Title: Ashes of Divinity
Part I: The Vessel Returns
#The world had ended in fire. That much was true. But Nirash's story didn't begin in flames—it began in silence.
He died at thirteen. Not in the war. Not in fire. But in stillness. A collapse, sudden and cold, somewhere between sorrow and surrender. No wounds, no violence—just a heart that gave up before its time. No one knew what killed him. Not even Nirash.
And then, one day, three years later, beneath the sky painted in perpetual dusk, he opened his eyes.
The wind smelled like ash and rusted metal. Trees were charred skeletons. The old city—Kathmandu, maybe, or some version of it—was shattered and stitched back together in brutal geometry. Billboards bent into new languages. Roads curled like vines.
Nirash stood barefoot in the dust, in a world no longer ruled by nations but by zones: red, black, and grey. Survivors huddled behind concrete walls. Machines whispered to ghosts. And floating above it all—watching—were the gods.
Not saviors. Not demons. Just... selfish.
They weren't omnipotent, just hungry. Helping mortals not for justice or kindness, but because peace of mind, for them, was a resource. A weapon. An evolution. And Nirash? He was a Vessel now—a shell hollowed out and filled with whispers of something greater. A tool, maybe. A threat, definitely.
He had power, but it wasn't his own. He could bend light. Breathe in radiation and cough it out as memory. He could see choices before they were made. But each time he used it, he felt a god's fingerprint on his spine.
They whispered promises. Regret. Laughter. All trying to mold him—to shape him into their version of "balance."
But Nirash wasn't empty anymore. He was remembering.
He remembered dying.
He remembered choosing to return.
And now, surrounded by ruins and false prophets, he would find the truth:
Not about the war.
Not about the gods.
But about the lie that built the world before