Ayan's eyes snapped open to a world already ending.
The pain came first, a white-hot torrent of agony that seized every muscle, every nerve, every thought that tried to form. His back arched against something cold, his fingers clawing at fabric that tore like paper. His lungs screamed for air, but each breath felt like inhaling broken glass, the kind that cut from the inside out and kept cutting.
He lay on stone. Rough and unyielding, it pressed against his spine, and he could feel the dampness of blood, he realized with dawning horror. His blood. It pooled beneath him, warm and thick, seeping into the cracks between ancient stones.
Where am I?
The thought scattered like startled birds before he could fully grasp it.
The sky above fractured.
Not like glass. Not like anything Ayan had seen before. Reality itself split open in a thousand places at once, and through each rupture poured something that wasn't light and wasn't darkness. It was older than both, a sickly golden radiance that hurt to perceive, that made his eyes water and his skull throb with a pressure that felt like drowning on dry land.
His body convulsed.
There was no transition. No warning. The sky simply broke, and the God Trials descended.
They fell like judgment.
Ayan couldn't tell if the terrible grinding sound came from the very fabric of the world collapsing or from inside his own chest. Probably both. The air itself seemed to vibrate at a frequency that made his teeth ache and his vision swim. He tried to move, to stand, to do something, but his limbs wouldn't obey. They were lead. They were liquid. They were something that had forgotten how to be part of a body.
How long have I been lying here?
The question crystallized with sudden clarity: I'm dying.
Not metaphorically. Not as some distant threat hovering in the future. His body was shutting down piece by piece, in a deliberate and methodical collapse. He could feel it happening with a clarity that bordered on supernatural. His heart stumbled in its rhythm, once strong, now irregular, like a drummer that had forgotten the pattern. His lungs rattled. His vision tunneled at the edges, darkness creeping in like water seeping through a sinking ship.
Beyond him, the world was screaming.
Ayan's hearing sharpened with the cruel focus of someone whose other senses were failing. The screams came from everywhere and nowhere, high-pitched cries from what must be children, deeper bellows of rage and confusion from men, the wailing panic of people who understood, in that moment, that the world they had known was over.
A woman's voice cut through the chaos: "Get them inside! The barriers... check the barriers!"
The barriers. Right. Ayan's fragmentary memories tried to assemble themselves into something coherent. There were supposed to be barriers. Technologies, magical constructs, something that protected people from the worst things the universe could do. But the barriers weren't designed for this. Nothing had been designed for this.
The golden light intensified, and with it came a crushing weight, not physical, not exactly, but pressure nonetheless. It pressed down on the entire city like the hand of a god, and Ayan realized with the kind of clarity that only came to the dying that that's precisely what it was.
The God Trials.
He'd heard of them in stories. Legends, really. The kind of tales that mothers told their children to keep them in line, or that monks recited in temples when they thought no one was listening. Every thousand years, the stories went, the divine descended to evaluate humanity. To test them. To cull them.
No one was supposed to survive that if they weren't chosen.
Ayan's throat constricted. He tried to sit up, but his body had other ideas. His muscles wouldn't respond. The pain that had greeted his consciousness had evolved into something worse, a numbness that was somehow more terrifying because he couldn't feel his own limbs anymore. He could feel his heart dying. He could feel his mind fracturing. But his arms and legs? They belonged to someone else now.
Around him, the city was in freefall.
A building collapsed to his left. He heard it crash rather than saw it, the sound was so loud it seemed to bypass his ears entirely and detonate directly inside his skull. A woman ran past him, clutching a child to her chest. She didn't even see him. No one saw him. He was already a ghost.
The golden light brightened until it burned like staring directly into the sun.
And then the mark appeared.
Ayan felt it before he saw it, a searing brand across his chest, right over his heart. It spread like wildfire through his body, burning away everything it touched with a sensation that made the pain from his initial collapse feel like a caress. The agony was almost infinite. It was absolute. It was the only true thing in a world that had just become alien and hostile.
He tried to scream, but sound wouldn't come.
The mark was intricate, he realized through the haze of suffering. It wasn't random. It wasn't just fire and pain. It had structure, complex geometric patterns that seemed to writhe and reform as he stared at them. Symbols he didn't recognize but somehow understood on a fundamental level. A contract written in flame across his skin.
The God Trials.
The realization came with a kind of sick finality. He'd been chosen. Or selected. Or marked. The terminology didn't matter because the meaning was the same: he wasn't supposed to be here. He was outside the normal order of things now, and the universe was correcting the error.
His heart stumbled again.
This time, it didn't resume its rhythm.
Ayan felt it happen with perfect, horrible clarity. The irregular beating that had become a kind of baseline for his last moments simply... stopped. For one eternal instant, his heart did not beat. His blood did not flow. His lungs made no attempt to draw breath.
Death arrived not with fanfare but with the dull simplicity of a door closing.
Then something else happened. Something that shouldn't have been possible.
His heart beat again.
But it wasn't the same. The rhythm was wrong... not arrhythmic like before, but fundamentally other. Each pulse felt thick and heavy, like his blood had been replaced with something denser, something that carried more weight than mere fluid should carry. The beat echoed through his chest like a drum that was no longer merely his own.
Ayan's eyes snapped open wider... though when had he closed them? and what he saw made the remaining fragments of his dying mind fracture further.
Above him, the golden light had formed a shape. A silhouette. A figure.
It was vast. It was ancient. It was aware.
And it was looking at him.
The pressure increased. The weight of that attention alone was enough to crush him deeper into the stone beneath his spine. He wanted to look away, but his eyes wouldn't obey. He wanted to scream, but his throat had sealed itself shut. He wanted to do something - anything - except remain pinned beneath that cosmic gaze.
The mark on his chest burned brighter.
Around him, the city's screams were reaching a fever pitch. The screaming of millions of people, all at once, all reaching the same moment of true understanding: the world had changed. The rules had changed. Everything they had known, everything they had built, everything they had been... it was all subject to re-evaluation now.
And something vast and terrible and divine had come to judge them all.
Ayan's consciousness flickered like a candle in a storm. The edges of his vision expanded to infinity and collapsed to nothing in alternating waves. His body was dead. His heart was something other than human. And the mark that burned across his chest felt less like a brand and more like a key - a key turning in a lock that had been sealed since before he was born.
The golden light consumed everything.
And then, mercifully, there was only darkness.