CHAPTER 228: IFRIT

[Narrated by one who has witnessed the moment when ordinary days become the last normal memory people will ever possess, who knows that catastrophe announces itself in tremors before the breaking, who understands that hell arrives not with trumpets but with silence before the screaming starts]

In the outer districts, the market breathed.

It was a living thing. Merchants called their wares, bread, furs, winter roots with the rhythm of a well-practiced heart. Children wove between stalls, their laughter the sound of life insisting on itself. Guards stood bored at their posts, dreaming of nothing but warmth and quiet.

Then the first tremor.

A whisper. A sigh beneath the stones. Most didn’t notice. Those who did glanced down, shrugged, and returned to their haggling.

The second tremor was a punch.

The ground rolled. Cobblestones rattled like teeth. Signs swung on their hooks. Conversations died in open mouths. Eyes met, wide with a question too early to speak. Horses screamed, pulling against their ties.

"Just the cold," someone said, a lie offered like a prayer.

No one believed it.

The third tremor was the truth.

The marketplace bucked. Carts rolled. Goods spilled. Children were snatched into arms. The sound was a deep, grinding scream from the world’s belly. Guards drew weapons that were suddenly toys.

Then the rhythm began. Not tremors anymore. A heartbeat. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.

Beneath their feet.

"Open ground!" a guard captain roared, his voice already lost in the rising panic.

But the ground was the enemy. Where could they run?

Dogs howled. Birds fled the rooftops in a storm of panicked wings. And then... the heat.

It did not whisper. It arrived.

Winter evaporated. The air shimmered, a mirage in a city of ice. Snow on roofs wept. Icicles fell and shattered. Elaborate ice sculptures melted, their beauty dissolving into tears.

People choked on it. They felt it through furs, through wool. Sweat bloomed on skin made for frost. The air became soup.

"What is happening?!"

No answer came.

Then... the CRACK.

It was not a sound. It was the universe splitting at the seams. Felt in the marrow. In the soul.

The very center of the square erupted.

Ancient cobblestones, laid to last forever, screamed as they were torn upward. The earth opened a glowing, jagged mouth. Ten feet wide. Then twenty. It tore through the square with vile intelligence, a black zigzag of hunger.

Stone exploded into the air, raining down as deadly shrapnel. A cart vanished into the glowing gorge. Stalls collapsed, their wares swallowed by the redness below.

Then... the screams. True terror, given voice.

People ran. They scrambled over each other. The edges of the crack crumbled, swallowing those who thought they were safe.

And the light... it poured out.

Not sunlight. Hell-light. An orange-red glare that painted the familiar world in the colors of a nightmare.

The heat that followed was not air. It was a wall.

A visible blast of superheated death that erupted from the pit. It threw bodies like dry leaves. They landed broken, burning, while from the glowing wound, shapes began to pull themselves into the world of flesh and fire.

The air wavered, a visible, distorting curtain. The marketplace shimmered like a mirage. It was not their city anymore. It was a painting left too close to a fire.

Breathing became torture. The air was thick, sulfurous, burning. People gasped, clawing at their throats. They were fish in a pot coming to boil.

Those in winter furs tore at them, mad with heat. The very clothes that had always meant survival were now shrouds, cooking them alive.

But that was the least of their problems...

Because next came... the sound.

It rose from the slit. Deeper than the first crack. It was the sound of the earth’s rage. Of old, dark things stirring in absolute blackness. A roar of tectonic hate. Within it: the grind of colossal bones, the shatter of bedrock, and a climbing, scraping, swarming rhythm.

They were coming.

The first hand gripped the edge.

Its fingers were stone, webbed with glowing cracks, molten light bleeding through. It was not stone. It was pain given a shape. The cobblestone beneath it liquefied, pooling like fat in a pan.

A second hand. Arms of corded, shifting magma. Shoulders built for breaking worlds.

Then the head.

The face was a melted monument. Features that might have been noble once, now warped by eternal fire. But the eyes... the eyes were living flame. White-hot. Intelligent. Malice made into a gaze that swept the square and found it wanting.

The demon hauled itself fully into the world.

Eight feet of nightmare. Its skin was a living map of cracks, healing and splitting with each slow, tectonic breath. Droplets of molten flesh fell, hissing, starting small fires where they landed.

It stood. It turned its head. The movement was horrifically smooth.

It saw the ice. The snow. The fragile, frozen beauty of the city that had been built atop its tomb.

Its hatred was a physical wave.

The demon’s mouth opened. Its throat was a furnace.

The sound that tore out was not a scream. It was the death of silence.

It was the rending of reality. Every window in the square exploded into glittering dust. People clutched their ears and fell, blood streaming between their fingers, their balance annihilated, their minds scalded.

The message was not in words. It was in the vibration that broke stone and spirit:

We remember. We have returned. Your winter ends now.

The first demon was not alone.

From the glowing throat of the crack, a second clawed its way into the light. Then a third. A fourth. A seething, climbing tide of molten forms, each a little different, each a unique sculpture of rage, their collective heat now a visible wall, their glowing eyes lighting the steam-filled square like a hundred fallen stars.

They kept coming. An endless procession from the world’s red, angry heart.

They came in a terrible symphony of forms.

Not all were the same. Some were smaller, six feet of coiled, molten velocity, built not for crushing but for chasing, their forms lean and predatory, moving with a blurring speed that left afterimages of fire in the air.

Others were monuments of rage, towering near ten feet, their shoulders broad enough to block streets, their arms thick with magma-swollen muscle that promised they could break fortifications by walking through them.

But they all burned. They all moved with the same terrible, ancient purpose. They all radiated a hatred so perfected by centuries of imprisonment that it was no longer an emotion... it was the fuel of their being.

Counting them was futile. As more fissures tore open across the district, the numbers became meaningless. This was not random. The cracks were precise... strategic eruptions at the weakest points in the ancient seals. Someone had mapped the city’s magical foundations. Someone had planned this.

Multiple openings meant multiple fronts. The district was not just attacked; it was surrounded, strangled, cut off from hope.

The demons flowed into the streets with a tactical intelligence that shamed mortal armies. Some ran on all fours, bestial and low, their passage melting cobblestones into glowing orange trails that marked their path like burning arrows. Others walked upright with a dreadful, casual stride, as if the screaming, scrambling humans were part of the spectacle, a prelude to the main performance.

Every footfall was a brand. Molten prints sunk into the stone, cooling slowly into permanent scars. Wooden buildings burst into flame from mere proximity; the heat they bled was enough to ignite timber without a touch. Stone blackened, cracked with the sound of gunshots, its integrity failing under thermal shock. The city’s beauty, its ice filigree, its glazed sculptures, detonated into sudden geysers of steam, shrouding streets in a blinding, scalding fog.

A guard... young, his face still soft with idealism... broke from the panic. Sword high, he charged, crying out for duty and the Emperor.

The nearest demon moved. Its hand... a construct of flowing stone and fire... shot out, too fast to follow. It engulfed the guard’s face, cutting off his shout.

The sound that followed was a wet, hissing pop. The guard collapsed. His armor rang against the ground, empty. Inside, what remained was a shriveled, carbonized thing, flesh pulled tight over bone like leather left too long by a fire.

Another guard, an ice-mage in military harness, stepped forward. Her hands were wreathed in a blizzard’s fury. She unleashed a beam of cold so intense the air itself crystallized in its wake. It struck the demons in the chest.

The ice did not take. It screamed. It flashed into a boiling cloud of steam that hid the demon for three agonizing heartbeats.

Then the demons walked through the dissipating fog. Unharmed. Unslowed. Its fiery gaze seemed almost... amused.

A backhand, casual as a man swatting a fly. The mage vanished through a shopfront in an explosion of splintered wood and glass. She did not emerge.

Then, the panic became a living entity. It swallowed order whole. People became a single, writhing animal, trampling itself. A mother shrieked a name lost to the roar. An old man went down under a dozen fleeing feet, his cry smothered. It was every soul for itself, a brutal calculus where mercy was the first luxury burned away.

The demons hunted movement. Their glowing eyes tracked the flood of prey, selecting targets with a chilling deliberation. This was not just feeding. This was sport.

One demon closed on a family. The father spread his arms, a pathetic shield of flesh and love against the inferno.

The Zahkar’s touch was almost gentle. It laid a burning hand upon the man’s chest.

The father did not burn. He vanished. A flash of light, a puff of ash, and he was gone, his outline etched for a second in the air before the wind took him.

His wife and daughter saw it. The daughter’s scream was a high, endless wire of sound, a note of pure horror that would pierce the memory of every survivor.

Another demon reached the central well, the heart of the district, its stone rim worn smooth by generations. The demon plunged its arm into the water.

The explosion was instantaneous. The water did not boil; it detonated into a superheated shockwave of steam. A white, expanding death.

Those within thirty feet were cooked alive, skin sloughing off in red sheets. Those farther back were scalded, stumbling, blinded, their own screams bubbling in ruined throats as they clogged the streets in their agony.

The demons spread, a tide of primordial hate. They were plague, wildfire, and divine retribution all in one. They moved with the patience of eternity, finally set loose upon the descendants of their jailers, and they were only beginning.