A God Who Hates Humans

Mara tore herself away from the stall.

“East!” a man shouted. “The inland road is still open!”

“It isn’t!” a woman answered. “The light is moving!”

Mara looked.

The white ruin had begun at the waterline. It advanced through Saltmere in a straight path, swallowing piers, taverns, homes. It did not spread like fire. It traveled with purpose. Every few seconds, another section of the city disappeared beneath that terrible brightness.

East was the only direction that did not yet glow.

Mara ran toward it.

Her boots slipped on wet cobbles. Rain struck her face, though the clouds above were dry and split by blue-white veins. A child cried somewhere behind her. The cry ended abruptly.

Mara did not turn around.

She had one goal: reach the old customs tunnel beneath Lantern Street. It led inland beneath the seawall and, if the maps were right, opened near the refugee yards. Her family might have gone there. Her mother would have taken Lina by the hand and followed the crowds. Mara had to reach them before the god’s judgment crossed the district.

The harbor gate stood ahead, jammed with people.

Mara pushed toward it, but the crowd surged back. A wagon had overturned across the street. Horses screamed beneath the broken shafts, their hooves beating sparks from the stones. Beyond the wreck, the gatehouse burned without flame. Its iron bars glowed red and twisted together.

“There’s no way through!” a guard shouted.

“There has to be,” Mara said.

The guard seized her coat. His face was gray with ash. “The passage is sealed.”

“Then unseal it.”

“By what? Prayer?”

A sound rolled over the harbor, too low to be thunder and too vast to be any living voice. The street trembled. Windows burst inward. Above the gatehouse, another black stroke carved itself across the sky.

The guard released Mara.

He looked up, and terror softened his features into something almost childlike.

“Gods,” he whispered.

“No,” Mara said. “Not ours.”

The white line reached the end of Dock Street.

The crowd broke.

People ran in every direction, trampling one another, clawing at locked doors. Mara was swept sideways into an alley between a cooper’s shop and a warehouse wall. Someone struck her shoulder. Her satchel tore against a nail, and the brass key fell into the water.

She dropped after it.

Her fingers closed around the key just as the alley mouth went white.

Heat struck her back.

Mara rolled beneath a stack of overturned barrels. The world outside vanished in a roar of stone and wind. The barrels shuddered above her. Dust packed her mouth. She pressed herself against the slick cobbles and listened as the god erased the street.

One breath.

Two.

The sound stopped.

Mara crawled out.

The alley no longer had an entrance. At its far end, where the harbor road had been, stood a wall of pale dust. The buildings on either side leaned together, their upper floors hanging over the passage like broken jaws.

A man emerged from beneath the wreckage near the cooper’s shop. Blood ran from his scalp.

“Are you marked?” he asked.

Mara stared at him. “What?”

He pointed to her wrist.

A thin line of light had appeared beneath her skin. It began at the base of her thumb and curled toward her forearm, bright as moonlit frost. The line formed a symbol she did not recognize: three hooked strokes around a dark center.

The man backed away.

“Don’t come near me.”

“I’m not - ”

“You’re marked.”

His voice carried into the alley. Others stirred among the rubble. Faces lifted. All of them looked at Mara’s wrist.

Then the mark burned.

Mara cried out and dropped the key. Light raced up her arm. It did not feel like heat. It felt like a finger pressing through bone, searching for something hidden inside her.

Every survivor in the alley screamed at once.

The markings on their bodies flared. Some glowed at the throat. One woman had a bright ring around her eye. A boy clutched his chest as letters appeared beneath his shirt.

Above them, the clouds shifted.

The god spoke.

No mouth formed in the sky. No face appeared. The words arrived in the bones of the city, vibrating through brick and water and teeth.

“THE FIRST HOUR HAS PASSED.”

Mara fell to one knee.

A second line burned across her wrist.

00:59:42

The numbers began to descend.

The man by the cooper’s shop began praying. “Please. Great Veyr. Please, we have done nothing.”

The name struck Mara with recognition. Veyr. The old harbor god. The one whose statues had been pulled down after the famine, whose temples had become warehouses and taverns. Her mother had called him a butcher in a crown.

A woman near the rubble spat blood onto the stones. “He hates us.”

The sky answered.

“CORRECT.”

The word cracked through the alley. Dust fell from the walls.

Mara stared at the numbers on her wrist. “What happens when it reaches zero?”

No one answered.

A boy pointed toward the closed end of the alley. “The tunnel.”

Mara turned. Beneath the collapsed wall, a narrow iron door showed between two slabs of masonry. The old customs tunnel. The key in the water. She snatched it up and ran.

Behind her, the crowd followed.

The door’s lock was swollen with rust. Mara jammed the brass key into it and twisted. Nothing happened.

“Move!” the bleeding man shouted.

The white glow seeped through the dust wall at the alley’s mouth.

Mara twisted harder. The key bent.

“Come on,” she whispered.

A hand grabbed her coat. “Leave it!”

She drove her elbow backward. The man grunted, but did not let go.

“Let go of me!”

“We’ll die here!”

“So will everyone if we stay!”

The lock clicked.

The door opened inward onto darkness.

Mara plunged through first. The tunnel smelled of wet iron and old sewage. Behind her, bodies crowded the entrance. Someone fell. Someone else screamed that the light had reached the alley.

Mara ran down the narrow passage, one hand against the wall, the other held before her. The countdown glowed through the darkness.

00:58:11

The tunnel shook.

Bricks dropped from the ceiling. Water burst from a cracked pipe and struck Mara across the ribs. She staggered, losing her grip on the key. It clattered ahead into the black.

“Keep moving!” the bleeding man yelled.

Mara followed the sound of it.

The passage forked after thirty paces. One branch sloped downward, filling with seawater. The other climbed toward a rusted ladder.

She chose the ladder.

Behind her, the tunnel filled with shouts. A pale brightness seeped through the lower passage, turning the water white.

Mara climbed. The rungs cut into her palms. She reached the top and shoved at the hatch.

It did not move.

She shoved again.

“Help me!” she shouted.

The bleeding man reached her. Together they forced the hatch open. It burst upward, spilling them into a courtyard behind the old saltworks.

The city beyond had become unrecognizable.

Saltmere’s harbor district ended at a clean, glowing line. Behind it, buildings still stood. Ahead, the docks and streets were gone, replaced by a smooth expanse of pale stone that ran all the way to the sea. Ships rested on it at impossible angles, their hulls frozen in the act of sinking.

The survivors crawled from the tunnel.

For one breath, Mara saw the inland road. It was open. Refugee wagons crowded it, moving north beneath a sky full of black marks.

Then the marks aligned.

The god’s voice returned.

“THE SECOND HOUR HAS BEGUN.”

A new symbol burned into Mara’s wrist beneath the countdown.

Names appeared in the air above the courtyard, written in white fire.

KESSLER, ELISE.

KESSLER, LINA.

KESSLER, JONAS.

Mara stopped breathing.

Her mother. Her sister. Her father, dead for six years.

The names hung above the ruins, bright enough to cast shadows.

“No,” Mara said.

The bleeding man looked at her. “Who are they?”

“My family.”

The first name flickered.

KESSLER, ELISE - 00:57:03

Mara closed her fingers around the brass key until its teeth cut her skin.

The road north waited beyond the courtyard. The refugees were already fleeing along it. She could follow them and survive the next strike. She could leave the harbor, leave the names, leave the question of why Veyr had branded her instead of erasing her.

The white letters shifted.

A final line appeared beneath her family’s names.

MARA KESSLER - WITNESS

The mark on her wrist tightened like a chain.

Mara looked toward the inland road, then back at the burning list.

“Where are they?” she asked the sky.

Veyr answered without anger, which made it worse.

“WHERE YOU LEFT THEM.”

The countdown continued.

Mara turned from the refugees and ran toward the city.

End of chapter one. 7 more chapters in the full book.