Before the first tower rose, before the first gunfire echoed, before the first avatar screamed with borrowed voices — the gods ruled.
But they ruled poorly.
Their love was violent. Their justice, flawed. And when humanity bled beneath their shadows, we rose — not in rebellion, but in revelation.
We did not kill our gods. We broke them.
Their temples were dismantled stone by stone, their names erased from sacred texts, their forms torn apart in wars that scorched the skies and shattered continents. Yet gods do not die like men. They scatter, like embers in the wind — into blood, into stone, into memory.
And so Mycaelia became what it is now: not a world abandoned by the divine, but haunted by it.
Relics hum beneath the skin of cities. Magic coils in data streams. Corporations auction pieces of the divine to the highest bidder. Soldiers go to war not for nations, but for fragments of prophecy. And in the alleys, in the temples, in the sky, something is waking.
Whispers spread: a child born glowing with godlight. A relic screaming in a forgotten tongue. An avatar bleeding black fire.
Some call it the Return.
Others, the End.
But in the rusting belly of Vathys, among the battle-scarred towers of Throsium, in the blinding heights of Delcaeon, and across the dreaming sands of the Hollow Steppe, a new generation is rising — not as worshippers, but as wielders.
They are not gods.
But they are close.
And the world will never be ready.