Hypothetically, if you lined up every coincidence and every statistical hail mary, and you multiplied every sliver of a probability onto a probability, and every lucky break fell perfectly together in an unraveling contingency--there was a chance that you could survive a stareater nuke.
The blast is over so quickly. One minute the city-state is bustling with the ordinary affairs of its populace, who visit marketplaces or eat meals or spin clothes or forge weapons. Then the void mages finish their chant, and the hand of entropy crushes it into nothing. Buildings collapse and are devoured as indiscriminately as bodies, and the few inanimate remnants that remain are blackened by the ashy dust of excision.
The stareater nuke is swift and absolute death, but 5 minutes after it passes its silent verdict upon the memory of a lively city, Illumina pushes his way out of the collapsed, half-eaten corner of a metalworking shop, climbs to shaky feet, stares ahead with shell-shocked, vacant eyes. His heart is loud in its panicked thudding--beating and unbelievably, inexplicably alive. Maybe it's the cheap amulet he bought from a mystic that morning, with a grain enough of exotic miscellany to resonate with the destruction of surrounding charms and enchantments, amplifying its supposedly protective blessing. Maybe it's the way Illumina was standing in a shop on the outskirts of the city, just behind enough people to be buried in their disintegrating corpses when the stareater tore dark unknowns into reality. Maybe it was the future slips he drew a month ago, foretelling a siren, a castle, and other fate threads he doesn't believe in--but maybe he should now, because it's every maybe lined up together to leave him standing there, knee deep in the warped remains of a city, and an empty plain of nothing.
Illumina's not the best under pressure, but his blind spot in the eyes of fate extends a little further, because when debris softens into ashy, indistinct shapes around him, and slides closer towards a vortex deepening at the center of the city, he scrambles towards the city's edge, and finds footholds in all the right places to make it to the pale grass beyond. As soon as his feet touch solid living earth, he runs and doesn't look back at the empty maw of sloughing decay and cold terror he leaves behind.
