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The mother gasped as her children convulsed in her arms, their bodies writhing, their limbs shifting, bone-cracking, joints displacing.

Their flesh rippled unnaturally, and their celestial forms unraveled mid-fall.

Their radiant skin dulled, warped, and split into jagged ridges and grooves.

Their eyes, once mirrors of the stars, glowed red, ebony, and scarlet, burning from within like cursed embers.

Wings that once bore them across the heavens shredded into tatters, black and smoking, disappearing for eternity.

Faces distorted. Canines elongated. Their screams gave way to snarls.

Still, they held on to each other.

Her brother’s hand found the eldest.

His voice broke through the chaos, hoarse and heavy with sorrow.

‘We are lost.’

‘Nada,’ she breathed. ‘We are Sullied.’

The words burned like ash.

Just as her vision split, her flesh contorted, and her divine grace boiled away beneath the curse in a blast of smothering heat.

Still, through time and torment, they fell towards Sacra’s planetary crust.

The cage landed with a crash, blazing like a meteorite on fire as it burrowed and tunneled down into the abyss under the shadowed underbelly of the descended city of New Savartin.

They plummeted until the aureate trap struck rock with a silent quake, embedding itself deep in the tunnels where light did not live.

Only then did the gods-forsaken shackles release them.

The gilded cell imploded, dissolving into particles and motes of fine gold that hissed as they vanished without sound.

Leaving behind five bodies curled in a charred heap, trembling, breathless, and beaten.

They were forced to crawl, burned, twisted, still reeling from the violence of divine condemnation, dragging their scorched limbs through stone corridors slick with condensation.

In time, they found a cavern, a hollow in the dark that became their sanctuary.

When thirst clawed at their throats, they emerged to drink from a black underground lake that shimmered like obsidian glass.

When hunger gnawed at their bellies, they scraped mollusks from the walls.

With breath and grief, the eldest one shook with rage as her loved ones writhed from the curse, still pulsing through their veins like molten iron.

Her mother wept silently, and her sister gnashed her teeth in anguish.

While her brother and father trembled in stoic wrath against the waves of agony washing over them.

That was when she realized her healing power had not left her.

Whatever gods had cursed her blood, they had not taken that.

So she knelt beside her father and pressed her hands to his ruined chest.

Her potency, however, could not undo what had been wrought, and the soul stone attached to his heart still ripped him apart from the inside.