He snapped his fingers.
The mist transformed. Deep golds and violent crimsons bled into the air until the entire summit became a canvas, and a world I had never seen bloomed outward like ink dropped in still water.
Looking up, I saw a view that was out of this world.
The sky was wrong—too many moons stacked like pale coins at different heights, each casting its own shadow across a landscape that shouldn't have worked but did.
Mountains floated. Rivers ran upward. Cities built from jade and compressed starlight clung to the sides of clouds.
"My world," he spoke, his voice carrying without effort across the painted air. "Beautiful, wasn't it?"
Past tense.
Then the towers came.
I watched them erupt exactly the same way they must have erupted in mine.
"We thought it was an invasion," he continued, moving through the projection like a man walking through an old memory.
"Every god mobilized. We assumed there was a source—something we could fight, negotiate with, destroy."
