EAGLE

Prologue – The Fire in Dead light

[Night. Deadlight District. Fifteen Years Ago.]

The city never slept. Not in Deadlight. Not where shadows walked like men, and men died like whispers.

The boy ran barefoot through rain-slick alleys, firelight dancing on broken glass like demon eyes. Sirens howled in the distance but avoided the district — everyone did. Deadlight had its own silence, its own secrets. The kind that crawled under your skin and whispered things you were never meant to hear.

Elijah Creed was just twelve.

And tonight, he was about to lose everything.

The air reeked of smoke, gasoline, and the metallic tang of blood. Elijah turned the last corner, sprinting toward the weathered building everyone called the Healing House — a sanctuary kept by his mother. The last place in Deadlight where people still believed in both prayer and power.

He skidded through the front doors. The inside was still and warm. Candles flickered at every corner, casting strange, swaying shadows over tribal markings chalked on the walls and floorboards. His mother always said these symbols were veils— keeping evil out, or maybe keeping something worse in.

“Mom!” he shouted, chest heaving. “They’re here! I saw—!”

No reply.

Then the room shifted.

Not physically — but spiritually. The temperature dropped, the candles flickered blue, and Elijah felt a pressure behind his eyes — like something watching him from inside his own skin.

Then came the hiss.

It slithered through the air like a serpent’s breath.

Three figures emerged from the hallway beyond the altar — tall, gaunt, faceless. Their skin shimmered like oil, their feet never touched the ground, and their eyes glowed with milky light. One of them dripped a black sludge that ate into the floor where it landed, releasing an acrid hiss with every drop.

Elijah froze.

One of them tilted its head in a slow, unnatural motion and raised its hand.

Then—

“GET AWAY FROM MY SON!”

She appeared like lightning.

His mother — Imani Creed. Barefoot. Drenched in rain and ash. Her eyes blazing with ancient gold, her hands crackling with light. She moved faster than the shadow men, faster than human sight could follow.

The first one lunged — she met it mid-air, her palm glowing bright as a star. There was a flash, a sound like thunder cracking inside a bottle, and the thing exploded into nothing but black mist.

Elijah backed away, heart thundering in his ears.

“RUN!” she shouted, hands already flaring again. “Go through the back—don’t stop—GO!”

“I can fight—!”

“YOU’RE NOT READY!”

The other two charged.

Elijah ran.

The back hallway was already burning. Flames crept across the walls, chasing him like hungry mouths. The smoke bit into his lungs, but he kept going — crashing through the rear door, out into the alley.

Then — an explosion.

He turned.

The entire building went up in a roar of light and ash. Flaming wood and debris burst into the night sky. Through the fire, he saw a silhouette — his mother — arms wide, surrounded by the last two shadows, tangled in her light.

And then she screamed a word that would haunt him forever.

“FLY!”

The shadows consumed her.

The temple collapsed.

Elijah fell to his knees as sparks rained down like burning feathers. He didn’t cry. He couldn’t. The scream had ripped something out of him.

Something he would never get back.

For days, he wandered.

A child with ash in his hair and no home to return to. No one believed him when he said what he saw. No one cared. The police called it a gang war. The news blamed it on a gas leak.

But Elijah knew better.

He’d seen the real face of evil — and it had no name.

The dreams began after that.

Every night, he stood at the edge of a cliff, and from the fire below rose a massive golden eagle— wings so wide they blotted the moon. Its eyes glowed the same color his mother’s had in the moment she saved him.

It stared into him. Through him.

And she spoke again.

“There is war between the worlds, my son. You were born in the space between. One day, you’ll return with fire in your wings.”

When he woke, his skin burned with patterns that glowed faintly in the dark. Ash marks — impossible to wash off. His eyes saw further. His hands shook with energy.

He wasn’t just alive.

He’d been changed.

[Present Day. The Nest.]

The man standing in the Nest’s silent war chamber was no longer a boy.

Elijah Creed had become something else.

His armor was matte black, feather-lined and eagle-emblazoned. His eyes glowed faintly under the visor, watching a holographic map of Deadlight flicker and flash red with new reports.

There was movement in the supernatural underworld again.

Possessions. Murders. Vanishings.

The veil between worlds… was bleeding.

He pressed a button on his gauntlet.

“Wing Unit, report.”

One by one, their voices answered.

Falcon. Talon. Shadow. Raven. Swift.

Ready.

He turned toward the chamber’s steel door, now shaped like a massive eagle’s wing.

“We move at midnight,” he said.

Tonight, Deadlight would see him again.

And this time, he wouldn’t run.

He’d fly.