale End.
The whole world seemed to have lost its colour in an instant, and gave the impression of something not quite real.
At the sight of that floating figure the prayers in Seraphina's head turned suddenly shrill, which hurt her, and she put her hands to her head without meaning to.
"White Page Witch..."
"White Page Witch!" In the end the prayers, made of Lorenian, resolved into those words, and went on sounding in Seraphina's head without stopping.
It was already affecting her badly, and Seraphina had no time to attend to whatever the voices in her head were. At that moment, directly above her.
That tall figure still hung in the air, the silver-white hair drifting loose about it. In the midst of a white death-light that the gods themselves could do nothing against, the figure in the air was entirely unharmed.
Looking at her, Seraphina instinctively took her for the one who had begun all this, and took her likewise for the White Page Witch echoing through her head.
She forced her eyes as wide as they would go, wanting to cut that face into her soul, wanting to know who it was that had destroyed Castibury, destroyed the star-tracks, and destroyed everything she had spent a life guarding.
But the harder she tried to see it, the more the face blurred.
When the white firelight came washing over her, all she remembered was the eyes.
Cold and hollow. Looking down at the ruin below, humanity seemed to stir nothing in her at all.
The world seemed at last to have given up on itself, or the gods to have given up on the world.
Seraphina could do nothing to turn it back. By then she had begun to forget who she was, and like the citizens before her stood staring blankly at the pale sky, and at the deep blue planet above it.
And then... the third pale burning began.
And after that...
"Ah!..."
When she opened her eyes again, outside the window was a morning from many years ago.
The bell tower of the order struck its first note, birds came down on the window ledge, sunlight came through the white gauze curtain, and the air smelled of clean herbs and of the star-lamps that had not quite burned out overnight. Seraphina sat up in bed with her fingers clenched into the quilt hard enough to whiten them, the sensation of being run through by white light still lingering in her chest.
She had confirmed it many times since. That dream again...
More precisely, a memory. The memory of a former life.