Kieran stood on nothing.
Below, above, around—there was only sky, vast and bruised with twilight. The air held no wind, but it pressed against him like unseen hands, suffocating and soft. He tried to move, and the world pulsed. A ripple spread outward from his foot, revealing what lay beneath the illusion.
He stood on a sea of glass.
Below the surface, stars drowned in slow spirals. Some were burning. Others blinked like eyes.
Then the whisper came again.
Kieran.
He turned, but no one stood behind him. Only his shadow, flickering and detached, moved of its own accord. It pointed.
A single door stood in the void, freestanding, ancient and wooden, its surface carved with symbols too deep to be weathered. It creaked open before he touched it.
The light inside was not light at all, but memory.
He stepped through.
---
He stood in a corridor of bone.
The walls pulsed faintly, like breath caught mid-death. Candles floated in the air, casting shadows that moved in reverse. On either side of him, narrow doorways opened into darkness, though one glowed faintly with red—like a wound.
He passed through it.
The forest was not a forest.
Trees stood like spears, their bark blackened, their branches twisted into the shapes of reaching hands. The ground was soft and wet, though no rain fell. Every step Kieran took echoed like a scream swallowed by time.
Ahead, something sat upon a throne of roots.
Not a god. Not a man.
A figure draped in white robes, faceless and still. It held a mirror in one hand. The other was dipped into the earth as if searching for something long lost.
"You are late," the figure said, though its mouth never moved.
"I wasn't invited."
"You were born to it."
The figure rose. The mirror tilted. Kieran saw himself — not as he was, but as he might have been. Eyes gold with power. Skin cracked with light. Sclera black as shadow surrounded each golden iris. Mouths where there should have been silence.
"You fear what waits," the figure said, "but still you knock."
"What is this place?" Kieran asked.
"The moment before truth."
The figure vanished. The forest fell silent.
---
Now he stood in a city he knew.
Or almost knew.
The towers of Caer Halin stood shattered. Stones floated upward into a sky of glass. The statues of the gods, once towering above the square, lay broken at his feet. Their faces had been removed — not worn by time, but torn by something angry.
Kieran bent and touched one. The stone bled.
A scream tore through the city — his name, stretched and cracked like it had been spoken through dying lungs.
He turned.
A woman walked toward him. She was burned from the waist down, her dress scorched, her hair a tangle of ash. But her face—her face was his mother's.
"Why didn't you save me?" she asked.
"I—this isn't real," Kieran whispered.
"Was the fire real? Were my bones real when they snapped?"
He stepped back. She followed.
"You dream," she said, voice now layered with something else, something deeper. "But the dream remembers. The gods bled in their sleep, and now you sleep where they died."
Kieran shouted, and the city fell apart like sand.
---
Now he floated in water black as pitch.
He couldn't breathe. But he didn't need to.
The stars above blinked in rhythm with his pulse.
From the deep, something rose.
Its size made the world seem small. Its shape was not meant to be seen — all angles and wrongness. It had no face, only a crown that dripped with blood and bells that rang in silence. Its voice bypassed his ears and nestled in the marrow of his bones.
You are the wound. You are the door. You are the bait.
Kieran couldn't move. His body was gone.
They died screaming. But not all. One fled. One lives. You carry its spark.
He tried to scream, but only silence came.
The figure leaned closer, and he saw: within the folds of its not-face, a thousand mouths wept flame.
We are what comes after gods. And you—
It touched his chest with a finger of light.
—you are our invitation.
---
He fell.
Through fire. Through memory. Through everything he had never dared to believe.
He landed on his knees in a white chamber with no walls. Just space and echoes.
Across from him stood a boy.
Young. Familiar.
It was him — maybe twelve years old, wide-eyed and bleeding from a cut on his hand. The boy held something in his palm.
A broken feather, made of gold.
"I found it in the field," the boy said. "The one where the sky burned. You remember."
Kieran did. But he had buried it.
"You kept it," he whispered.
The boy nodded. "You always knew something wasn't right. You just stopped looking."
"I was afraid."
The boy stepped forward, holding the feather out.
"It's still yours. But it costs."
"What does?"
The boy smiled.
"Everything."
Kieran took it.
---
His eyes opened.
The wind screamed through the shattered windows of the temple ruins. Moonlight painted the stones in ghostlight.
His hands bled. In his palm, a single feather—gold, warm, impossible.
His veins shimmered beneath the skin, alive with pale fire. His breath fogged in the warm night.
From the shadows, something watched.
Not a god.
Not yet.
But whatever had started the hunt had noticed him now.
And far above, in the silence beyond stars, something turned its gaze toward the world again.