"What flickers once, never fully dies."
Before the seals. Before the Nine Paths. Before divinity wore a crown.
There were two.
Lumen, who smiled at stars as if they were children.
And Kael, who feared the dark between them.
They stood atop a hill that no longer exists, beneath a sky still untamed. Back then, the world was not yet divided into heavens and realms. Cultivation was instinct — not system. People ascended not because they sought power, but because they remembered who they were before form.
> "You know what I saw?" Lumen had said that day, his voice soft with joy.
Kael didn't answer. He never did, not when Lumen spoke like that.
> "I saw a boy with no body, no soul, and no name… just light. A flicker. And he looked at me — and smiled."
Kael finally spoke.
> "That wasn't real."
Lumen turned, not in anger, but in a sadness Kael couldn't name.
> "It was more than real. It was before real."
Kael had always been afraid of what Lumen saw.
The flicker. The truth beneath creation. The idea that divinity wasn't something to be earned, but something to be remembered. That godhood was not a throne — but a return.
Kael couldn't accept that. He needed structure, progress, steps. So when Lumen spoke of tearing down the boundaries — Kael began to doubt him.
> "You would give it all away," he once told him. "Even to the unworthy."
> "No one is unworthy of what they are," Lumen replied.
The day of the Fall came quietly.
Lumen stood beneath the Worldroot Tree, his disciples gathered, waiting.
But Kael arrived not to follow — but with the god's voice in his heart.
And the spear in his hand.
He couldn't do it.
He couldn't kill him.
But others did.
Kael watched as Lumen was sealed — not slain, but scattered across time.
His soul broken into thousands of echoes.
And Kael took the mantle of enforcer.
Now, years later, Kael sat in his chambers, alone.
The divine spear beside him.
The war outside his door.
And on the wall, a painting no one else had seen.
Two boys. A hill. A sky full of flickering stars.
He whispered, not for anyone to hear:
> "You should have taken me with you."