The rain had never stopped in Virelda.
For three hundred and seventy one days, the skies bled silver over the spires and rotting domes of the Drowned City. And on the final day of the Third Era, beneath a storm that whispered in forgotten tongues, a coffin of brass and saltstone was lowered into the Sea of Names.
They said it belonged to a god.
Crowds gathered silently atop bone white steps of the Basilica Marrow, their faces veiled and hands gloved in thread spun from dead comets. Mourning was compulsory, not for the divine corpse, but for the century that died with it. For the truths it took with it into the salt.
At the edge of the crowd stood a boy named Ashen Halweir, seventeen, wearing a coat three sizes too large and eyes that remembered too much. He was not supposed to be there. Not among the priests of Glass, the Choir of Regression, or the marble faced nobles whose bloodlines were stitched with ancient pacts.
He was, after all, only the son of a paper keeper. A nobody.
And yet he had been invited.
The invitation had come three nights ago, in an envelope made of kelp skin, sealed with a sigil that bled ink when touched: a serpent eating its own wings. Inside was only a sentence, carved in unfamiliar script:
"You were present the last time a deity died. Come again."
He didn't understand. No one had died except his mother, and she was no deity. Just a fragile woman with fading eyes who once told him that "reality was a wall of paper, and some children are born with ink on their fingers." Whatever that meant.
The coffin disappeared into the sea with a hiss like a dying breath. The priestess stepped forward. Her robes were made of rain. Literally—every fold shimmered and dripped, yet never wet the marble below. Her voice echoed across the plaza like memory in a cave:
"Let the Veil accept what lies beyond mortal cause. Let the Weft of Being unravel, and be rewoven." At her side, masked attendants dropped black pearls into the water. They sank like stars into an endless abyss.
Ashen felt it in his teeth first—a low humming, deep in the bone. A resonance. Like a tuning fork struck against the soul.
And then it happened.
The sky blinked.
No thunder. No flash. One moment clouds; the next, an eye.
Vast, lidless, horizontal. Watching.
The plaza erupted. People screamed without sound, mouths open in silent terror, as blood leaked from their ears. Dozens fell—seizing, choking on their own tongues. Ashen felt his knees buckle, but before he hit the ground, a hand caught his shoulder.
It was warm, and wrong. He turned. The figure was tall, dressed in a suit of folded dimensions—his tie a Möbius strip, his buttons tiny black holes. He had no face, only a smooth mirror where one should be.
"He remembers," the being said without speaking. "It will begin again. And this time, the Threads will not be kind." The eye in the sky closed. The rain resumed. Silence returned, heavy and unnatural.
Ashen stumbled back—but when he looked again, the figure was gone. Only the whisper remained, like a breath behind his ear:
"Seven sigils. Seven keys. The Archive of Endings opens in dreams."
And then, as if nothing had ever happened, the crowd reassembled in grim reverence. No one spoke of the sky. No one seemed to remember. Even the priestess now spoke of mundane prayers and prophecies that smelled of mold.
But Ashen remembered.
And as the bells tolled thirteen times—an impossible number—he realized something that made his skin crawl.
The god they buried today hadn't died yet.
It was inside him.