When the Sky Forgot Itself
It was not the end of the world, though the stars had started to fall.
Not all at once. Not with fire. They simply... blinked out. One by one, quiet as old prayers.
The shepherds in the Hollowlands were the first to notice, staring up from their nightfolds and seeing constellations cut apart like butchered beasts. In the deep cities, where temple bells no longer rang, the seers dreamed of a gate of bone and light. And in the northern marshes, a salt wind rose where no sea should breathe, and the dead whispered to roots that had never borne fruit.
They said it began with the breaking of Vaelak—the first seal, the oldest wound.
No horn was sounded. No armies stirred. Only a sigh across the world, deep and aching, like something long buried exhaling through the cracks.
And in the dark, she opened her eyes.
The girl. The forgotten. The gate.
She remembered no name, no place she called home. Only the silence of stone and the taste of blood in her mouth. The world had moved on without her, but the world was wrong now—fractured, untethered from the laws that once held it still. She could feel it. In her bones. In the pulse behind her eyes. In the way the wind called her toward things she could not yet name.
They would come for her. She had seen them in her dreams: the pale-masked cultists with serpent tongues, the fire-eyed queens, the veiled women who sang of spirals and storms. They all wanted a piece of her, though none understood what she truly was.
Except him.
The red-handed one. The young saint who bled too many and saved too few. The soccerer, of the broken sigil and burning eyes. He who once turned from prophecy, now cursed to walk beside it.
He found her not in triumph, but in ruin. Not in a cradle of stars, but in a ravine filled with ash and the bones of false kings. He should have ended her. That was the pact, the order, the oath. But something deeper stirred in him—something older than obedience.
Pity, perhaps. Or recognition.
He did not know what she was.
Not yet.
But he knew this: she was waking. And the world would not survive her dream.
Not unless he walked with her.
Not unless he broke first.