The Sky Remembered Fear
There was peace once—
a fragile, accidental silence held together by prayers that no one truly believed in.
But peace is the breath drawn before the scream.
The first to feel it were the stars. Their light bent inward, as though the heavens themselves recoiled. Comets froze mid-arc, halos dimmed, and every radiant thing looked down in trembling awe toward the black horizon that bled across the firmament.
The mortals did not understand it at first. Farmers spoke of eclipses, scholars wrote of omens. But somewhere, in the hollow chambers of existence, something old stirred—a pulse that did not belong to this realm.
It came as sound.
A low, resonant hum that made mountains shiver.
The birds fell dead from the sky, their songs inverted into whispers that no wind carried. Oceans convulsed as if some buried leviathan had awakened beneath them. Forests bled sap like open wounds, roots coiling away from the soil in fear.
And then came the silence.
A silence so absolute that even thought seemed blasphemous.
High in the northern spires of the Eon Temple, an oracle awoke screaming—her eyes glowing with the pale fire of prophecy. She clawed at her throat, choking on words that were not her own until they tore free:
"The Void remembers us."
Across continents, dreams fractured in unison. Kings awoke drenched in sweat, warriors felt their blades hum as if alive, and beasts in their lairs whimpered at the edges of shadows that hadn't been there before.
In the academies of light, archmagi gathered under trembling stars. They measured the distortion, the unholy inversion of resonance patterns spreading across the ley channels.
"It's not a spell," one whispered.
"It's a will."
The skies answered them.
For three seconds, the sun died.
No clouds moved. No flame flickered. The world hung suspended in a single moment of divine terror—until the sun reignited, blackened and wrong, a dying sphere bleeding darkness.
And above it, like a wound torn through existence, opened an eye.
No shape, no color—only awareness. The weight of something vast pressing against reality's surface, testing its strength.
Beneath that cosmic gaze, even gods remembered what fear was.
In the crystal capital of the Elarin—the radiant city that had once escaped his massacre—a chorus of priests fell to their knees, their crystalline bodies flickering with fractures of light.
"Something's returned," murmured the High Luminar. "Something older than us all."
In the shadowed lands of the Dralith—scaled warlords with molten blood—volcanoes erupted in unison. Their chieftain, an immortal bound in obsidian, stared into the black sky and whispered to no one:
"He has crossed the veil."
And far beneath the oceans, in trenches where no mortal breath could reach, titans rolled in their sleep—ancient beings carved before time, sensing the distortion.
"The Voidborn awakens…"
Even the dead were restless.
In forgotten catacombs, bones rattled.
Not from life—
but from recognition.
They remembered a resonance older than gods, older than language. It pulsed faintly, like a forgotten song replaying across dimensions. Each beat of that invisible rhythm corroded the natural order, bending gravity, time, and will.
The veil between worlds—the fragile membrane separating creation from what lurked beneath—began to tear.
Fissures of pure black light stretched across the horizon, devouring color. From them came the whispers, layered and discordant:
"He walks… He walks… He walks…"
Mothers clutched their children as night refused to end. Wolves fled their dens and howled not to the moon, but to something deeper, something beneath it.
And in the heart of every sentient being, from beggars to emperors, bloomed an emotion they could not name—an ancient memory of servitude.
The world remembered him.
Then the lightning fell.
Not white or blue—but violet, edged with silver, slicing the heavens open like veins across a corpse. Each bolt struck with the weight of a thousand dying suns, forming a sigil in the clouds: a vast, burning circle with a black sun at its core.
Every eye turned toward it.
Every mind screamed to look away.
But they could not.
Because behind that symbol, hidden within its endless depth, something was coming through.
The old prophets—those few who still spoke the true tongues—trembled as they chanted the forbidden verses, words that had not been spoken since the dawn of the First Fracture:
"When the Sky remembers fear, and the Light learns silence,
He shall return clothed in darkness,
And every god shall bow."
And then the winds died again.
Only a heartbeat remained—an eternal pause before revelation.
Somewhere far above them, beyond stars and spirit, beyond dream and flame, a figure stood between realities.
He did not move.
He did not need to.
For the world was already bending toward him.
To be continued in Part II — "The Gods Broke Their Silence."