She once whispered to him,
"If divinity must break, let it break beautifully."
And so he did.
He shattered himself into madness.
Fragments of a god who refused to be whole.
The dream remembered.
And so did she.
—
[Start of Book One: Forget Me Not]
—
He emerged without warning, as if the bones of the earth had exhaled him.
A silhouette on the shifting dunes, cloaked in a threadbare robe, wandered toward the ruins of a forgotten Citadel.
Nothing had changed. Just as he remembered.
Shattered columns, towers collapsed in elegant disarray. The echoes of divinity buried beneath centuries of sand and silence.
Infinity did that to you.
Plucked a blackened apple from the tree that still stood in the very place that had once been theirs. Home.
From a past long gone, when it had been just the two of them.
Still growing. Still rotting.
His cracked eye flickered.
They would begin to stir soon.
The ones that had always been.
Still in the dream. Still performing.
Still unaware of the truth festering beneath his skin,
whispering what he'd become.
That infinity was not strength.
It was stillness. Stagnation.
And true divinity would not be found in what one was... but in what one chose to become.
He'd seen it play out in every way.
And never once did it end differently.
But in infinity, even the impossible becomes inevitable.
And he would be here to see how it ended.
Or how it began.
It didn't matter which.
He always watched.
Her laughter, soft as mischief, sharp as madness, tethered him when his mind unravelled to ash.
"You're not chaos," she told him once,
"just a storm pretending not to be scared."
She called him Calio. Once.
Before the dream. Before he broke.
A name spoken in these very kitchens and doorways and sleep.
Too soft for what he became.
Too human to kill.
But gods don't get to keep the names given in love.
A name lost to time.
Only the dream remembered.
And so did she.
A single tear traced his cheek.
Still warm. Still real.
Proof something inside him hadn't died.
That he hadn't broken all the way.
Not yet.
But when he did-
He'd make sure it broke beautifully.