The Night the Sky Cracked Open
The sky was burning again.
Gessica stood at the center of it, bare feet sinking into ash that should have scorched her but didn't. Overhead, clouds the color of molten copper rolled and boiled, shot through with veins of gold that pulsed like something alive, something breathing. The heat pressed against her skin without ever touching it, a strange paradox that her mind couldn't untangle even as her body understood it perfectly.
*Gessica.*
The voice rolled across the burning expanse, deep and ancient, syllables that bent strangely in her ears—not quite words, not quite music, but something that lived in the space between. She turned, searching for its source, and found only fire reflected in endless dark glass, as if the ground itself had become a mirror to the sky.
*Gessica Moreira.*
Her name, spoken correctly this time, startled her. She spun again, and that was when she felt it: claws, enormous and impossibly gentle, closing around her wrist. Not gripping. Not hurting. Holding, the way someone might hold something precious and breakable.
She looked down to see fingers—her own fingers—wrapped in a light so bright it hurt to look at, and a mark burning gold into her palm,…
