The sky bled gold that day.
Palaces burned like dying stars. Shrines cracked open and spilled silence. And somewhere, far beneath the wreckage of gods and their proud monuments, the boy they forgot sat with his back against black stone.
He didn't move.
He hadn't moved in a long time.
His name was Lucien.
Though even that—
He wasn't sure still belonged to him.
He no longer counted the years. The notion of time had dulled into something abstract. Above him, the world shifted endlessly—empires fell, new laws rose, gods were born, and worshipped, and slain. But here, at the deepest floor of the Celestial Black Vault, the only sound was breath.
His.
And hers.
A whisper.
No, not a voice. Not really. Something more ancient. Something older than voices.
Sing to me…
The stone trembled. The air thinned. A faint pulse echoed in the bones of the earth, not like thunder—but like something swallowing thunder whole.
Lucien opened his eyes.
He hadn't spoken in centuries. Hadn't heard his own voice in even longer. His chains had fused with his body. His hands were no longer hands, but relics of someone who used to want things.
The gods had locked him here after the trial. Said he was too dangerous. A child with no bloodline, no clan, and no place among the heavens. They branded him the Error. A deviation. A threat to balance.
So they buried him in silence.
But the Void… the Void had other plans.
He'd felt it growing. Slowly. Patiently. In the cracks of his soul where anger used to live. Not warmth. Not hate. Just… stillness. A kind of waiting that even death feared.
A second pulse came.
Stronger.
Deeper.
Chains groaned.
Lucien shifted. Only slightly. A finger. The iron screeched as it bent, screaming like it knew what came next. A crack spread across the floor, wide and dark and endless.
The voice came again.
You were never meant for their world…
So remake it.
Sing, child.
Lucien stood.
The chains shattered.
Not loud.
Just final.
And for the first time in ten thousand years, the boy they buried beneath gods… took a breath as himself.