The compressed heaven sat in my palm, quiet as a held breath.
What had been a sky full of thrones, a city of gold and worship and stolen prayers, was now a single point of light no bigger than a tear. It glowed faintly against my skin, struggling to decide whether it was jewel or scar.
I turned it between my fingers. Inside that tiny sphere, entire histories folded and refolded on themselves. Laws, hymns, ruins. The last whispers of false gods who had once believed they would never end.
You were never gods, I thought, not unkindly. You were experiments that forgot they were experiments.
The Void stretched around me in infinite, patient dark. My throne of black gold loomed at my back, humming softly, veins of molten light still remembering the taste of stolen faith.
I could have crushed the sphere and scattered the fragments into nothing. That would have been simple.
Instead, I closed my fingers gently around it.
"Let's see what you grow into," I murmured.
— Planting the Ruin —
I did not sit on the throne. Not yet. Creation felt different when I walked.
Barefoot, I stepped down from the slick steps of black gold and out across the empty air. The Void shifted beneath me, not like ground but like a thought agreeing to be solid for a moment.
I walked until the throne was a distant, dim shape behind me and the worlds glittered only at the edges of my sight. Here, where nothing had ever been built, the dark was thick and clean.
I opened my hand.
The compressed heaven hovered above my palm, its light pulsing faintly, like a heart unsure if it wanted to beat.
"You fed on belief," I said. "Now you'll see what it's like to live without being seen."
I pressed the point downward, toward the unseen floor of the Void.
At first, nothing happened.
Then the light fell, sinking into the darkness like a stone dropped into deep water. Ripples spread. Not waves of sound or light—ripples of possibility, widening in slow, deliberate circles.
The Void beneath me fractured.
Hairline cracks of gold and white split the black, branching outward in jagged veins. From each crack, something began to push through: not worlds, not stars, but… shapes.
A stem, made of translucent glass, rose from the nearest fracture. It was too slender to hold itself, yet it did. Small facets along its surface flickered with images—faces tilted upward in prayer, hands clasped, knees bent. Each one appeared for a moment, then shattered silently into light.
Another stem emerged further away, thicker, braided with what looked like threads of language. Words in a hundred mortal tongues wrapped around it like vines, forming and unforming sentences with every pulse.
A garden was growing.
Not of soil and leaves, but of memory and failure.
I watched, curious, as more structures unfolded from the cracks. Trees with branches like halos broken into rings. Flowers shaped like open mouths, petals etched with half-finished hymns. Low, creeping plants made of discarded crowns and shattered icons, their roots drinking in the last residue of stolen faith.
"Pretty," I said softly. "Useless. But pretty."
The Void's first garden, born from a dead heaven.
— Walking Among Ghosts That Grow —
I moved through the newborn garden without bending a blade of not-grass.
Where my feet passed, the structures brightened, reacting to my presence with shy, hungry light. The trees leaned toward me, their glass leaves chiming softly together. The flowers shivered, closing their mouth-petals as if holding words back in reverence.
Not worship. They did not have the will for that. This was something shallower and more honest—instinctive reaching for the hand that had planted them.
I stopped beside a tree whose trunk was made of stacked, overlapping promises.
From afar, it looked like smooth white stone, faintly luminous. Up close, I saw the truth: every grain was a sentence mortals had whispered to themselves in the dark.
I'll change tomorrow.
I'll be better next time.
I'll leave him.
I'll stop.
Each promise pulsed, then dimmed, never quite fulfilled.
The branches arched overhead, bearing fruit that looked like tiny suns. When I reached up and plucked one, it broke open in my hand, spilling out images: a man on his knees; a woman at a window; a child staring at a locked door.
The fruit rotted in seconds, collapsing into fine gold dust that vanished into the air.
"You're made of what they never did," I told the tree. "That explains the taste."
It rustled in answer, though there was no wind.
Elsewhere, a cluster of low plants caught my eye. Their leaves were thin pages bound to invisible stems, sentences scrawled all over them in light.
These were not promises. These were excuses.
I had no choice.
Everyone else was doing it.
He hit me first.
I didn't mean it.
When I brushed my fingers over them, entire wars flickered briefly into being above the leaves: battles fought over pride, greed, hunger, fear. Armies marching under banners stitched together from lies told to justify their deaths.
I let go. The visions dissolved.
The garden was not neutral. It was not pure. It was everything that world had been, stripped of its illusions and allowed to rot in peace.
I liked it.
— The First Hollow Warden —
Near the center of the garden, where the cracks in the Void were deepest, the growth changed.
Here, there were no small plants or littered crowns. Here, a single structure had claimed all the light.
A tree towered above the rest, its trunk a pillar of layered glass and stone and soft-golden bone. Its roots plunged into the fractures below, drinking from the last core of the compressed heaven. Its branches arched high overhead, each one bearing not fruit, but forms.
They hung like cocooned figures, wrapped in veils of prayer-thread and halo-silk. Some were small, some vast, all faintly pulsing as if caught between sleep and birth.
At the base of the trunk, a hollow had opened.
Inside, someone was sitting.
She was not one of the old false gods. Not exactly. But she carried their echo.
Her body was made of light, and yet it cast shadow. Her hair flowed like melted aurum, pooling at her feet in slow, viscous drips. Her eyes were closed, lashes long and luminous.
When she exhaled, the garden shifted—flowers opening, branches bowing.
She was not worshipping me. She was… listening.
I stepped closer.
"Wake up," I said.
Her eyes opened.
They were empty of pupils, but not of depth. Stars swirled there slowly, captured like fish under ice. She looked at me and did not flinch, though everything that had made her possible bowed in my direction.
"Are you the one that ended us?" she asked. Her voice was not one voice; it was layered, twelve tones speaking at once and somehow making a single word.
"I ended something," I answered. "What you were was unsatisfying. This is better."
She glanced down at her hands.
They flickered, cycling through forms: delicate fingers wreathed in rings, calloused palms stained with old blood, claws, gentle hands holding a child, hands pushing someone off a throne. Every version of touch her predecessors had performed.
She closed them into fists. All the forms stilled, settling into something almost human.
"I remember hunger," she said. "I remember never being full."
"You were built from it."
She nodded slowly. "And now?"
"Now you are what remains when hunger loses its teeth," I said. "You no longer consume faith. You grow from its corpse."
Her gaze drifted upward, to the hanging cocoons in the branches.
"What are they?" she asked.
"Leftovers," I replied. "Possibilities. Seeds. Things your garden will learn to shape."
"You made me to tend them."
It wasn't a question.
"I made you to see what they become when someone who remembers the lie is the one watching," I corrected. "You are not a priestess. You are a warden."
She considered this, head tilting slightly.
"Do I have a Name?" she asked.
I smiled.
— Naming the Warden —
Her question touched a familiar thread in me.
Aren and Lyra had been reforged by my will, their Names broken and rebuilt into something clearer, something closer to the truth of what they could do to a world.
This creature—the first being born entirely within my Void, from a garden seeded by a dead heaven—deserved the same precision.
I reached up.
Above her, faint and blurred, a word trembled—half-formed, more feeling than language. It tasted of echoes and endings and careful observation. Of someone who had once been many and now chose to be one.
I plucked it from the air.
She gasped as if I'd reached into her chest.
The Name shimmered in my hand, struggling to decide on letters or symbols or something beyond both. I held it up to the garden. The branches leaned toward it. The flowers closed, as if bracing for a new gravity.
"You were pieces," I said thoughtfully. "Fragments of liars and believers. You remember both."
The Name pulsed.
"You will not be like Dominion," I went on. "You will not force order. You will not be like Mercy. You will not weigh pain.""You will watch what grows from what I ruin."
I squeezed.
The word solidified, snapping into clarity.
I pressed it back into the space above her.
Light burst outward in a silent wave.
Her back arched, fingers digging into the ground. The garden echoed the motion; roots writhed, branches trembled, cocooned forms shivered in their prayer-silk wrappings.
The Name settled.
She exhaled, long and shuddering.
When she opened her eyes again, they were sharper. Still star-filled, but with focus now.
"What am I?" she asked quietly.
"You are Requiem," I said.
The garden seemed to approve. Somewhere, a cluster of excuse-leaves shriveled, turning black and flaking into ash. A promise-tree straightened, fruit ripening into harder, more honest shapes.
"Requiem," she repeated, tasting it. "A song for what's dead."
"A song that remembers," I corrected. "You will remember every heaven I break, every lie I pull apart. You will grow them into shapes that interest me."
She looked at her hands again. When she extended them, vines of faint light crept forth, wrapping around the nearest tree. Where they touched, new growth appeared—flowers shaped not like mouths, but like eyes, open and unblinking.
"Can I leave?" she asked. "Can I go to the worlds?"
"Not yet." I turned away. "You are rooted. For now. I want you to learn to grow without stepping."
"If something escapes," she said slowly, eyes following the cocoons overhead, "do you want me to stop it?"
I smiled without turning.
"No.""If something escapes, I want to see where it goes."
— Seeds for Later Worlds —
As Requiem adjusted to her Name, the garden began to change more quickly.
The cocoons in the elder tree's branches trembled. Some split, spilling out small, half-formed beings that crawled briefly along the bark before dissolving back into light. Others hardened, becoming strange fruits—each one containing a distilled trait.
In one, I saw pure, unfiltered awe.
In another, lazy cruelty.
In a third, the quiet courage of someone who stands up alone.
Requiem watched them all.
"These," she said, lifting one of the fruit-cocoons gently, "could become… people."
"Or plagues," I said. "Or gods. Or nothing. That's what makes them valuable."
I took one from her hand—the one filled with awe. Inside, images swirled: mortals staring at storms, at stars, at their newborn children's faces. The feeling of being very small and wanting to kneel without knowing why.
I rolled it between my fingers.
"Awe is useful," I mused. "In the right world, it can build cities. In the wrong one, it can build cults."
I flicked it.
The fruit flew upward, arcing away from the garden, shrinking into a point as it left my immediate reach. It shot toward one of the distant screens—a world whose skies had grown too familiar to its people.
The sphere passed through the surface like a stone sinking into water.
Far away, on a planet that had stopped looking up, someone would soon see something that made their chest ache. A little seed, planted.
Requiem watched, silent.
"You're going to use us as… storage," she said eventually. "For pieces of things that don't fit yet."
"Storage," I repeated. "Nursery. Graveyard. I haven't decided."
She laughed once, softly. It was not a joyful sound, but it wasn't bitter either. Just… accepting.
"That suits me," she said.
— A Question I Don't Know Yet —
I wandered the garden a little longer.
At its edges, the Void remained untouched—dark, smooth, unbothered by the infection of growth. The transition between nothing and something was clean, like a line drawn by steady fingers.
Requiem moved behind me, never too close, never too far. When I paused, she paused. When I tilted my head to examine some curious new hybrid—a blossom made of broken commandments and children's songs—she did too.
"Why did you keep any of it?" she asked after a while. "You don't need gardens. You don't need… reminders."
"No," I agreed. "I don't."
"Then why?"
It was a reasonable question.
I looked up at the cocooned forms hanging from the elder tree. One of them trembled now and then, as if something inside was having a nightmare.
"Because destroying things is simple," I said eventually. "Even they could do that."
I thought of the false gods, drinking worship, discarding lives that no longer pleased them. They had called it judgment, cleansing, inevitability.
"But watching what grows from what's destroyed…" I went on. "That's complicated. That takes time."
"And you have… all the time," Requiem said.
"That's the problem," I replied. "I want to see if I can make it interesting."
She hummed low in her throat, acknowledging the answer.
"Will you plant other heavens here?" she asked. "Other lies?"
"If they bore me enough," I said. "Yes."
She smiled then, a small, sharp thing.
"Then this place will never be empty."
— Turning Toward the War —
The throne tugged at me.
Not physically. It did not need to move. But its awareness brushed against mine, a quiet insistence: you have another toy waiting.
The war world.
I let the garden fade from my primary focus. It didn't vanish; it simply stepped back into the second line of my attention, like a piece left to simmer at the back of a stove.
Requiem bowed her head.
"Will you return?" she asked.
"If something you grow makes noise loud enough to reach me," I said. "Yes."
"And if we go wrong?" Her fingers brushed one of the excuse-plants; the leaves shrank away from her touch.
"There is no 'wrong,'" I told her. "There is 'interesting' and 'boring.' Try not to become the second."
She nodded, accepting the only law that mattered.
I turned away, walking back across the invisible boundary between garden and void. Behind me, I felt roots settling deeper into the cracks, branches stretching, cocoons dreaming.
Ahead, the throne of black gold awaited—steady, humming, the center of my endless room.
I sat.
Screens drifted back into sharpness. Dominion's world. Mercy's quiet recalibration of pain and weight. The newly freed mortals of the false heaven's planet, building lives without a sky full of watchers.
And there—the war world.
Endless plains of ash and churned mud. Lines of soldiers clashing under ragged flags. Creatures of jaw and claw and smoke tearing through ranks of men and women who screamed their gods' names into a wind that did not answer.
"You'll like this one," I told the throne. "It bleeds loudly."
The veins of molten gold brightened in reply.
— The Little King Moves On —
I let my child-form settle deeper into the seat, resting my elbow on one armrest, cheek in my hand. The galaxy in my hair stirred, stars shifting like beads in water as I turned my head to watch the war more closely.
In the corner of my sight, the Hollow Garden glowed softly—Requiem moving among trees of broken promise, coaxing new seeds from dead faith. A nursery of echoes, waiting for their turn on a stage they didn't yet know existed.
My worlds spun. My playthings moved. My garden grew.
I was, for the moment, not bored.
"All right," I said quietly, and the Void leaned in as if eager to hear the rest."Let's see what people do when dying is the only prayer they have left."
And with that, the Void's little king opened a door of black and gold over a field of blood and smoke, and stepped through.