The Seeker had not intended to return to the shrine.
It had collapsed weeks ago in a spectacle of flame, stone, and livestreamed panic. News anchors debated whether faulty wiring or divine intervention had brought the roof down; influencers sold shirts emblazoned with grainy frames of his silhouette in the wreckage. He had sworn never to touch that place again. But his scar had burned all night, a white-hot pulse that throbbed with its own disobedient rhythm, tugging him like a hook through his ribs.
So he returned.
The city around the shrine still bore its bruises. Storefronts were boarded up, traffic lights flickered erratically as if obeying an unfamiliar hierarchy of gods, and weeds grew fast in cracks of pavement—unnatural speed, verdant riots. He pushed through a knot of pilgrims camped near the police cordon, each holding icons that disagreed with one another: a plastic Virgin glued to a Buddha's lotus, paper-cut Norse runes stitched with Shinto sunbursts, Aztec glyphs traced on wax cups from a coffee chain. Their chants braided into nonsense and yet…something coherent.
The Seeker listened a moment. His scar flared, unseen.
Inside the collapsed shrine was a husk of stone and silence. The roof was gone, replaced by a bruised sky caught between daylight and dusk though his watch insisted it was nearly noon. Pigeons flapped overhead, and every wingbeat seemed to echo with another word, another language.
"Late, late, late," said a voice.
He turned and saw a man—or something borrowing the shape of one—leaning against a cracked pillar. He wore a courier's jacket, faded blue, with pockets that rustled as if full of letters never meant to arrive. His smile was wide, foxlike, and his eyes shifted colors when one tried too long to pin them down.
"Hermes," the Seeker said, the name thick in his mouth.
"Guilty as charged, though rarely guilty in court. Technicalities, you understand." Hermes pushed off the pillar and paced, light-footed, as though gravity had to be reminded of its duties. "Messages for you. Three at once, and every sender insists theirs is the only one you must heed. The problem of couriers, you see, is that we deliver contradictions for a living."
He produced three envelopes, each sweating faint light. One was sealed with Norse runes that hissed when the Seeker leaned closer. Another bore an Egyptian ibis feather pressed into the wax. The last was scorched around the edges, smelling of blood and sandalwood.
"Read carefully, don't read at all, read aloud—your choice determines the punchline," Hermes said. "I do so adore a man who despises choices."
The Seeker's hand twitched toward the envelopes but stopped. He remembered Xuemei's warning, her dry laugh: Every god thinks they are your author, but you are the one writing. Xuemei, who was gone—whether buried in riot rubble or vanished by the Keepers, he dared not guess.
Before he could answer, the air split with boots and lantern-light.
Figures emerged from the shadows, black coats marked with the sigil of flame-in-cage. The Lantern Keepers. They carried their namesake lanterns, beams not of warmth but of suppression; wherever the light swept, symbols on the shrine's walls dimmed, pilgrims' chants outside faltered, even the weeds shrank back into cracks.
"Target sighted," one barked.
But another voice answered in dissent: "Not for purge. He must be preserved."
Two groups. The Seeker blinked, realizing the fracture Coyote had promised was real. Half the Keepers leveled weapons—rifles jury-rigged with relic shards—while the other half held their lanterns high, protective, as though fending off their brethren.
"Do you see?" Hermes whispered in delight. "Even the librarians have lost their index. Nobody agrees on what you are."
The Seeker's scar seared, a furnace under his shirt. He staggered, clutching the pillar, as words—not his—spilled across his tongue. Old syllables, older than any pantheon claimed, humming with architecture. The envelopes in Hermes' hands pulsed in rhythm, three conflicting heartbeats.
Then, a shout from the rubble:
"Stand down!"
Agent Nakamura. She wore no lantern, no sigil, only the badge of a government already irrelevant. Her pistol was steady, though her eyes flickered with something between pity and disbelief. She looked at the Seeker as if he were a weapon she'd been ordered to carry but never trained to fire.
"This ends here," she said, though her tone betrayed she no longer believed such endings existed.
The shrine became a geometry of factions:—Hermes, amused courier, juggling contradictions.—Lantern Keepers split, archive versus purge.—Nakamura, pragmatic, trembling at the edges.—And the Seeker, scar burning, words older than memory spilling from his throat.
Light flared from the scar—blinding, silent. All fell still.
Hermes stopped mid-juggle, grin frozen, as though hearing something even he had no license to carry. Lantern beams flickered useless, failing to suppress. Nakamura lowered her gun, staring as if seeing the Seeker for the first time, or perhaps for the last.
From beneath the light came a voice. Not Hermes', not Odin's ravens, not Thoth's scribe-song. Something lower. Something foundational.
It spoke in fragments only the scar could bear, and yet every soul present understood:
Before gods, there was the architecture.
The shrine groaned, stones shifting as though bowing. Pigeons scattered in panic. The pilgrims outside screamed, though whether in devotion or terror could not be told.
The Seeker felt the words burning inside him, rewriting marrow.
Hermes, for once, did not smile. He tucked the envelopes back into his jacket, gave a mock bow, and whispered, "I am no longer the messenger here."
The scar blazed again, and reality bent—light curving, language cracking, silence demanding.
Then the chapter ended, mid-voice, as though the universe itself had turned the page.