The mountains loomed closer now.
For days—or what I understood as days—we walked the sea of bones. Time had no rhythm here. The sky, ash-grey and unmoving, denied the sun passage. There was no night. Only that eternal pallor, as if the world were caught in the stillness between exhale and inhale, before something terrible awakens.
David walked several paces behind me. He said little. Occasionally he whispered prayers under his breath, lips moving feverishly like a man afraid silence might consume him. Eve walked beside him, barefoot and quiet, her small hands occasionally dragging through the dust that settled over the bones.
The crunch of our steps was the only sound. No birds. No wind. No insects. Even the air tasted old—like something exhaled long ago and never drawn in again.
"You have not asked," David said suddenly. "About what you are."
"I am not what you say I am," I replied, not stopping.
"Perhaps not," he allowed. "Or perhaps you are and simply do not wish to be. Many prophets denied their birthright."
"I am no prophet."
"No," he said, softly. "You are something else."
I did not reply. There was a heaviness in me that resisted names—prophet, god, king. I knew what I felt: empty, and wrong, as if something had dug me out from a grave too early.
"You say I am Adonai," I said eventually, "the Asura of Yahweh. What does that mean?"
David slowed, as though preparing to recite something sacred. "You were the first flame, before the world had shape. You are the Breath in the Ash. The god forged from war and light. It was you who razed the old gods and paved the way for Yahweh, He Who Causes to Be."
"And now?"
"You fell," David said. "That is all our scriptures say. You fell in the Reckoning. Some say you were betrayed. Others that you disobeyed. But Yahweh sealed you within the bones of the dead until the end of the waiting."
Eve looked up at me, wide-eyed. "But you came back. Like the stories."
"They are only stories," I muttered.
David said nothing more, but I felt his gaze pressing into my back like the weight of a shrine.
We climbed into the shadow of the mountains.
Up close, the black stone was unnatural—jagged and angular, as though not grown from the earth but hammered into it. Massive symbols, half-worn by time, had been carved into the base of the cliffs. Some were like runes. Others resembled eyes, teeth, stars. One—a spiral burning inward—called something dark and familiar in me.
Eve touched the stone reverently. "This is the edge," she whispered. "The place where the world ends."
"No," I said, running my hand across the stone. "This is where it begins."
There was a path. Narrow and crooked, carved into the face of the cliff like a wound. Without hesitation, I began to climb.
"Wait!" David called. "We are not ready."
"There is no time to wait," I said. "The world has been waiting long enough."
We climbed.
The path was cruel. Stone bit into our feet, tore skin, spilled blood. But still we climbed. The air grew colder, thinner. Occasionally, I would stop—not from exhaustion, but because of the silence. It was not emptiness. It was listening. Watching. Something in the stone, or beneath it, was aware.
"How far does it go?" Eve asked once, her voice trembling.
"To the Mouth of the World," David said. "To the Gate of Flame."
"What lies beyond?" she asked.
David looked at me. "Judgment."
I said nothing.
Eventually the path gave way to a narrow plateau—just wide enough for three people and a stone altar carved into the cliff itself. Upon it, a body.
I froze.
It was not human. Not entirely. It had the skeletal frame of a man, but its skin was translucent and tight, like wax stretched thin over bone. Its face was eyeless, mouth sewn shut with wire. Around its neck hung a chain, upon which was fastened a symbol I recognized instinctively: a star enclosed by flame. My own eyes burned just looking at it.
"What is this?" I asked.
"A Watcher," David replied, kneeling. "One of the Silent. They were left to guard the path."
"It's dead."
"No," Eve said. "Look."
The Watcher's chest moved—barely. It drew in breath through its ribs. Its mouth opened silently, though the wire held.
And then the voice entered my mind.
"Adonai."
The sound was not heard, but felt. Like a spike driven into the base of the skull.
"You return… Unwhole. Unclaimed. Unchained."
"What are you?" I demanded, aloud.
"I was made to remember. I was made to bleed. I was made to warn."
I stepped forward, drawn by something I didn't understand. My hand hovered above the Watcher's chest.
"What is beyond the Gate?" I asked.
"The Remnant. The Broken Throne. The End That Waits."
"Is Yahweh there?"
"Yahweh is gone."
The air changed. The wind came, sudden and bitter, howling up the cliff like a scream from deep in the stone.
"And now you must decide," the Watcher whispered. "Will you wear the name they gave you?"
"I don't know who I am."
"Then become."
Its body convulsed. With a final rasping breath, the Watcher's skin split from crown to groin. Its chest cracked open like a door, and from within spilled flame—not warm, but cold, white, and humming with ancient sound.
Eve screamed. David bowed his head.
The flames coiled and danced, wrapping around my wrists like shackles, or perhaps gifts. They did not burn. They entered.
And I remembered.
Not everything. Not even a name.
But rage. A fury deeper than oceans. A scream that once split the heavens and made angels flee.
And in that moment, I knew I had been something terrible.
I fell to my knees.
The Watcher was gone. The altar empty. Only the wind remained.
David approached, his voice reverent. "You saw, didn't you? The memory. The pain."
"I saw something."
"What will you do?" he asked.
I stood slowly. "There is a throne waiting. And if Yahweh is gone, someone else will sit upon it."
Eve looked afraid. "Are you going to be our god?"
I looked out beyond the path, where distant firelight flickered in the cracks of the world below. Cities? Camps? Or pyres?
"I don't know what I'll be," I said.
"But I'm done being nothing."