Part III: Threads in the Light
The light didn't glow—it bent. Not because of heat, but because of fate.
Reality, to most, looked linear. Sharp edges. Flat scenes. But around Nirash… the very panels of existence curved. Walls tilted just a little too far. Lamps flickered in still air. When he stood still, reflections moved.
The gods thought they had control over fate—that it unspooled in loops or lines. But Nirash was unknowingly weaving new threads just by existing. The bending light around him wasn't magic. It was destiny trying to rewrite itself in real time.
And the tragedy? He didn't know.
He smiled sometimes. He spoke like things were fine. But beneath it, buried deep, was a fate that wasn't just bad—it was cursed. Not by a villain. Not by the gods. But by the very logic of the world he was reborn into. Every step he took brought him closer to... something watching.
Even the light was warning him.
It bent. It cracked.
As if the panels of the universe were holding back a scream.
He didn't want power. Not the explosive, god-splitting kind.
He just wanted control—even if he didn't yet understand what that meant.
At thirteen, Nirash had already seen too much. Not of the world—of the words behind it. The ones in old books, whispered in banned texts, etched on scorched alley walls. Words that taught him this world wasn't just broken. It was built that way.
And then came the pain.
Ten hours. A lifetime compressed into aching seconds, stretched by static. His skin buzzed like it held voltage. His mind fractured, not into madness… but into clarity so sharp it bled.
Then silence.
Pain vanished. Like it had never been there.
Like he had never been there.
And in that silence, he remembered something darker.
In a past life—if it was truly his—he hadn't been heroic. He hadn't saved anyone. He had studied them. Measured their emotions. Worn them like masks. A psychopath, they might've called him.
But now… he felt something. A mimicry of sorrow, maybe?
He cried. Or tried to.
Nothing came.
No salt. No release.
Just the taste of grief without the relief of tears.
He slept where he could. Concrete. Ash. Sometimes a hollow tree.
He listened to broken radios sing lullabies from extinct stations.
No one came. No one saw him.
He was alive again. But unseen.
And maybe, in that long silence, Nirash did give up.
But only in the way the earth gives up after winter.
He broke so he could shift.
Crack so he could change.
Because something deeper was forming.
Something even the gods failed to notice.
The god inside him hadn't left.
He was watching.
And when Nirash rises next…
he won't be asking for control.
He'll be defining it.