They had built something.
Not a shrine.
Not yet.
Kael saw it just before dawn, when the fires had burned low enough that shadows regained their honesty. He had been pacing the perimeter out of habit—checking lines of sight, listening for footsteps that didn't belong, feeling for that subtle pressure that meant someone, or something, was watching too closely.
That was when he noticed the gap.
Near the river crossing, where the water narrowed and stones rose naturally from the current, someone had cleared the ground. Not aggressively. Carefully. Reeds trimmed. Mud packed flat. A low ring of stones arranged with intent rather than function. Two upright posts of driftwood set opposite each other, empty between them.
No markings.
No prayers etched.
No blood.
Just space.
Space that did not exist for trade.
Or for defense.
Or for the dead.
Space that waited.
Kael stopped walking.
His pulse slowed—not from calm, but from something colder. Recognition without comfort.
Footsteps approached behind him, hesitant, uneven. He did not turn.
The woman stood a few paces back, hands clasped tightly in front of her, eyes rimmed red from smoke and sleeplessness. The river murmured beside them, indifferent, as it always was.
"We thought—" she began, then faltered.
Kael looked at the structure again.
They had aligned it with the crossing. With the road. With the place where strangers arrived and danger announced itself.
Not a shrine.
A placeholder.
"We thought maybe you'd come back," she finished quietly.
Kael closed his eyes.
"I won't," he said.
The words were sharp, final, honed by too many nights like this.
Silence stretched.
"But you could," she whispered.
That was the danger.
Not belief.
Belief was loud. Belief demanded ritual, obedience, hierarchy. Belief built gods and fed them until they grew cruel.
This was worse.
This was possibility.
Kael turned to face her.
"You don't understand what you're doing," he said.
Her shoulders shook. "We understand that when you were here, the river stopped killing us."
"And when I leave," Kael said, "you will decide whether you live without me."
She flinched, as if struck.
"They came," she said suddenly, words spilling out. "The hunters. They said you were worth more alive than we were together. They said if we helped, they'd spare us."
Kael's jaw tightened.
"And you believed them."
"We were afraid," she said, almost pleading. "You weren't."
Kael laughed once—a short, humorless sound.
"I am afraid," he said. "Just of different things."
He stepped closer to the marker.
The air felt wrong here—not heavy like a god's gaze, but attentive. As if the world itself was pausing, curious to see what he would do.
Kael lifted his spear.
The woman gasped. "Wait—"
He drove the spear into the first upright post and wrenched it sideways. Wood split with a sharp crack. He kicked the stone ring apart, scattering it into the river where the current immediately claimed it. He smashed the second post with the butt of his weapon until it collapsed into splinters.
Violence, precise and unceremonious.
The space was gone.
The possibility broken.
The air lightened.
The woman stared at the wreckage, tears cutting clean lines through ash on her face.
"You didn't have to destroy it," she said.
"Yes," Kael replied softly. "I did."
He turned away from the river and began walking back toward the road.
Behind him, the woman spoke again—not to stop him, not to accuse him, but with the fragile certainty of someone reaching for the last thing they had.
"What are we supposed to do now?"
Kael did not stop walking.
"Choose," he said. "And accept the cost."
The sun crested the horizon then, Sol Aurex rising hard and unforgiving, burning away the last of the night's illusions. In its light, Kael's shadow stretched long and distorted across the ground—too large, too sharp, shaped by things no single man should carry.
Far above, beyond the sky, something stirred.
Not a god.
Not fully.
A thinning presence, irritated, aware.
Divine remnants noticed when space was made for something that refused to be claimed.
Kael felt it like a pressure behind his eyes, distant but deliberate.
He did not look up.
He walked until the village disappeared behind a bend in the road, until even the river's sound faded.
Behind him, Ressan Ford would rebuild.
Or it would fail.
Or it would harden into something cruel enough to survive.
That was no longer his choice.
Ahead of him, the road waited—not as a calling, but as an absence of anchors.
Kael kept moving.
Because the moment he allowed space to remain for him—
The world would fill it.
And then, gods would follow.