Year 3.
The problem was a tremor in the Halls of Unbroken Song, a vibration felt not in the ears but in the soul, like a single, frayed string in a grand harp. The choir of two hundred Blessed Souls was practicing the "Hymn of Unquestioning Dawn," but a dozen voices in the back kept slipping, their harmony tainted by a slow, mourning drag. The choirmaster, a High Soul named Lior with a face like polished alabaster, was incensed.
"Focus!" his voice rang, a clear bell of displeasure. "You must release the mortal weight! The melody is pure. Your attachment is the flaw!"
Hana, standing at her assigned observation post by the great jasper doors as the morning light streamed in, watched. She was still a Blessed Soul, dressed in the simple, soft grey shift of a postulant in Michael's faction. Her duty was to note any defects in the hall's ambient light, but her attention was on the singers. She saw it not as a lack of focus, but as a surplus of memory.
During the mandated midday Reflection, she did not go to the Tranquility Niche. She moved quietly among the distressed singers, her presence unthreatening. She found the source—a woman named Kira, whose form seemed less solid than the others, shimmering at the edges like a mirage. Her eyes, when they met Hana's, held a depth of sorrow that felt older than Heaven.
"It is the third phrase," Kira whispered, her voice the rustle of dead leaves. "The rise of the notes… it is the exact contour of a lullaby I sang. My daughter… she fell asleep to it, but I was gone before she woke. The song has no end for me."
Hana did not offer empty comfort. She listened, then she acted. She sought an audience not with Lior, but with his superior, Warden Felix, a being of calm, amber light who oversaw the district's aesthetic cohesion.
"The flaw is not in the performance, Warden," Hana stated, her hands clasped before her, the picture of respectful submission. "It is in the assignment. The Hymn of Dawn evokes specific familial warmth. For a soul whose last memory of family is an unfinished lullaby, it is not a hymn. It is a reopened wound. She cannot release the memory because the music commands her to relive it."
Warden Felix's light pulsed slowly. "The solution?"
"Reassignment," Hana said simply. "The Memory Gardens contain a replica of a mortal nursery, curated for souls with such… attachments. Send her there as a caretaker. Let her finish the song for the empty crib, for the ghosts of other children, until the memory becomes a story she tells, not a ghost that haunts her. The Hall's harmony will be restored, and a soul will be healed, not punished."
It was a shockingly practical, human solution in a realm that spoke only of release and transcendence. Felix studied her. "You bypassed the choirmaster."
"I sought the most efficient path to a solution that served both the Hall's purpose and the soul's peace," Hira replied, meeting his gaze. "Was that in error?"
A week later, Kira was transferred. The Hall's tremor ceased. Hana was not publicly praised. Instead, Warden Felix summoned her as the evening stars began to gleam and placed a simple silver band around her wrist, a mark of authority. "Your insight was… utilitarian," he said, a hint of something like curiosity in his tone. "You see systems and souls as parts of the same mechanism. Michael's faction has need of that. You are now a High Soul. You will oversee the Residential Block Sigma-Seven. Ensure its harmony."
Her first command. Not of warriors, but of a hundred souls trying to remember how to live when life was over.
Year 44.
The cold was not a temperature, but a leeching of certainty. It seeped from the Western Storehouses, vast catacombs where the raw stuff of Heaven—solidified intention, memories turned to crystal, light woven into tangible form—was kept. The celestial lamps there dimmed. Tools meant to last an eternity began to flake. A quiet panic started among the artisans and builders.
Hana, now a junior administrator in the Logistics Conclave, was handed a ledger of light and told to find the leak. Her office was a small alcove with a desk of milky quartz, overlooking a canal of liquid starlight. For months, through countless days and nights, she lived in the interconnected scrolls of the tripartite bureaucracy. She traced requests for a single ingot of "Forgiven Sorrow" (used to mend cracked foundations) through a dizzying loop.
A request from Michael's builders would go to Raphael's Hall of Benediction for a blessing of "purposeful use." Once blessed, it was sent to Uriel's Chamber of Sanction for authorization against "wasteful expenditure." Once sanctioned, it returned to Michael's quartermaster. There, a new clerk, seeing the original request date was now cycles old and no physical ingot had yet been drawn, would log it as "stale—process restart," sending it back to Raphael's Hall for a new blessing.
The light wasn't being stolen. It was trapped in a perpetual, holy roundabout, a monument to perfect, inefficient order.
Hana did not write an accusation. She designed a Tri-Seal Chit. A single, triangular tablet. One corner for Michael's quartermaster (REQUEST), one for Raphael's benedictor (BLESS), one for Uriel's sanctioner (AUTHORIZE). It had to travel in one circuit. The last seal activated the tablet, becoming the release note for the storehouse keeper.
She presented it not to the Archangels, but to their three head stewards in a neutral meeting room as dusk settled outside. "It respects all hierarchies," she explained, her voice calm in the tense silence. "It merely turns a labyrinth into a circle. The authority of each faction is physically etched into the solution."
The stewards, beings of immense pride, eyed each other, then the elegant tablet. It was undeniably superior. It was adopted. The coldness in the storehouses lifted within a cycle.
Her reward was a larger office, a staff of two, and a profound, unspoken trust. She was now a Logistics Coordinator. Her ledgers now included the most sensitive manifests: shipments of "Sanctified Will" to the remote Voidwatch Bastions, the silent monasteries perched on the city's very rim where souls with the strongest constitutions stared into the abyss and reported on… nothing.
Year 89.
The alarm was not a sound, but a subliminal scream. In the Sector of Whispers, a park designed for the contemplation of absolute silence, the fabric of Heaven puckered and tore.
Hana was reviewing a shipment manifest for Voidwatch Bastion Theta in the late afternoon when she felt it—a drop in her soul's pressure, a suction of meaning. Looking out her window, she saw it: a jagged, black scribble hanging in the air above the park. It bled no fire, no demons. It bled Null. A sensation of erasure, of never-having-been, washed over the sector. Souls froze, not in fear, but in existential dread, their very memories feeling thin and fragile.
Protocol was explicit: Quarantine. Report to the Archangel Council. Wait for a dispatched cadre of Vanguards—Heaven's elite shock troops. The process would take time. Already, she could see the park's caretaker angels hovering at a safe distance, forming a barrier of light, containing the scene but not the effect.
Hana's logistics hub was three streets away. She didn't hesitate. "Kâzım!" she barked at her aide, who had become a steadfast friend. "Get everyone in this and the adjacent sectors moving north. Use the service alleys. Don't let them look at it." To Elara, her archivist: "Pull every record we have on spontaneous void-fissures. I need precedent, not prophecy."
Then she went herself.
She walked past the hovering angels, ignoring their shocked protests. The air grew colder, not in temperature, but in concept. The grass underfoot turned grey and brittle, not dying, but becoming un-alive. The tear was the size of a door, and through it was not darkness, but a colour that hurt to perceive.
She remembered the beach. Not the fear, but the terrible, quiet finality of it. The absolute acceptance that this was the last sunset, the last breath, the last squeeze of a hand. She did not summon light or song. She wrapped that memory around her core—the sheer, undeniable truth of an ending—and let it radiate from her. She was not fighting the Null. She was representing its conclusion. She was the full stop it sought to impose.
She walked right up to the fissure. The void-hunger pulsed against her aura of accepted finale. It was a paradox. The rift tried to unmake her, but she presented it with something already resolved, already complete. It hesitated, its edges flickering uncertainly.
By the time the sky split with the arrival of the Vanguards—six beings of breathtaking power and blazing wings—the fissure was gone. Not sealed with a bang, but having simply… ceased, as if deciding this particular patch of reality wasn't worth the effort. Only a circle of dead, conceptual grass remained.
Michael descended, his light scorching away the residual null-feeling as the first true stars of evening appeared. He looked at the circle, then at Hana, who stood calmly amidst the grey dust, her simple Warden's tabard seeming absurdly mundane.
"You confronted a Null-event." His voice was the grinding of tectonic plates, displeased. "You are a logistician."
"And this was a threat to the assets and souls under my logistical purview, Lord Archangel," she replied, her voice level though her soul trembled. "The Vanguards were not here. The threat was. My duty is preservation. I acted to preserve."
He was silent for an eternity of seconds. He had received Kâzım's crisp report on the evacuation already. He saw the contained scene, the lack of panic, the extinguished threat. She hadn't acted with a warrior's glory, but with a commander's cold efficiency. She had treated the existential tear as a logistical problem.
A week later, the summons came. In the Citadel of Dawn, in a room with a floor of sun-bleached bone-ivory and no furniture, Michael spoke.
"The edge of our city is not a place for philosophers. It is a place for sentinels with the clarity to see a threat and the will to meet it, even without a perfect command. The Sentry District is the city's southern shield. Its Wardens have faltered, seeing only protocol, not purpose. You will take command. You are Warden Hana. Your jurisdiction is the border. Your mandate is vigilance."
Year 222.
Warden Hana stood on the observation deck of the Vigil Spire, the keystone of her district, as the sun set, setting the western districts of the city ablaze with reflected glory. The air here was bracing, scrubbed clean by winds that raced across the Emptiness before hitting the city's eternal walls. Below her, flowing to the horizon in a glittering, impossible tapestry, was the only city in Heaven.
From this height, the factional districts were clear. Michael's domain to the east was all soaring towers and wide military parade grounds, geometry made manifest. Raphael's to the north was a softer mosaic of interconnected sanctuaries, healing springs, and libraries with organic, growing walls. Uriel's to the west was severe beauty—precise crystalline structures and gardens where every flower grew in absolute, mathematical symmetry.
And her district, the Sentry, was the southern rim. It was not beautiful. It was functional. The buildings were lower, squatter, made of a dark, non-reflective stone that drank light. Wide streets allowed for rapid mobilization. The district housed the Gate Anchorages—heavily fortified plazas where, with the combined will of an Archangel, a permanent bridge to another realm could be opened. It was also dotted with Watch-holes, small, austere towers where her souls monitored the Emptiness for the telltale shiver of an unauthorized rift.
For 222 years, she had climbed by being more useful than she was troublesome. She had learned the city's circulatory system, its bureaucratic immune response, its defensive reflexes. She had made herself the calm, competent solution to every problem they gave her.
Now, looking out at the infinite black beyond the city's glow as night firmly took hold, she held the key to the outermost lock.
She had the authority to inspect the Gate logs, which recorded every sanctioned opening. She commanded the souls who watched for unsanctioned ones. She could requisition information, justify investigations, and move through the city's underbelly with the respect of her rank.
The official search was over. Jin was not in the ledgers, not in the gardens, not in the light.
Now began the unofficial search. It would not be in the archives, but in the shadows even a heavenly city cast. It would be in the whispers of souls who found the perfect peace suffocating, in the rumours of angels who asked questions that had no blessed answers. She needed to find the cracks within Heaven's own society.
She needed to find the heretics. The ones who knew how the Gates really worked. The rogue angels.
Turning her back on the mesmerizing void, Warden Hana descended the spire, her grey cloak billowing. The fortress of Heaven stretched before her, magnificent and silent under the starlight. She had spent centuries learning its gates and battlements from the inside.
Now, it was time to find its back door.