The ribs of the dead god loomed like cathedral pillars, blackened with time and soot from an age when the sky still burned.
Cael stood before the tomb's entrance—its gate open, its chains snapped like threads.
A faint hum resonated from within, not loud but piercing, as though sound itself was being reversed. Veyra didn't follow him immediately. She stared at the open gate with something close to dread.
"I've read the tomb's name in a dozen forbidden tongues," she said."They all translate the same way.""The Place Where Gods Are Forgotten By Themselves."
Cael said nothing. He stepped forward.
Inside, the air was cold—not from temperature, but absence. It was as if heat, time, and memory had all been bled out.
The walls were carved with thousands of names.
Some were in languages Cael had never seen. Some were scratched in with bloody fingers.And one… was his own.
"Cael."
A whisper—not from behind him, not from around him, but from inside his bones.
He turned and found no one.
He kept walking.
The Whispering Room
It was circular, domed, and vast—lit by no flame but glowing faintly from something in the floor. An altar stood at the center, and above it, suspended like a marionette by invisible threads, floated a disfigured god.
Or what was left of one.
Its face was fragmented—a dozen mouths, some sewn shut, others whispering in languages Cael could feel but not hear. One of its arms was human. The other was a spiraling wing of knives.
"You came back," it said.
Its voice was not a sound. It was a feeling in Cael's blood.
"Back?" he asked.
"You left me in the fire. You left us all. And now, you walk with a Thread? That isn't yours."
Cael stepped forward. "What are you?"
"A mirror."
And then the whispers exploded.
Suddenly Cael's mind was filled with visions—
A battlefield of suns, where divine armies drowned in their own light.
A throne in the void, and a figure cloaked in ash, laughing as galaxies bled.
Seven Threadwalkers standing around a dying star, one of them—himself, older, colder—saying:
"Let it all burn. The threads were meant to be broken."
Cael dropped to his knees.
"Stop—STOP—!"
The disfigured god hovered lower.
"You remember it now, don't you? The truth. You're not seeking the Threads. You're their executioner."
Then the altar cracked—and from its core, a sigil rose:
A silver thread, entwined with chains.
It pulsed once—then leapt into Cael's chest.
He screamed.
Outside the Tomb
Veyra watched the sky turn red.
The Hollow Sea began to ripple. Stars blinked out.
A tremor echoed through the bones of the mountain.
She looked back toward the tomb and whispered:
"He found the second one.May the gods forgive us all…"