"For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
Later they would call it the Decimation.
Fractures cracking across skin, flesh withering into dust, life fading in a single instant.
The ashes were swept away by the wind, flaking into a thousand facsimiles of themselves, and for a moment they could have been beautiful, caught as they were in a dancing tornado like so many dust motes in wan sunlight. Men crumpled where they stood, women collapsed mid-step, and children were caught mid-turn, as though searching whence this destruction came, the single simple motion enough to disintegrate them in a moment. Toys fell from vanished hands. The sun was blocked by a cloud of grey smoke.
Later, they would call it the Decimation, and Mr Thorn would scoff. Not entirely accurate, he would say. The Romans had taken only one tenth, and Thanos had taken half, exactly half. He referred to it as the Reckoning.
No form of life was left unscathed. All fell to ruination. Miss Loss had planted fresh flowers in the garden of the Eyrie only the day before, and in a single instant they withered. Their roots shrivelled and grew black, petals wilting from their stems at the merest touch of her fingertips, the colour draining from them as blood from a cooling corpse. They died in their multitudes, lost in swathes as though to the scythe of a reaper, as so too were millions of souls harvested in turn.
And yet, from destruction and devastation and decimation, existence wormed forth. Life clung to life.
All across the world, in various locations - a Tokyo subway, the wide open green of a Kenyan plateau, a New York street - clouds of dust and ash that had once had names and faces and lives coalesced, like a murmur of flies spinning in concert. And when they faded and fluttered and fell away once more, they left flesh and form in their wake: a child, no older than two years old, wide awake and utterly, utterly silent.
"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
Later they would call them the Forsaken.
Infants and children, unblemished and whole, entirely without memory of whence they came.
Most were taken into government custody, distributed between orphanages. Preliminary medical tests revealed no anomalies, no aberrations, no unusual features, except for their miraculous appearances and spontaneous creation. And in the long days and weeks that followed the Decimation, no one was inclined to ask too many questions. Chalk it up to another strange occurrence in a week that was full of them. There were too many lost to mourn to bother oneself with the found.
Later, they would call them the Forsaken, and Mr Thorn would shake his head. Hyperbole, he would say. They had not been abandoned; he had seen to that personally. He called them the Orphans.
The first Forsaken began displaying unusual abilities only a single short day after their strange not-birth, and the others followed in suit without delay. It would have been impossible to discern rhyme or reason from the powers they possessed, for there was clearly no pattern - some were powerful, some were nearly useless, and others still were so very esoteric and specific that it took years to discover they were gifted at all. They shared only a single trait: their powers extracted a heavy toll.
And of the thirty Forsaken children that were reported, Mr Thorn found and adopted seven. A good number, seven.
In some cases, it took him weeks to locate another. Some of the children did not even realise they were Forsaken, rather than abandoned at the orphanage in the normal way. Some had been taken before the state had found them. Some had already died. In all, Mr Thorn encountered twenty three Forsaken children. And in the end, he brought seven of them into his home - only seven.
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
Later they would call it the Urnfield.
Ghosts clung to its very foundations. The gate was kept locked. The grounds stretched wide and desolate.
The seven children were themselves no older than seven when they arrived, and eyed one another with apprehension and distrust. A strange thing, to have six siblings created from dust and ash. Acceptance came slowly; trust, slower still; love, for some, never grew. They were flawed figures with strange gifts, and tension often flourished. Nonetheless, they were grateful for this odd haven they had found. The house was too big for so few people, and its very bones felt hollow.
Later, they would call it the Urnfield, and Mr Thorn would look disapproving. Unnecessarily foreboding, he would say. And yet he would not permit them to call it home. It was, in his parlance, the Aviary.
Over the years, they dwelled in this strange house, and honed their gifts, and lived a strange facsimile of an ordinary life. Mr Thorn would not permit them to call him father; on that point, he was clear. And yet he did expect them to become a family. Not only a family, but one that could use their gifts to help in crises, to defend others from danger, to improve the world. And this they did for seven years.
And in their fifteenth year of existence, just as the Forsaken began to wonder about their origins, Mr Thorn vanished from his office on a clear October night.
They never saw him again. Old tensions in the family rose - brother blaming sister, sister accusing brother. Some saw their opportunity for a normal life. Some saw their chance to search for answers. Others still were cast adrift, lost without the guidance of the strange, enigmatic man who had been their sole constant in life. There was no body to bury; the schism came without ceremony. The gates were shut for a final time, as even Miss Loss left the old building to ruin. The family went seven years without seeing one another, until each received the same ominous message to reunite at the Urnfield.