The first sign was the silence.
Not the kind that comes with peace — but the kind that arrives when the world holds its breath.
Lyraen noticed it at dawn. The river below the valley had always sung as it moved, a constant murmur of life. But this morning, the water glided past without a sound, its surface flat as glass. The birds didn't stir. Even the wind seemed to forget which way to blow.
Only the light moved — faint streaks of gold that quivered through the mist, as if the sun itself were uncertain it belonged here.
She stood on the hillside, cloak drawn tight, watching the sky ripple. For days now, the heavens had been behaving strangely. Stars had begun to appear where none had been before, arranged in constellations that didn't exist. Sometimes they pulsed softly, like heartbeats. Other times they flared and vanished, leaving behind only a ringing sound that echoed faintly in her chest.
It was as if creation itself had begun to breathe out of rhythm.
By midday, people from the nearby towns had gathered in the fields. They looked upward, pointing, whispering. Above them, the horizon shimmered like heat, and faint shapes moved within it — fragments of other skies, overlapping with their own.
A crimson sun. A ring of floating mountains. A sea suspended upside down.
Images that blinked into being for moments, then dissolved into mist.
Lyraen could feel something behind those visions — a presence trying to press through. Each time the light twisted, a deep hum resonated in her bones. She knelt and placed her hand against the soil. It was warm. Throbbing. Alive.
The world was not breaking apart.
It was remembering other versions of itself.
That night, she dreamed again.
This time, she stood at the edge of an ocean made of mirrors. The sky above was torn — threads of silver light dangling from the darkness like veins. Across the horizon, other worlds hung like lanterns: red, blue, violet — each turning slowly, their oceans gleaming, their cities burning.
From their edges drifted shapes — shadows with voices that spoke without words.
The Seeds are calling each other.
The roots remember their origin.
And one among them is waking too soon.
Lyraen turned toward the voice and saw herself reflected in the mirror sea. But her reflection was no longer her own — its eyes burned gold, and its skin shimmered with faint lines of starlight.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
The reflection smiled.
The echo of what you will become.
Then the dream cracked apart like shattered glass.
Lyraen woke gasping. Her room glowed faintly again — but this time, the patterns across the floor weren't lines of light. They were runes, faint symbols alive with motion, crawling like veins of gold across the stone.
She reached out to touch one, and it pulsed beneath her fingers — warm, alive, responsive.
Her heart stuttered as the mark Kael had left upon her palm years ago blazed to life. It beat once, twice, then steadied — in perfect rhythm with the light beneath her.
She felt him.
Not as a voice, but as gravity — as if something vast and distant had turned its gaze toward her again.
"Kael…"
No reply — but the air trembled. The candle flame bent sideways, drawn toward the open window, toward the distant sky where faint violet lines wove like cracks through the stars.
Something was happening out there. Something enormous.
And it was calling to her.
Lyraen stood, trembling, her pulse matching the rhythm of the sky.
The Pulse of Dying Worlds.
The phrase echoed in her mind, unbidden, yet familiar — like a song she had once known by heart.
She looked out across the valley. The river below no longer flowed; it hung suspended in midair, glittering like liquid glass. Above it, a shard of light was descending — slow, deliberate, beautiful, and terrible.
When it struck the earth miles away, there was no explosion — only a wave of silence that rolled across the land, and for a heartbeat, she saw another world through the rift it left behind: towers made of crystal, oceans of fire, and a single throne of white light standing empty.
Lyraen whispered to herself, "He's coming back."
And far beyond the stars, Kael — now half consumed by the light of his own creation — opened his eyes.