There is a black sun, a chasm gnawing at the firmament.
Perfectly round, yet torn by elongated rays that stretch like fissures in a dead pupil. Within it, something watches. Not with intention, not with mercy, but with the exhausted vigilance of an organ that has forgotten the relief of sleep. The sky bends around it as flesh yields to an embedded blade, and the light that spills forth is neither illumination nor darkness.
Beneath that gaze, the earth has learned to endure itself.
The land bears the memory of divinities that were never gentle. They did not rule as kings nor descend as saviors; they were vast presences, indistinct, terrible in their indifference. When they withdrew, or were unmade, or dispersed into matter, the world was not freed. It was abandoned in function. What remains of them lingers in places where form has grown unreliable: in forests that bleed resin the color of old wounds, in seas that recoil from the shore as though remembering a command no longer spoken, in stone that hums faintly when split.
These remnants speak and they metabolize.
The great beast stands as a monument without inscription. Its trees rise red and strained, bark split to reveal inner fibers slick with sap too warm to be natural. Leaves fall without season, each descent deliberate, as though marking time for something buried beneath. Roots twist through soil and bone alike, indifferent to the distinction, threading themselves through what once may have been sacred. Those who linger too long among the trunks report nothing consistent, only the sense that they are being recalled by a name they do not remember learning.
The sea tells fewer lies, but more dangerous ones. Its surface appears calm, resigned, almost vacant. Below, however, something vast shifts with obscene patience. The tides obey it. The moon, if such a word still applies, is dragged rather than followed, a dead star caught in a burden of flesh and shell. When it passes, coastlines retreat, and what was drowned is permitted to breathe once more. Towers rise encrusted with salt and prayer. Streets reemerge bearing the impressions of feet that never belonged to men. Then the water returns, heavy and deliberate, as if ashamed of its own revelation.
Of the ancient gods, only their consequences persist.
Their absence has fostered a different kind of power. The noble house, those pale lineages that infest the cities of stone, claim descent from covenants no longer legible. They preserve themselves through rites whose meanings have eroded, yet whose efficacy remains undeniable. Their halls are built atop reliquaries disguised as foundations; their bloodlines sustained by contact with things that should not be touched. Beauty is cultivated among them like a discipline, purity of form masking corruption too ingrained to name. They are neither cruel nor kind by choice, only faithful to decay.
Their banners still fly. Their titles still circulate. Their feasts continue beneath vaulted ceilings where saints have been scratched away, replaced by symbols no one dares interpret aloud.
And all of this unfolds under the unblinking eye.
The black sun does not intervene, it does not judge. It simply remains, pressing its attention into the world, thinning the veil between what is and what was never meant to persist. Days pass beneath it without dawn, nights arrive without darkness. Time advances in the manner of a wound refusing to close.
This is not a land awaiting catastrophe.
It has already survived it.
What endures now is something quieter, more corrosive: a world continuing out of habit, watched by an eye that cannot close, haunted by divinities that have learned the patience of matter, and governed by those who have mistaken preservation for purpose.
Nothing here asks to be saved.
Nothing here knows how to end.