Before there were ruins worth naming, before silence learned how to linger instead of scream, there were Gods.
Elara remembers them.
She remembers not because she wishes to, but because remembering was the burden placed upon her spirit long before the world learned how to fail. Long before mortals began vanishing between words. Long before the sky cracked without thunder and the land forgot how to heal.
Memory is not mercy. It does not soften what it carries. It sharpens it.
It is a blade that never dulls, cutting through the fog of time to draw blood from the truth each time she dares to look back. Elara has learned this the hard way. Some memories do not fade. They wait.
The Gods were not distant in those days. They did not sit above the world and judge it from thrones carved from belief and fear. They walked the land until the land itself began to sag beneath their presence. They bled when the soil split. They weakened when faith thinned. They felt hunger, exhaustion, and doubt in ways mortals never understood.
They were not eternal.
They were simply willing.
Willing to remain.
Willing to endure.
Willing to break themselves so the world would not break all at once.
Elara remembers the moment they chose her.
Not in ceremony. Not in prophecy.
In silence.
She had been standing at the edge of the Garden, watching mortals argue over where to plant a well. The God of Paths had stood beside her, quiet longer than usual. When the decision was made, he did not look at the others.
He looked at her.
"You remember things as they are," he said. "Not as you wish them to be."
That had been enough.
THE GARDEN, BEFORE
Elara remembers the Garden first.
Not because it was perfect — nothing born of life ever is — but because it was fragile.
Sunlight fell warm without burning. Rivers ran clear, singing softly against their banks. Trees bent their branches low so children could climb without fear of falling. Laughter carried without consequence.
Mortals lived loudly then.
They argued. They failed. They forgave. They forgot.
And the world let them.
That mattered.
It mattered more than divinity ever did.
The Gods understood this, even when they pretended otherwise.
THE FIRST FRACTURE
The end did not arrive with fire.
It came quietly.
Elara felt it like a wrong note in a familiar song. A moment where rhythm faltered. The texture of the world grew uneven, like a painting left too long in the rain. The colors remained, but they no longer held together. Meaning began to loosen.
The Gods felt it at the same instant.
Conversation stopped mid-sentence. Wind died in the leaves. The seas hesitated, as if waiting for permission to continue.
"This isn't an enemy," the God of Storms said at last. His voice, usually thunder given form, trembled. "It's a correction."
Correction.
The word tasted like ash.
Malakor, the First Weaver, had reached for the tapestry of existence and found it flawed. He did not seek to mend broken threads. He did not wish to restore balance.
He wished to burn the loom.
To strip the world of excess. To decide which lives, which histories, which meanings were worthy of being woven again — and which were not.
The Gods argued then.
Not with anger.
With desperation.
They searched ancient covenants etched into the bones of creation. They invoked forgotten rites. They spoke the old promises aloud, hoping sound alone might slow what had already begun.
One of them proposed abandoning the mortal realms entirely.
Elara remembers the silence that followed.
The Goddess of Hearth had shaken her head.
"If we leave," she said softly, "then everything we were meant to protect dies alone."
No one argued after that.
THE FAILING ANSWERS
They tried other ways first.
Elara remembers a city sealed in amber light, preserved perfectly — and then forgotten, erased whole when meaning could no longer reach it.
She remembers a mountain turned into a shrine of permanence, only for the land around it to thin until the shrine stood alone in nothingness.
Containment failed.
Preservation failed.
Only sacrifice held.
Someone always stepped forward.
The Goddess of Hearth was the first.
She bound herself quietly to warmth — to kitchens, to hearthstones, to the last coals mortals clutched when the sun dimmed. Each winter she held back took something from her. Each family she saved dimmed her flame.
When she vanished, the world grew colder in ways mortals never learned to name.
The God of Paths followed.
He shattered himself across the roads of the world, splintering his divinity into direction itself. Journeys still ended after that. That mattered.
He did not scream.
The God of Time screamed enough for all of them.
He tore fragments from his own eternity, slowing the world by heartbeats. By breaths. By moments so small they seemed meaningless.
Until Elara saw how mortals used them.
Final words.
Last embraces.
Children finishing games they would never play again.
The Gods did not flee.
They stayed until staying cost them everything.
They poured themselves into the failing world, holding the sky together with blood and will until there was nothing left of them but absence.
When the last God fell, the barrier did not shatter.
It failed the way exhausted hands fail.
Slowly.
Inevitably.
With dignity.
THE GREAT SEALING
That was when Elara was sealed.
She had not been made to rule what came after. She was not meant to fix what could no longer be fixed.
She was meant to remember it honestly.
Aris, the High Priestess, stood beneath a broken sky as the Final Rite was enacted. Her hands shook as crystal grew around Elara, binding spirit to vessel, memory to flesh.
"Sleep, Seventh Vessel," Aris whispered, tears cutting clean lines through ash on her face. "Be the testament of this dying world."
They bound Elara beneath the Library, folding her spirit inward.
She became memory given shape.
She slept while the world simplified.
She slept while Silence ate the names of mountains, kings, and forgotten loves.
She slept while meaning thinned and history collapsed inward.
She slept.
Until pain tore her awake.
THE AWAKENING
Not a gentle stirring.
Not a gradual return.
Pain — sharp, invasive, undeniable — ripped through the seal that held her.
Crystal screamed. Ancient bindings snapped. The world rushed back into her awareness all at once, raw and unfiltered.
A mortal stood before her shattered prison.
Bloodied.
Exhausted.
Kaelen.
He did not kneel.
He did not pray.
He chose.
"We're both broken," he said.
The words should have meant nothing.
Broken things were meant to be discarded. That was the old law. The law the Void enforced with perfect indifference.
And yet this mortal refused to be discarded.
He was Noise.
An anomaly.
He had torn her free from the Song of Malakor. He had bent a forbidden decree, denying weight and descent, casting the False Prophet screaming into the abyss.
The effort had nearly killed him.
Kaelen lay unconscious upon the fractured platform, his life flickering like a candle in a storm.
Elara looked at her left arm.
Black veins pulsed beneath pale skin. The corruption was awake. Even the Keeper was not untouched.
She turned her gaze to the Core.
Liquid mana boiled over its edges. Ancient structures groaned. The seal was failing.
If she did nothing, the Library would fall. The corruption would rise. The world above would rot from its roots.
If she stayed, she could hold it.
She could contain the ruin.
But the mortal —
He did not belong in a sealed tomb.
AUTHORITY: DENIED
Elara made her choice.
It was not kindness.
It was Order.
The anomaly could not remain.
She raised her hand and wove banishment, not healing.
"You cannot remain," she whispered, her voice layered with ancient law. "The doors must close."
She pushed.
The force was absolute.
Kaelen's body was torn from the platform and hurled backward, flung into the open mouth of the ventilation shaft — the last path that led to the surface.
SLAM.
The heavy doors of the Core thundered shut.
She was alone.
The Core screamed as it collapsed inward. Light fell like shattered stars. Mana surged to swallow what remained.
Elara stood amid the ruin, anchoring the prison through will alone.
She had saved him by rejecting him.
Above, in the cold air of the surface, the mortal would awaken alone. He would understand that the Goddess had not followed.
The Age of Hiding was over.
But the Age of the Lonely King had just begun.