• Agony. Mind-shattering spikes of pure, sweet pain ripped through his brain like the shafts of light that pierced the endless gray cloud cover overhead. Melting his eyes, cracking his bones, and punching infinitely numerous holes through his entire body as the shockwave of magical and nuclear energy crushed him under the mammoth pressure exerted upon him. Every inch of his physical existence was being dissolved as the enormous amounts of energy heated his molecular composition, eating apart strong chemical bonds that held his corporeal form together.

    At last, the soul-numbing shower of energy stopped. Time passed, whether it was moments or eons, it didn’t matter. His consciousness, having submerged itself long ago to shelter him from the pain, slowly returned. Bit by bit, like a puddle gathers rain, so too, did his mind and thoughts gather together. As more of his memories pulled towards each other, his mind exerted a force similar to gravity and the whirling remnants of his psyche raced to the center of the mass and melded with it to finally form a complete whole.

    On instinct, he tried to pull himself into a sitting position and survey the landscape about him. This, however, proved impossible as he was not made of flesh. Instead, he extended outward what senses he was possessed of, and discovered that he was in fact composed of more or less of a slightly spherical grouping of light and energy. Shock passed through him as he processed this new information.

    Unable to accept this, he began to form a body out of the light energy, or to be more precise, a vessel to carry his energy. Having no idea where to start, he began with what his memories told him was his old form. Building from the ground up, he was able to make a few modifications, mainly for mobility, by adding wings and decreasing the response time of his muscles to insure even greater heights of speed and strength than what they had been before. This body would be wholly under the control and manipulation of his mind. It took shape and substance in a relaxed pose of lying down.

    Complete, he gave a heave of his new chest and relearned how to breathe, as it would be essential to blend in. A creature that didn’t have to breathe would be too noticeable indeed. Many moments passed as he eventually learned to make it an unconscious act, to appear natural as it were. He rolled over and crawled across the debris he had been lying on. Every new surface sent thousands of sensations to his brain as he reached forward with his hands and legs, with his wings folded at his back. This overload of information was enough to send him reeling. Falling down and just absorbing all the knowledge of the world around him exhausted his mind, but he could not give up yet. There was too much to do.

    Pushing himself up again, he pulled himself forward to try and reach the edge of the Island of Debris, as he thought of it as. Crawling seemed to take hours, but flight was out of his reach at this time. He managed to grasp the edge of a building that had been smashed into another, at the time of the explosion, and looked out over the edge and into the water.

    What he saw there in the water sent rippling shudders of intense psychological pain throughout his being. A grotesque picture of the once handsome angel he had been floated there in the lapping waves of brackish water. Even as he watched, his face rippled, flowed, and molded itself to form a more accurate representation of what he had once looked like. His eyes were bright silver, shining as splendidly as a full moon. Long locks of metallic-shade gray flowed down the sides of his head in cascading folds, almost floating in the air. His face was an ovular shape, reminding him of an elf’s or a cat’s. A high brow with prominent cheekbones and sharply defined ears lent a stark look to his face. At the moment, he was very gaunt looking because he didn’t in fact have real muscles underneath his skin.

    Then in a flood, as if released from a dam, it burst upon him. All the memories of the last few years of his life crashed over him like a tsunami, a virtual tidal wave of emotions and actions. Pouring over him, his memories flooded him with knowledge, and pain. Each moment brought new thoughts, old ideas, and ancient experiences to the surface, pushing away all attempts to be subdued.

    Out of habit, he reached out to God, to feel his comforting and reassuring presence in order to calm himself and focus his thoughts on the task at hand. What he felt instead was a cold blankness, a slick wall of impenetrability. It loomed before him, taunting him, challenging him like God had challenged so many prior to his birth. Unlike those confrontations, however, this one was not to be surmounted. It ate at him, that he was not able to contact God, to stretch forth his mental consciousness and feel that there was something right in this insane reality.

    All this came upon him in a moment, a space of time so small, that even angels dismissed it as unimportant. To him though, it was an epiphany, a conclusion of such magnitude that shook the ground and stirred the air. There was only one logical solution to his problem. Despair at his loss roiled inside him as he stood there, looking out upon the water. No longer was he connected to God, able to draw solace and comfort from the Almighty. Such loss is comparable to that of an addict who goes to rehab, except this drug was more potent and desirable than any other known to man. Its disappearance was akin to losing life itself, and it was killing him.

    Burning and itching, this separation tore at him, ripping down boundaries that had been erected millennia ago. Seething and fuming, a veritable ocean of molten hot fury roared through him. It grew stronger with each passing second as his thoughts came back to one thing: it was all Her fault. She was the one who had caused this. If She had been stopped, this Cataclysm could have been avoided. His feeling of bereavement was so monumental that it threatened to overwhelm all other thoughts.

    Struggling to control his emotions, he stood up. Stretching his vision as far as he could, he saw that the world around him was a gloomy mess. No, it wasn’t just a mess. For all that it was, calling it a mess was an understatement. It was a field of devastation that lay before him in all direction, an ocean of brown water that churned endlessly before his eyes and riddled with Islands of Debris. Buildings that stood even after the shockwave and the nuclear explosion had no chance against the relentlessly pounding water, slowly eroding down to nothing, virtual molehills in this gray expanse of catastrophe.

    His thoughts coalesced around one idea, one thought, one obsession that would drive him to near insanity in its pursuit. His thoughts full of vengeance and his heart full of despair, his wings unfurled and spread themselves to their full length and shone with a light of their own. As he stood there, readying for the jump, he could only think of one thing. One single thought that was so inescapable that even the light feared to touch there. Bending his knees and flexing his wings to warm them up, all else was driven from his mind as he prepared to fly. Stretching to his full height, he reared up and roared a challenge to all, like a predator loosed upon the world, and for all purposes and intents, he was indeed a predator.

    With one sweep of his magnificent wings, Lanon flew through the air with only one word on his mind: Nyx.