Inferna's claws caught me across the face, cracking my helmet and sending me spinning through the End's purple void.
"THE AWAKENING," she said. "I REMEMBER. THE CHILD. THE MOMENT YOU BECAME SOMETHING AGAIN."
"Nearly seventy-two years of silence," I replied, stabilizing my flight. "And a child's fall broke it."
"CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE. EVEN I KNOW THIS."
"I didn't. Not until she caught me."
---
Year 50-72.
The child's name was Mira.
She was five years old—maybe six, I never learned exactly. The daughter of farmers, born and raised in Eterna during the height of my silence.
She was playing on the hill, as children often did, despite their parents' warnings about disturbing the Silent God. Children didn't fear me the way adults did. To them, I was just a statue that had always been there.
She fell.
The hill was steep in places, and she slipped on loose soil. I watched her tumble—head over heels, arms flailing—toward a cliff that dropped twenty feet onto flat rocks below.
The fall would kill her. Maybe. Or maybe it would just injure her badly. Either way, a child was about to suffer because she'd been playing too close to the Silent God.
I didn't decide to move.
My body decided for me.
---
I moved.
For the first time in over seventy years, I moved.
One moment I was sitting. The next I was running—legs pumping, arms reaching, armor don and clanking. I launched myself off the hill, caught Mira in mid-air, and rolled to absorb the impact.
We hit the ground at the base of the cliff. My armor took the damage. Mira was unhurt.
She stared up at me with wide, terrified eyes.
"The Eternal One,"she whispered. "You... you moved."
I stared back at her. I was as shocked as she was.
"I... moved," I said. My voice was rough from disuse, barely more than a croak.
"You saved me."
"I... yes."
She smiled—a brilliant, innocent, grateful smile that cut through seven decades of gray like a blade.
"Thank you, Eternal One."
And then she hugged me.
---
The hug broke something in me.
Not broke as in damaged—broke as in opened. A door that had been sealed for decades suddenly swung wide, and emotions I'd buried came flooding back.
Fear. Joy. Relief. Love.
I started to cry.
I hadn't cried in over seventy years. The tears felt strange on my face, hot and real and overwhelming. I held this small child—who had done nothing more than fall and hug me—and I wept.
Mira didn't understand. She couldn't. But she didn't pull away. She just held on and let me cry.
When her parents finally found us, they fell to their knees in worship.
Their Silent God had moved. Had spoken. Had wept.
It was a miracle.
For me, it was something else entirely.
It was a beginning.
---
The aftermath was chaos.
The villagers had seen me move. Word spread through Eterna like fire through dry grass. The Silent God had awakened. The Eternal One had spoken.
They came to me in droves—praying, thanking, asking for blessings. They brought offerings more valuable than any before. They prostrated themselves at my feet.
I didn't want worship. I didn't want offerings. I just wanted...
What did I want?
The question was strange after so long without wanting anything. But the answer came slowly, hesitantly:
I wanted to matter.
I wanted my existence to mean something.
I wanted to do more than sit and watch.
I wanted to be... alive.
---
Year 72. I made a choice.
I could have gone back to the gray. It would have been easy—all I had to do was stop caring again. The fog was always there, waiting to welcome me back.
But I'd felt something when I caught Mira. Something when she hugged me. Something when I realized that my inaction had consequences just as much as action did.
For seventy years, I'd been the Silent God. I'd watched my people struggle and grow and die without lifting a finger to help.
That ended now.
I stood up—fully, deliberately, for the first time in decades. The villagers gasped.
"I am not a god," I said. My voice was stronger now, though still rough. "I am a man. A man who was lost and broken. But I am done being silent."
They stared at me.
"If you will have me,"I continued, "I will help you. I will guide you. I will protect you as best I can."
A long silence.
Then Elder Thrum—the oldest villager, who remembered stories his grandfather had told about the day I first arrived—stepped forward.
"We have waited seventy years for you to speak," he said. "We can wait no longer. But we do not need a god. We need a leader."
"I will try,"I said.
It was the first promise I'd made in this world.
It wouldn't be the last.