The sky had forgotten how to shine.
Nael stood alone on the cliff's edge, where the wind screamed like a dying god and the ash fell like snow. The world below him was a graveyard of mountains and bones, temples split like cracked skulls, statues of gods worn faceless by time. Nothing moved. Not even the sun. Just a pale, lingering light that painted the world in tones of ruin.
He held a rusted shovel in one hand. In the other, a satchel of salt and silence.
Behind him, half-buried in the scorched earth, a shrine lay crumbling—a monument to a deity whose name no one dared remember. Nael didn't know which god it was. Maybe he never would. Maybe that was the point.
He didn't speak. He didn't pray.
He dug.
The soil was black and dry, crumbling like burnt parchment. Each thrust of the shovel broke open the silence, only to be swallowed again by the vast emptiness around him. A bird watched from a dead branch above, one eye glowing pale blue, like the soul of something older than the sky. It didn't blink.
Nael paused. His breath came in clouds. He wasn't cold.
Just… hollow.
The grave took shape slowly, as they always did—an exact rectangle, measured and careful. He never rushed it. No one had ever taught him the rites, but somehow, his hands remembered what his mind did not.
Salt on the corners. Ash at the center. A circle carved with the tip of his finger, just wide enough to enclose the space where the heart should lie. He didn't know what it meant, only that every grave needed it.
He stood over the hole.
Then, gently, he lowered her in.
The girl had no name. She had fallen from the cliffs two nights ago, or perhaps three. Time blurred when the stars refused to turn. Nael had found her body curled around a charm—a disc of sunstone and bloodied metal. Her hand still clutched it when he pulled her free.
He didn't ask who she was. He didn't look for survivors. The world had stopped asking, and so had he.
He placed the charm beside her heart, tucked under folded arms. Then, with solemn precision, he scattered the salt. The ash. The fragments of incense long since burned out.
And he whispered.
Not a prayer. Not a farewell.
Just one word, like a key long forgotten in his throat:
"Rest."
A gust of wind howled through the ruins above. The shrine behind him groaned—stone splitting, something old stirring beneath layers of time and death. Nael turned, shovel tight in his grip. His heart didn't race. He was used to the dead moving.
But this… this wasn't a body.
It was the sky.
It pulsed—just once—like something had blinked behind the clouds.
And Nael felt it.
A pressure. A presence. A voice not made of sound, but weight.
"You buried her… in my name."
The voice did not echo. It resonated, like a second heartbeat pressing against Nael's ribs, ancient and immense, carved into the silence itself. It wasn't male or female, cruel or kind. It was remembered, like a word long forgotten suddenly whispered again.
Nael didn't move. Didn't speak. The wind had stopped.
The shovel slipped from his hand and landed soundlessly in the dirt.
His eyes searched the sky, but nothing moved. No form. No face. No storm.
Only that pressure — like a weightless gaze — wrapping around him, tugging not at his body, but at something buried far deeper.
"She died clinging to the last spark of a name that has already faded."
"And yet… you gave her rest."
A soundless hum passed through the air — not vibration, but memory. The world shifted. For a split second, the wind carried a scent: jasmine, burnt myrrh… and blood.
Nael clenched his fists.
He had felt things like this before. In dreams. In moments between sleep and waking, when the line between the dead and the living blurred.
But never like this.
He turned slowly, eyes narrowing toward the broken shrine.
And there, amidst the cracked pillars and shattered offerings, a lightless flame hovered. Black and gold, flickering without heat, without source — just being. It pulsed once, then twice, like a breath.
Nael stepped forward.
The flame didn't burn. It pulled. Like a voice calling from beneath water, familiar and terrible.
"You do not know me, Gravekeeper."
His breath caught.
"Yet you walk my forgotten lands. You dig where the stars no longer shine. You mark the graves… of those who once shaped the heavens."
He wanted to speak — to ask who, what, why — but his throat wouldn't open. The words had been taken before he was born.
Instead, he thought:
"What do you want from me?"
And somehow, the voice heard.
"You are the last to remember us. The last to bury the sacred. The last who has not yet chosen a side."
The wind returned — sharp and cold, whipping ash into his face. The flame dimmed, flickered… and expanded, spiraling into a ring of light that hovered above the grave.
Nael shielded his eyes. Beneath the light, the girl's body shifted.
She wasn't breathing. Her eyes did not open.
But from her chest, the charm she carried began to glow — faintly at first, then bright, brilliant, a sunstone ignited. Symbols etched along its rim flared with fire, circling into the air.
The flame twisted, and the voice whispered like a storm restrained:
"This world is not dead. Not yet."
"But something must rise from the graves we left behind."
"And so, I offer you this, child of ash and silence — a name."
Nael blinked.
A name?
"Nael," he said. His voice was hoarse, unused. "I already have one."
"No."
"That is not the name I speak of."
The flame crackled. From its core, three glowing runes emerged, spinning slowly, orbiting one another like a dying star system. Nael recognized none of them.
But something inside him did.
His knees buckled. Heat filled his chest. Not pain — not exactly.
It was like something had been unlocked, something hidden in the marrow of his bones.
"You are more than a boy with a shovel."
"You are the last Gravekeeper."
"And the gates are beginning to open."
Nael tried to stand, but the ground trembled beneath his feet — a low, deep quake that didn't come from the earth, but from beneath the world itself.
The ring of flame collapsed into itself, becoming a sphere, and then—
—it shattered, and everything went black.
The sky was gone.
The cliff. The grave. The shrine.
Gone.
He stood in an endless plain of shadow and gold, like a sea of stars drowned in ink. The air was weightless, soundless. But he was not alone.
Shapes floated around him — silhouettes the size of mountains, half-formed, broken, and blindfolded. Limbs of starlight. Wings made of silence. Faces carved from prayers that no one spoke anymore.
He didn't understand what he saw.
But his soul did.
"This was once the Hall of the Twelve."
The voice returned, no longer distant. It came from everywhere, like the wind speaking in tongues.
"Before man walked, before the sun knew its own name, this was where the gods ruled. And then they fell."
Nael turned as slowly as fear would allow.
In the sky above, a memory was burning.
He saw it — as if through someone else's eyes.
—A throne split in two, a woman screaming light into the darkness.
—A spear of void hurled through a sun.
—Heaven cracking like glass under the weight of betrayal.
—And at the center, a god with no face, descending with arms outstretched, carrying death like a gift.
"We destroyed ourselves," the voice said.
"And the world forgot us."
Nael's chest ached. It wasn't just the weight of what he was seeing. It was as if he had watched this before.
As if he had stood where the sky broke, as if he had seen gods bleed and knew the taste of divine ashes on his tongue.
"Why are you showing me this?"
His voice cracked the silence.
And the voice replied, softly:
"Because it is happening again."
The sky twisted. The memory began to collapse inward, dragging stars and screams into a single point of light.
From that light, a single figure emerged — cloaked, masked, with a sword that shimmered like bone and gold.
She turned toward him.
Even without eyes, she saw him.
Even without lips, he heard her speak.
"Nael."
It was not the same voice. This one was hers — cold, beautiful, terrifying in its stillness.
"You will open the gates."
Nael gasped, and the world snapped back.
He was on his knees beside the grave. The sky had returned, dim and ashen. The flame was gone. The girl's body was still. But the charm on her chest had turned black, empty of light.
He looked at his hands.
Symbols—runes—glowed faintly across his palms and fingers. Not carved. Not drawn. Branded into his soul.
And behind him… the shrine was no longer silent.
Stone cracked, falling away in chunks. A door had appeared — a slab of onyx, pulsing with breath. There were no hinges. No seams. Just a mark at its center, glowing the same way his hands did.
The gate.
He staggered backward.
"What am I supposed to do…?"
And the voice — now quieter, fainter — answered one last time:
"Bury the forgotten. Remember the unforgiven. Guard what should not return."
"You are the Gravekeeper of the Gods."
"And the gods are beginning to wake."