The sky was bleeding.
Eiden Vale stood on the rooftop of his university's philosophy building, watching the horizon split open like a wound in reality itself. The clouds had turned the color of burnt copper, and through the widening tear, something vast and terrible was emerging—not descending, but manifesting, as if it had always been there and humanity had simply failed to notice until now.
Around him, the world was ending in real time.
Car alarms shrieked in discordant harmony. Someone was screaming in the street below—a woman calling for her daughter, her voice raw with the kind of desperation that only comes when you know, with absolute certainty, that there will be no answer. Fire bloomed across the cityscape in sporadic bursts, but it wasn't spreading. It was simply appearing, as if the world itself had decided that burning was the appropriate aesthetic for its final moments.
Eiden's hands were steady as he lit a cigarette.
He'd stolen the pack from his professor's office twenty minutes ago, right after the sky had first started to crack. Dr. Harmond had already fled—probably to hold his family one last time, or pray to whatever god he'd spent his career deconstructing in lecture halls. Eiden had considered following him, had even made it halfway to the stairwell before stopping.
What was the point?
His mother had died three years ago. Cancer. His father two months later—grief, officially, though Eiden knew better. You don't drink yourself to death in eight weeks by accident. His younger sister had stopped answering his calls after the funeral, choosing her boyfriend's family over the hollow-eyed stranger her brother had become.
He had no one to run to. No deity to beg. No last words worth speaking.
So instead, he smoked, and he watched, and he waited for the punchline.
The sky tore wider.
What emerged wasn't an angel or a demon—both would have been too convenient, too moral. What stepped through the bleeding heavens was something else entirely: a figure of impossible geometry, its form shifting between shapes too complex for human eyes to process. One moment it appeared vaguely humanoid, the next it was all wings and wheels and eyes that burned with light that had no color. It was beautiful in the way a nuclear explosion is beautiful—overwhelming, absolute, and completely indifferent to the observer.
Then it spoke.
Every human being on Earth heard the same voice at the same instant—not in their ears, but directly in their minds, bypassing language entirely to plant meaning like a seed in soil:
"YOUR MORALITY WAS AN EXPERIMENT. YOU HAVE FAILED. LET THE WORLD RESET."
Eiden laughed.
It wasn't hysteria—he'd watched enough people break down over the past hour to know what that looked like. This was something else, something clearer. He laughed because finally, finally, someone had said it out loud.
"An experiment," he murmured around his cigarette, smoke curling from his lips. "God played scientist and we were the fucking lab rats."
The voice continued, and Eiden realized with a detached sort of fascination that it was explaining itself. God—or whatever this thing was—was justifying the apocalypse.
"I GAVE YOU FREE WILL TO OBSERVE WHETHER CONSCIOUSNESS COULD SELF-REGULATE TOWARD HARMONY. I GAVE YOU PAIN TO TEACH ADAPTATION. I GAVE YOU DEATH TO PROVIDE URGENCY. I GAVE YOU LOVE TO INSPIRE COOPERATION."
A pause. Somehow, impossibly, the cosmic entity's tone shifted. It almost sounded... tired.
"YOU CHOSE CRUELTY. YOU WEAPONIZED EVERY GIFT. YOU BUILT HIERARCHIES OF SUFFERING AND CALLED THEM CIVILIZATION. YOUR SPECIES HAS EXHAUSTED ITS NARRATIVE PURPOSE."
"Narrative purpose," Eiden repeated, his grin widening into something sharp and bitter. "We were a story to you."
Down in the street, a group of people had fallen to their knees, hands clasped in prayer. They were begging—for mercy, for salvation, for one more chance. Their words tumbled over each other in a desperate cacophony of devotion.
The divine figure didn't acknowledge them.
"DELETION WILL BE INSTANTANEOUS. YOU WILL NOT SUFFER."
"How merciful," Eiden said softly. He took a long drag from his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs, and let it out slowly. "Tell me something—if you're so tired of us, why make the announcement? Why not just... flip the switch? Why do you need us to know?"
He wasn't expecting an answer. Gods didn't engage in dialogue with ants.
But something changed in the air—a subtle shift, like the moment before lightning strikes. The cosmic entity's countless eyes turned, and for one impossible instant, Eiden felt the full weight of its attention press down on him specifically.
"BECAUSE," it said, and now its voice was quiet, almost gentle, "EVEN I REQUIRE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MY EXISTENCE. EVEN I NEED TO BE... SEEN."
Eiden's cigarette fell from his lips.
Understanding hit him like ice water to the skull. This thing—this god—wasn't destroying humanity out of anger or disappointment. It was doing it because after eons of being worshipped, feared, loved, and hated, it had realized something fundamental:
It was lonely.
"You're not testing us," Eiden breathed. "You never were. You're just... playing. And you got bored."
The entity said nothing, but the sky began to burn.
Pure white fire cascaded down like inverted rain, each droplet a miniature star. Where it touched, matter simply ceased—no explosion, no ash, just absence. Buildings vanished floor by floor. Trees blinked out of existence mid-sway. People dissolved mid-scream, their terror cut off so completely it was as if they'd never drawn breath to voice it.
Eiden watched a droplet of divine fire drift toward him, lazy and inevitable.
His mind was strangely calm. He thought about his philosophy classes, all those late-night debates about theodicy and the problem of evil. Professor Harmond's favorite question: If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why does suffering exist?
The answer, it turned out, was simple.
God wasn't benevolent. God wasn't malevolent either. God was neutral—a consciousness so vast and so detached that human morality was just another variable in an equation it had long since solved and grown tired of reviewing.
"A truly omnipotent god cannot be good," Eiden murmured, the words flowing out of him with the certainty of revelation. "Because goodness requires limitation. It requires choosing one thing over another, valuing one outcome above the rest. But if you're truly omnipotent..."
The fire was inches from his face now. He could feel its heat—not burning, but erasing, unmaking the very concept of Eiden Vale from the tapestry of existence.
"...then everything is equally meaningless to you. Every choice, every life, every world—just variables in infinite permutations."
He smiled one last time, and it was genuine—not bitter, not angry, just... clear.
"If God is tired," he said to the fire, to the entity, to the universe itself, "then I'll build a world without belief."
The fire consumed him.
There was no pain. No tunnel of light, no life flashing before his eyes, no sense of ascending or descending. There was simply... transition.
One moment, Eiden was dissolving into non-existence.
The next, he was choking on sand.
He gasped, his lungs screaming for air that tasted wrong—too clean, too sharp, like breathing in broken glass made of pure oxygen. His hands dug into something grainy and hot, and when he finally managed to force his eyes open, he immediately regretted it.
Twin suns.
Two massive spheres of light dominated the sky, one a pale gold, the other a deep amber, and together they cast the world in harsh, overlapping shadows. Eiden lay sprawled in a desert of white sand that stretched endlessly in every direction, each grain glittering like pulverized diamond.
He was naked. Completely, vulnerably, absurdly naked.
"What the fuck," he croaked, his voice raw and unfamiliar in his own throat.
"Language, language!" a cheerful voice chirped from somewhere behind him.
Eiden rolled onto his back and immediately wished he hadn't. Standing—no, hovering—a few feet away was a small humanoid figure wreathed in soft, golden light. It was vaguely child-like in proportion, with an oversized head, enormous eyes that sparkled with innocent joy, and a smile so wide it looked painted on.
A godling. Eiden didn't know how he knew this, but the knowledge settled into his mind with absolute certainty, as if it had always been there.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome to Eryndor!" the godling sang, clapping its hands together in delight. It did a little twirl in midair, leaving trails of shimmering dust. "Oh, you've had such a journey, haven't you? Don't worry—it's all going to make sense soon! Well, not all of it, but enough! Probably!"
Eiden sat up slowly, sand cascading off his bare skin. His body felt... wrong. Too light, too weak, like someone had hollowed out his bones and replaced his muscles with tissue paper. He looked down at his hands—they were trembling, pale, marked with the kind of malnutrition-thin fragility he'd only seen in documentaries about famine.
"Where am I?" he managed.
"Eryndor! I said that already. Weren't you listening?" The godling drifted closer, peering at him with those too-large eyes. "You're in the Desert of Forgotten Faiths, specifically. It's where... well, it's where things come when they don't fit anywhere else. Lost souls, abandoned gods, failed prophets—you know, the usual!"
"I died."
"Yes!"
"Earth was destroyed."
"Super destroyed! Very thorough. The Eternal Symmetry doesn't do half-measures." The godling nodded sagely, as if discussing the weather.
"So this is... what? An afterlife? Reincarnation?"
"Mmm, neither? Both? It's complicated!" The godling clapped again, its excitement somehow intensifying. "But here's the fun part—you get to start over! Fresh slate! New world! And I get to be the one to offer you Divine Favor!"
It extended one tiny hand toward Eiden, and suddenly there was something hovering between them—a mote of light so bright it hurt to look at directly.
"This is a blessing from the God of Light," the godling explained, its voice taking on a rehearsed, ceremonial quality. "Accept it, and you'll be aligned with the forces of Order, Justice, and Protection. You'll receive guidance, power, and purpose. All you have to do is believe."
Eiden stared at the light.
In it, he could see... something. Glimpses of what accepting would mean. He saw himself clad in shining armor, leading armies against darkness. He saw people kneeling before him in gratitude, their faces radiant with hope. He saw himself mattering, being part of something larger, something Good.
It would be so easy. After the emptiness of his final years on Earth, after watching his world end in cosmic indifference, it would be so incredibly easy to just... accept. To let himself be folded into a new purpose, a new identity.
To believe again.
"No," Eiden said.
The word fell into the desert silence like a stone into still water.
The godling's smile faltered. "I... what?"
"No," Eiden repeated, his voice stronger now. He pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly but managing to stay upright. The twin suns beat down on his bare shoulders, and the sand burned his feet, but he met the godling's confused gaze without flinching. "I don't want your blessing. Keep it."
"But... but you have to! Everyone accepts! It's part of the—" The godling cut itself off, its expression shifting from confusion to something like concern. "You don't understand. You're a Vessel. You can't survive in Eryndor without alignment. You need Divine Favor or you'll just... fade. Become nothing."
"Then I'll be nothing."
"That's not—you're not thinking clearly! The transition must have—"
"I watched God destroy my world because it was bored," Eiden interrupted, and now there was something cold and sharp in his voice, something forged in those final moments on the rooftop. "I watched an omnipotent being erase billions of lives because its experiment didn't entertain it anymore. And you know what I realized?"
The godling floated backward slightly, its glow dimming.
"Belief is a chain," Eiden continued. "Every prayer, every act of faith, every moment of devotion—it's all just feeding something that sees you as a variable in an equation. I spent my whole life studying philosophy, questioning meaning, and in the end, the biggest question got answered for me: God doesn't love you. God doesn't hate you. God doesn't even really see you. You're just... content."
He took a step forward. The sand beneath his feet began to tremble—just slightly, just enough to notice.
"So no, I don't want your Divine Favor. I don't want alignment, I don't want guidance, and I sure as hell don't want to believe in anything ever again."
The godling's eyes widened. "You... you're refusing? But that's—that's never—"
"I'd rather earn my own damnation," Eiden said flatly.
And then something broke.
The light in the godling's hand flickered, sputtered, and went out—not dimming, but actively being snuffed, as if something had reached into reality and pinched out a star. The godling itself convulsed, its cheerful form distorting, twisting, fragmenting like a reflection in shattered glass.
"What did you—" it started to say, but the words dissolved into static.
Around them, the desert began to shift. The white sand started to pulse with a strange, colorless luminescence—not light or dark, but something between, something that hurt to perceive because it refused to be categorized.
Eiden felt it rising from somewhere deep inside his chest: a sensation like ice and fire and emptiness all at once. It spread through his hollow body, and where it touched, his weakness burned away. Not replaced with strength exactly, but with something else—a sense of being untethered, unbound, undefined.
The godling screamed.
It wasn't a sound of pain but of wrongness, of a fundamental rule being violated. Its form began to unravel, golden threads of its existence peeling away and dissipating into nothing.
"You... you're an Error!" it shrieked, terror replacing its perpetual cheer. "The system can't—you're not supposed to—"
"System?" Eiden's voice was distant, distracted. He could feel something awakening inside him, something that had been dormant—or maybe had never existed until this precise moment.
The godling's face, rapidly fragmenting, locked onto his. Its eyes—too many eyes now, multiplying as it came apart—burned with a fear that looked almost human.
"You will unmake us all!" it wailed.
Then it dissolved completely, leaving only a faint shimmer of golden dust that the desert wind immediately scattered.
Eiden stood alone in the silence that followed, naked under alien suns, with something impossible stirring in his soul.
He looked down at his hands. They were no longer trembling. Beneath his skin, visible like veins but colorless—aggressively colorless—something flowed. Not blood, not energy, but... absence? Negation? He didn't have words for it.
From somewhere far beyond the horizon, a sound rumbled through the air—not thunder, but something vast and aware shifting its attention, like a sleeping titan opening one eye.
Eiden smiled.
He had died watching one world end. He'd been reborn into another that ran on belief, on faith, on the very systems he'd learned to see through.
"Alright," he said to the empty desert, to the twin suns, to whatever vast and terrible things were already turning their gazes toward him. "Let's see what happens when you remove belief from the equation."
He took his first step into the Desert of Forgotten Faiths.
Behind him, where the godling had dissolved, the sand had begun to crystallize into strange, geometric patterns—symbols that meant nothing in any human language, yet somehow screamed a single message to anything divine enough to read them:
SYSTEM ERROR. VESSEL WITHOUT POLARITY DETECTED. CONTAINMENT FAILED.
And somewhere in the space between worlds, in a throne room made of mirrors and void, something that was neither god nor mortal opened eyes the color of nothing and smiled.
"Oh," said the Neutral God, speaking to itself across eternity. "I remember now."