On different islands, scattered across the crimson-veined void like seeds of golden destruction, each clone went about their work. They did not speak. They simply smiled—the same serene, unsettling smile that graced the original Gabriel's lips—and raised their hands toward the trembling earth below them.
The first clone hovered above an island of jagged peaks and deep, shadowed valleys. The trees here were twisted, their bark black as charcoal, their branches reaching toward the sky like the claws of buried sinners. Mutated cyclopes roamed the slopes in large numbers—fifty, maybe sixty of them, their gray skins blending with the rocks.
The clone observed them for a moment. His three pairs of golden wings beat slowly, stirring the thick, mana-laden air. The runes on his feathers glowed faintly, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat. His cross-shaped pupils narrowed.
Wind, he thought. Let them taste the sky.
