Six Months After the Last Facility Burned
The black rain still falls.
It hisses against the broken highways, fills the craters left by Aesir's collapsing strongholds, pools in the hollows of corpses whose mouths remain forever parted in song.
You'd think it's over.
You'd be wrong.
—ZAYN—
He stands at the edge of the ocean, where the water hasn't moved in weeks. A perfect, glassy black mirror. His reflection doesn't match. Hers does.
The little girl—Sarah, or what's left of her—floats just beneath the surface, her hair fanning out like ink in water. Her lips move in sync with his.
"They lied about the vaccine," she whispers through his teeth. "But we lied first."
Behind him, the others are changing.
Aaron's skin has turned translucent, his veins pulsing with the same blue fire as the neural looms they destroyed. Insha's implant has grown into a crystalline lattice around her skull, humming the Choir's dissonant hymn. And Niko…
Niko was never there.
But the eclipse was.
—THE ECLIPSE—
It never set. Not truly. It watches from behind the smoke, a hungering pupil framed by red tendrils. The "vaccine" was never meant to cure. Only to prepare.
The Carrion Choir was just the first note.
Now, the world begins to harmonize.
In the ruins of Aesir's headquarters, a single loom flickers back to life. Its wires knot themselves into a new pattern. A name repeats in the static:
SOREN. SOREN. SOREN.
Somewhere, a door opens.
A figure steps through.
And the rain sings welcome home.