Chapter 9: How the hell do you cure wings...?
Adam took a step back, unable to tear his eyes away. The plate of food and cup of water shattered against the floor, but he didn’t even register the sound.
The woman’s body lay at the center of the room, as if torn from the fabric of reality. Her presence had no forewarning—no sound, no flash of light. She was simply there. As though she had always been there, and Adam had only just noticed her.
Her very sight ripped the air from his lungs. As if his entire world, up until now brutal and grimy, had been sliced open by something... unattainable. Everything about her—the way she lay, the way the light slid across her skin—seemed to defy the world he knew.
Her skin, almost glowing in the half-light and pale as porcelain, bore a single, brutal wound. A cut beginning just below the collarbone and trailing down to her ribs, slicing her with a surgical, inhuman precision.
Her face was delicate—almost ethereal. Her features were sharp but soft, as if someone had sculpted her with obsessive care. High cheekbones, a small nose, full lips slightly parted, as if she had just whispered. Long lashes cast shadows across her cheeks, and her closed eyes gave her the look of eternal sleep. Even bloodied, with strands of dark hair clinging to her damp forehead, she looked like a figure torn from another realm.
Behind her back, folded and splayed like the wings of a fallen bird, were two massive, jet-black wings. Partially matted with dried blood, with small tears in their membranes, they hovered between majesty and curse.
Coiling downward from the base of her spine was a sleek, obsidian-black tail — long, sinuous, and shaped like a question mark. Its surface shimmered faintly with an oily sheen, and it ended in a wicked, barbed hook, elegant yet unmistakably meant for violence.
It was those that rooted Adam in place.
His arms trembled slightly as his gaze kept returning to them. Even after all he had seen in this shattered world—mutilated corpses, twisted mutants, the ruins of civilization—nothing had struck him like this. His eyes slid across her face, the wound at her side... but always came back to those wings.
They branded themselves into his mind—inhuman, unearthly, inexplicable. Staring at them, Adam couldn’t comprehend how a human could possess wings. Every instinct screamed that it was a mistake, a hallucination, something he wasn’t supposed to witness. Their existence tore through the laws of reality, slicing the boundary between what was and what shouldn’t be.
Adam’s heart pounded like a war drum. Each beat louder than the last. Blood surged faster, hotter. His body reacted before his mind could make sense of anything.