**((Trying to write some stories—let me know how I can improve!))**

The cathedral stood at the edge of the world, a skeleton of stone and sorrow. Stained glass, fractured by time, cast dying colors across the ruins, and the air reeked of burned roses.

Lucian knelt at the altar, his breath shallow, his hands shaking. He had come here to escape—to silence the voices that followed him like ghosts. But he should have known better.

Footsteps echoed through the hollow space. Slow. Measured.

Astrael.

“Look at you,” Astrael murmured, stepping through a pool of crimson light. “What a pitiful, exquisite thing you’ve become.”

Lucian didn’t look up. He couldn’t. His fingers curled against the stone, white-knuckled.

“You reek of regret,” Astrael continued, circling him like a slow-moving tide. “But tell me, Lucian… did you really think you could outrun the ashes?”

Lucian squeezed his eyes shut, but it didn’t help. The memories were waiting, coiled in the dark. A child with a blue ribbon, her small hands reaching for him as the fire swallowed her whole. A friend gasping his name through bloodied lips. A lover’s whisper turning to a scream.

“You tried,” Astrael mused. “Oh, how you tried. And yet, everything you touched—” A gentle hand brushed Lucian’s shoulder, featherlight. “Burned.”

Lucian flinched as if struck.

“Do you hear them?” Astrael leaned closer, voice like silk spun over razors. “The ones who believed in you? The ones who died for you?” A soft chuckle. “Did they thank you, I wonder? Or did they curse your name with their last breath?”

Lucian gritted his teeth, but his body trembled.

“Ah,” Astrael sighed. “But the little girl… the one with the ribbon. She didn’t curse you, did she?” Astrael tilted their head, a smile playing at their lips. “Even as the flames devoured her, she still thought you would save her. That’s the cruelest part, isn’t it?”

“Stop,” Lucian rasped.

Astrael knelt beside him, tracing patterns in the dust. “Her fingers were blistered. Her voice was breaking. But she still called for you. Lucian, help me, she begged.” Astrael’s voice dropped to a whisper. “And you let her burn.”

Lucian’s breath hitched. He pressed his hands to his temples, but the screams were already there, clawing at the inside of his skull.

“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered, his voice breaking like shattered glass.

“But you did,” Astrael purred. “Not because you wanted to. But because that is what you are.” Their hand cradled his face, deceptively gentle. “You think you are a savior, but you are something far more beautiful than that.”

Lucian’s gaze snapped up, something raw and desperate in his eyes. “What do you mean?”

Astrael smiled. “You are not a destroyer. You are a creator of endings. A poet who writes in cinder and bone. They feared you, yes—but they needed you. Without you, there is no tragedy, no grand symphony of suffering. And oh, Lucian, how exquisite you make it sound.”

Lucian shook his head, but the world around him had already begun to shift. His breath felt different. The weight in his chest, once crushing, now felt like something else—like fire licking at the edges of his ribs.

“You were never meant to save them,” Astrael whispered, brushing strands of hair from Lucian’s face. “You were meant to bring them to their knees.”

Lucian exhaled. A slow, shuddering breath.

Outside, the sky split open.

The stained glass exploded, shards raining like dying stars. The earth cracked, vomiting fire from its depths. Screams rose from the abyss as the heavens wept black fire, and the cathedral groaned beneath the weight of unraveling reality.

Lucian stood.

Astrael stepped back, watching him with something akin to reverence.

Lucian’s eyes, once burdened by sorrow, now burned with something new. Something untethered. Something divine.

A slow smile ghosted his lips as the screams of the damned wove themselves into a lullaby.

With a voice like a funeral hymn, he whispered—

“If all I touch must perish, then let the world choke on its own ashes.”