The world is cracking—a tectonic groan that vibrated not in the ears, but in the very marrow of my bones.
I see the sky over the Heavens was a bruised, sickly violet, bleeding molten gold where the fabric of reality had been torn asunder. I stood on a floating shard of white marble, a platform suspended in an infinite void. He was small—smaller than he was now—and his feet were bare against the cold stone. Around him, the it appers that heaven is screaming. It wasn't the sound of voices, but the sound of basic laws being broken, of Heavens is weeping.
Before him stood a middle age, broad shoulde robust man whose silhouette seemed to swallow the light.
The man's back was a jagged map of scars, each one a silver-white line marking a history of every God he had offended, every divine law he had spat upon. He held a blade that looked less like a weapon and more like a captured piece of the night sky, a jagged sliver of the Void that hummed with a low, terrifying frequency.
Facing him were the Seven. They were not men. They were towering mountains of radiance, wreathed in halos of absolute authority. Their eyes were suns, their voices the roar of oceans. They were the Sovereigns of the Realms, and they had come to reclaim the thing this man had stolen.
"Is this the end of the line, Father?I heard his own voice. It was thin, trembling like a reed in a storm.
The man turned his head. Only half of his face was visible, dominated by a single, storm-grey eye that held the weight of a thousand years of war. He didn't look like a hero. He looked like a tired laborer at the end of a long, bloody day.
"No, little one," the man's voice echoed, heavy with a dense, suffocating energy. "This is where you are planted. This is where the Legacy hides."
Suddenly, the Gods moved. The first, raised a spear of pure white flame. The air ignited. The man didn't flinch. He didn't even breathe fast. He stepped forward, and as he did, the marble platform groaned. Dong felt a sudden, crushing inertia. The man wasn't fast—he was Dense. Every step he took seemed to anchor the floating shard, preventing the divine winds from blowing them into the abyss.
"The realms are rot, Dong," the man said, his voice calm even as he parried a strike that would have leveled a mountain. The collision sent a shockwave of silver sparks—Maori—cascading over Dong. "I have stolen enough time to give you a life of dirt and sun. But the silver silt is patient. It will find you."
The man slammed the pommel of his black iron blade into the marble. The world didn't just break; it folded. The geometry of the Heavens twisted into a spiral.
"Wait! Take me with you!" I cried out, his small hands reaching for the man's tattered, soot-stained cloak.
"Forget the steel," his father whispered. He reached out, his hand glowing with a soft, silver-grey light, and touched Dong's chest. The heat was unbearable, a searing brand that felt like it was melting Dong's very soul. "Be a nobody, Dong. Stay in the dirt. Hide in the mundane until the harvest is ready. Only then... will you reap."
The man turned back to the Seven Gods, his silhouette growing smaller as the marble shard began to plummet, sucked into a swirling vortex of silver mist—the Exile-Gate to the lower realms. The last thing Dong saw before the void swallowed him was his father raising the black sword one last time, a lone, heavy shadow against an ocean of divine, suffocating light.
CRASH.
The sound of a ceramic basin hitting the floorboards shattered the silence of the attic.
Dong's eyes snapped open. His breath came in ragged, wet gasps, his lungs burning as if he had been submerged in the silver mist for hours. The bruised violet sky was gone, replaced by the familiar, dusty rafters of the farmhouse. The smell of ozone and divine fire had vanished, replaced by the comforting, pungent scent of dried hay, old wood, and the damp earth of the fish ponds outside.
He lay there for a long time, watching the dust motes dance in a single shaft of morning sunlight. His heart was thumping a frantic, irregular rhythm against his ribs, a drumbeat of a war he wasn't supposed to remember.
"Just a dream," he rasped, his voice cracking. He wiped a hand across his forehead; it came away drenched in cold sweat. "Just the same damn dream."
He sat up, the wooden bed cracking under his weight. He was six old today. He was broad-shouldered, his skin tanned the color of toasted wheat of laboring under the sun. His hands were thick and calloused, but the callouses came from hemp ropes and wooden hoe-handles, not from the hilt of a God-Slayer's blade. He was a farmer. A nobody. Exactly what his father had told him to be.
But as his feet hit the wooden floorboards, he froze.
In the center of his right palm, a faint, silver vein pulsed once—a rhythmic throb of Maori that felt like liquid lead moving through his blood—before vanishing beneath the skin. He stared at his hand, his breath catching. For a split second, the heavy iron hoe leaning against the far wall didn't look like a tool for the garden. It looked like a weapon. He could see the leverage of it, the weight of the head, the way the wood would splinter a man's ribs if swung with the right Inertia.
"Dong!"
The voice of his mother, sharp and grounding, drifted up from the kitchen below. The sound of a heavy iron skillet hitting the stove acted like an anchor, pulling him back from the precipice of the dream.
"The Moon-Glow Carp are already jumping, and the weeds in the south terrace aren't going to pull themselves! Are you planning on sleeping until the next Great Cycle?"
Dong exhaled, the silver chill in his blood receding, replaced by the familiar ache of a body that worked for its bread. He stood up, but as he took his first step toward the ladder, he felt a strange, heavy resistance. It was as if his center of gravity had shifted, his feet wanting to root themselves into the very floorboards. He had to consciously force his muscles to move with the light, easy grace of a commoner.
"Coming, Mother!" he shouted back.
He descended the ladder, his mind still trying to remember his dream. He ate his
stewed-fish in silence, listening to his father—the man who had raised him, the quiet, limping farmer with the kind eyes—talk about the weather patterns and the price of grain. This man wasn't the giant from the dream. This man smelled of fish scales and wet soil, not of void-iron and divine blood.
"You're quiet today, son," his father said, pausing with a wooden spoon halfway to his mouth. He looked at Dong, his eyes narrowed slightly. "The dreams again?"
Dong paused, his grip tightening on his bowl. "The same one. The man with the black sword. The Seven."
His father's face went still, a mask of practiced neutrality. "Dreams are just the mind's way of weeding the garden, Dong. Don't let the weeds choke the crop. You've got work to do."
But as Dong stepped out into the humid air of the Verdant-Hush morning, the hoe slung over his shoulder felt heavier than it had yesterday. He walked toward the ponds, the silver-green water reflecting a sky that was perfectly, peacefully blue.
He spent the morning in the water, his legs submerged in the cool silt. He used the long-handled net to catch the Moon-Glow Carp, his movements precise and efficient. Thrust, scoop, lift. It was a cycle he had mastered over a year. But today, every time he moved, he felt the Inertia. He felt the way his body wanted to lock into a combat stance. He felt some kind of strange energy humming in his blood, waiting for a command he didn't know how to give.
As the sun reached its zenith, Dong stood in the middle of the pond, the water rippling around his waist. He looked at his reflection. He saw a farmer. He saw a nobody.