The Keeper stood at the edge of the drifting island, her toes just touching the boundary where soft clouds gave way. There was no sun here to warm her. But somehow, warmth appeared just because she was there. Where she walked, a quietness followed. She lifted her face to the vast, empty sky. She searched a horizon that did not exist. The sky above was vast and dark. Her golden eyes shimmered. "Something is missing," she whispered, knowing nobody was there to listen. "I feel there is something… that should be here. Something that was once here."
Her feet barely grazed the ground as she moved. Wherever she wandered, small miracles unfolded. Petals bloomed from nothing, flowers that had never existed until her passing bloomed. Vines unfurled in coils of colorless flame, and translucent bubbles rose, bursting into clouds of shimmering essence. But she no longer cares for the beauty. What meaning did wonder have when there was no one to witness it? Is there no one to share the silence with?
The island was small, but it was enough. Just enough to walk, to rest, to dream. Glowing fruit hung from the branches of the trees. The vines were long and warped. They produced a soft whistle when the air passed through them. The island was a quiet oasis, suspended in clouds and cradled by the void. In the center was the Temple, a forgotten crown of stone and silence. It had always been there, close but still, inaccessible. Whether it had ever opened for her, she could not say. That memory, like so many others, had been lost. "I wonder if He is watching me," she questioned.
At times, she wondered: Was he the one she had lost, the one she had created? Or was he the one fated to end her? And still, through her fear, there was something else. A thread she could not sever. A pull she did not understand, only obeyed.
She raised her hand to the empty sky. And she desired. No words passed her lips. No spell was spoken. No plea sent to powers above. She longed to see him. To know she was not alone. That she was not some forgotten dream, left unfinished. The sky trembled. Then light. It did not descend from the heavens, but bloomed from within the void itself —a radiant burst of flame and memory. Not a true star, but something more: a sun born of yearning. A beacon shaped by hope. For the first time in the history of this place, the island knew shadow. The clouds stirred with warmth. And in that brief, impossible moment, she saw him, The Severant, a silhouette etched in gold, standing on the farthest cloud. Still. Watching. Alone.
Her breath caught. But before she could reach out even in thought. The light began to fade. The sun, born of her longing, trembled. Then came a pulse not of force, but of quiet unraveling—a soundless echo of negation. And the sun was gone and not shattered, not destroyed. Erased. Effortlessly. Without hatred. As if it had never been. The Keeper sank to her knees. "No…" she whispered. She did not weep. She only stared into the place where her light had lived.
On the far side of the island, the Severant stood with his hands held behind his back. His cloak shifted gently in the fading warmth of the vanished sun. He had seen the light rise. He had watched it with quiet awe, felt its presence move through the void like a breath held too long. He hadn't meant to destroy it, not this time. But he didn't do it out of hatred. He was damaged simply by existing. The Keeper was created from longing. He was made through memory. The moment the sun brushed against his awareness, it began to unravel, too perfect, too fragile to survive the weight of what he was. He had admired it, truly, in that brief moment. More than anything he had ever witnessed. And then it was gone. Not because he wished it. But because he was there.
The Severant lowered his head. "She still dreams," he said quietly, his voice low and rough, like stone dragged across stone. There was no one to hear him. He turned away from the lingering warmth and stepped deeper into the upper clouds of the island. The terrain shifted around him. Trees bent into strange arches, streams flowed against gravity, and silent birds perched on pale branches, their bodies still and blind. She shaped this place. Every inch of it. And though it resisted him, it did not fear him. Nothing ever did. It simply disappeared when he came near, like chalk wiped from a board, quiet, clean, and final.
"I don't judge this place," he said quietly. His voice faded into the clouds. "The Keeper was never mine to judge." He lifted his gaze toward the distant silhouette of the Temple. "I was a weapon once," he said. "A tool used by a universe already falling apart. And now… now I'm just here." His thoughts turned to the Keeper. He thought of the strange warmth she carried with her and the sadness she never showed. To the way she had looked at him, even if only for a moment. "She sees me," he said, barely above a whisper. "Even now." Then, after a long pause, softer still: "I don't remember who I was before her."
He sat down on a ledge of airstone, a slab of hardened wind that had formed beneath him without thought. His sword, worn and dulled with age, rested across his knees. "There's no one left to judge," he said quietly. "No wrong to put right. No truth to weigh." He lowered his head, eyes on the void below. "Then why am I still here?"
The memory of the sun lingered in his chest. Not as warmth, but as a hollow ache. Something beautiful he had ended before he could understand it. "She reached for me," he said quietly. "Even knowing what I am. Even afraid of what I bring." He stood still for a long moment. There was no heartbeat in him. No breath. No warmth. But something shifted deep inside.
The Keeper moved through the gardens. She let her hand graze the vines that rose at her touch. They responded as if recognizing her. Flowers opened beneath her fingers. The clouds shifted to support her steps. But none of it brought her peace. It existed only because she willed it to be. It was hers, and only hers. No one else walked these paths. No one watched the trees grow. No one laughed, or asked questions, or needed her. She had built a paradise. And it was empty.
She stopped near a waterfall that flowed upward, its silver stream climbing endlessly into the sky. Around it, tall trees arched like the ribs of a cathedral, their bark glowing faintly with curling patterns of light. The fruit hanging from their branches gave off soft tones, lullabies, gentle and low, though no one was ever there to hear them. The Keeper sat at the edge of the pond below the rising stream. The water's surface shimmered, her reflection blurred by drifting strands of light. "Why am I afraid of him?" she asked, barely louder than a breath.
There was no answer. There never was. "I can feel what he is," she murmured. "I don't think he is evil. He doesn't destroy because he wants to. He was made that way." The memory of his silhouette lingered in her mind, tall, unmoving, shaped like something carved out of silence. He carried judgment with him. Always. But judgment of what? There was nothing here to condemn. No law to break. No crime to punish. "Did I bring him into existence?" She stretched her hand out once more, and a weak flame flickered to life. She gradually molded it into a moth with a gentle luminescence. "Go," she instructed. "Find him." The moth took flight.
Meanwhile, the Severant lingered beneath a shattered archway. A structure that had never truly existed yet was always in the process of crumbling. Around him were all of the Keeper's creations. The shapes here were incomplete: walls that shimmered in and out of form, doorways that led nowhere. It was as if her will had faltered in this place, unable or unwilling to finish what had been started. He moved through it slowly. His fingers brushed against the edges of fading stone, of surfaces that flickered like memories too fragile to hold. He was careful, not out of fear, but respect. He didn't want to destroy anything else here.
Above him, he sensed something not light, but intent. A small shape drifted down through the still air, wings glowing faintly. The moth. It floated toward him without hesitation, its flight steady despite the strange currents around it. When it reached him, it settled on his outstretched hand. It didn't flinch. It didn't burn. It simply rested there, warm and alive. For a brief moment, the Severant allowed himself something close to a smile, subtle, quiet, but proper. "You still believe in something," he said to the tiny flame. "Even after I took it away."
He held the small creature in his palm for a long while. Its soft glow pulsed against the dark shadow of his hand. He could feel something of her in it. She needs to understand the quiet hope of being seen. "She's afraid of me," he said. His voice was low. "But she sent this anyway." He closed his fingers slowly. The moth disappeared, not crushed, not destroyed, but gently released. Its light faded into the still air like a breath let go. For the first time in what felt like ages, something moved beneath the stillness inside him. He couldn't name it. But it lingered. And it hurt.
He turned his gaze upward, toward the place where the sun had briefly burned. "She made it just to see me," he said quietly. "And I destroyed it." He sat again, this time beneath the twisted limbs of a broken tree, its branches stretching into emptiness. Around him, the world was calm. It was a silence too vast to be natural. "I want to be a king," he said, voice low and steady. "I want to rule… To matter." The words echoed faintly across the void. "I want a crown. For command and glory. So, I won't disappear." He reached down and picked up a shard of glass, maybe from a window, maybe from something that had never fully formed. It caught his reflection in its surface. Faint. Uncertain. Almost unfamiliar. "There are no people. No court. No audience. Just her." His eyes turned toward the pulse of her presence in the distance. "And I can't reach her."
At the center of the island, directly beneath the Temple, the ground changed. It felt older there, as if it carried both the beginning and the end. The Temple's tower rose like a blade into the sky. Its surface shifted with a dull glow, as if it were half-awake. The ground flickered with faint movement, not life exactly, but something akin to it. Here, light and shadow didn't fight each other. They moved together, like two sides of the same thought. And in that quiet, the island spoke: They were two. But they were never meant to be apart.
Elsewhere on the island, far from where the sun's light had once touched. The Severant stood still before a grove of trees. They no longer bore fruit. He hadn't meant to interfere. Not intentionally. The trees had grown along his path, bright with amber leaves and pale vines that shimmered faintly. Their soft hum had stopped him for a moment. They were beautiful. So, he stepped closer, curious. But as his presence drew near, even without touch, with only the trace of thought, the trees began to change. Their leaves turned gray, curled inward, and crumbled away. No sound. No resistance. They were… gone. Undone by proximity alone.
His narrow flame-lit gaze settled on the bare branches. There had been something in them, a shape, a warmth that reminded him of hope. But now, all that remained was the quiet emptiness left behind. He extended a hand toward a vine still wrapped around a nearby stone, moving slower this time, gentler. Even so, it unraveled the moment he touched it. "...It always ends this way," he said, his voice low and even. "I look too closely, and the world slips away." He turned from the ruined grove and faced the horizon. There, in the far distance, a faint shimmer glowed, the last trace of the sun the Keeper had called into being. For a moment, he watched.
He had felt it. Not heat, but warmth, shaped by intention. A light brought into existence not for strength or control, but out of longing. And even though it strained against his presence, even though just being near it had put it at risk, he had looked at it. He admired it. "It was beautiful," he said quietly. The words felt rough and unused, like stone breaking apart. He remembered how it had lit the stone walls of the Temple not with fire, but with meaning, casting long, still shadows that made the whole island seem to pause.
And in the heart of that sun. Not in the light itself, but in what it reflected. He had seen her. The Keeper. Not her whole form. She was too complex, too shifting to be fully seen. But he had glimpsed her silhouette, resting against the branch of one of her strange, impossible trees. Her eyes had been lit with quiet awe as she watched the thing she had made. Watching him. She had created the light to reach him. To see him. Remind them both that they weren't alone. And now it was gone. His chest, beneath all the old armor and silence, felt tight. It wasn't pain. Not exactly. But something close. A hollow pressure. A feeling he hadn't named in a very long time. Was this… grief?
He knelt where one of her creations had once thrived, a spiral garden made of light-glass petals and stones that sang when the wind passed through. Now, the air was still. The stones were cracked. The petals were gone. "She dreams," he whispered. "And I erase those dreams. Not out of anger. Not even by choice. It just… happens." He clenched his fist. "I was a king once," he said to no one. " A keeper of order. A voice that meant something." He looked down at his hand. The rusted gauntlet shimmered faintly with a red glow, dim, but alive. It always flared when the past crept too close, when memory pushed through the silence. "Now I'm just… the answer to a question no one will ever ask." The wind passed, unbothered.
He rose to his full height. His armor was weathered. Its edges were dulled by time. But it still held a faint shimmer of power, like embers that refused to die out. "I would build a kingdom," he said, his voice low but certain. "If there were any people to lead. If there were still laws to uphold. I would bring order. I would bring balance. I would be the final truth." His gaze shifted toward the Temple in the distance. Its doors remained shut as always. The carvings are too old to read. "I would pass judgment," he murmured. "But there is no court. No verdict to give. Only her."
His head turned again toward the place where the sun had vanished. And then, in a voice low and worn like iron remembering fire, he said, "I would speak to her." The words lingered in the air. Heavy. Irrevocable. He did not step forward. He did not retreat. He stood there, still as stone, upon the scorched place where warmth had once reached him. His eyes that narrow slit of flickering flame slowly closed. And in the dark, he did not see ruin. He saw her. Not as an enemy. But as she was. The one who dreamed. The one who reached for light. And somewhere deep within him, something stirred.
Meanwhile, the cloud island drifted in silence. There was no longer a sun. Yet the memory of light lingered, casting a faint golden hue across the paths and gardens the Keeper had once shaped. The Temple stirred. It did not open. It did not speak. But something inside shifted, slow and deliberate, like a lock recalling the shape of a long-forgotten key. And from within, a low hum began to rise. Not sound. Not voice. But a pulse. And with it, the void listened.
The Severant felt it first not as noise, but as a slow tightening behind the flame-slit where his eyes had once burned with judgment. He stopped mid-step atop a ledge that overlooked a quiet crater, the mark of his last unmaking. There, not long ago, stood a sculpture —a woven monument of vine and light, shaped with care and silence. He had destroyed it without knowing. Only after that did he sense it had been hers. A gesture, perhaps. A memory she had not spoken aloud. And now, like so much else, it was gone.
He stood for a long while, surrounded by the silence. The hum in the air deepened, not loud, but steady, like a memory trying to return. Far above, remnants of the sun she had summoned still hung faintly in the clouds. It trembled, barely holding form, its edges fraying inward like the last thread of a fading dream. He raised his hand toward it slowly, but did not reach again. He would not risk touching it. He looked up at it with something close to reverence… and something closer to grief. "I should not have ended it," he said, voice hoarse, barely more than breath. "It was not my intent..."
The air folded around his words, as if unwilling to carry them far. "She builds," he said softly to no one. "Not because she is commanded. Not because there is a need. "But because she hopes." He paused. "That is her flaw." His hands lowered to his side. "I do not know how to hope," he murmured as he turned from the ledge and began to descend. Each step fell with the weight of things unspoken. Beneath him, through the clouds and stone, the Temple's hum continued. Faint, and steady. Like a heartbeat.
Beneath him, the island moved on. It was a vast realm of contradictions. There were floating plateaus that gave rise to forests that had no roots. And caves made from crystal that stretched into the sky. These were the Keeper's creations. They were born from feeling, not design. The Severant walked through a grove of hollow trees. Their trunks whispered as he passed. Everywhere he went, he would feel the Keeper's presence. She was in the stillness. In the flicker of light that refused to die. In the way the world held its breath around him.
He had never stood beside her. But he had felt her presence across the island. In the way the wind shifted without cause, in the way a flower opened toward a sky with no sun, in the stillness that lingered after her passing. And in those moments, something in him changed. It stirred beneath the old instincts, beneath the laws he once upheld, beneath the silence of judgment he had carried for so long. It was not a command. It was not a duty. It was something older than either. Something that reached for her, not to stop her, not to weigh her worth, but to be nearby.
She is what remains, he thought. The last dream. The last ache. A final defiance against the quiet pull of nothing. He stopped beside a still pond shaped like an eye. Its surface did not ripple. There was no wind here, no breath. But it reflected him all the same. A tall figure wrapped in worn metal and silence. His armor, rusted by time, flaked with the weight of years. Beneath it, there was little left, not skin, not bone, only memory—a body shaped more by what had been lost than what remained.
"I would be king of what?" he asked the pond. "Of silence? Of absence? Of ruins too stubborn to fade?" The water did not reply. But as it shimmered faintly, he thought, for a breath of a moment, that he saw her face reflected there. He turned away, as if the thought itself had teeth. "I was not made to long," he said. His voice was quiet, almost ashamed. "And yet…"
The Temple's hum deepened. A low resonance, like a voice trying to remember how to speak. Far above, near the summit of a winding cliff marked with golden vines and half-faded glyphs, the Keeper sat alone beneath a tree that bloomed only in solitude. Its branches arched over her like reaching arms, and its petals shimmered. Her eyes were closed, but her thoughts drifted far. She could feel him. She always had cracks follow in the air. The wind stilled where he passed. Light hesitated at his edges. She did not need to see him to know he was near.
She held one of her suns between her hands. A small one, no larger than a child's dream. It pulsed with a golden glow. "I wonder," she said, "if he can see these." The light shifted in response as if it had heard her. "I made them so he might feel warmth," she continued, not sure if it was true, only that it felt true. "I don't know why." She laughed, just once—a slight sound, carried off by the still air. The kind of laugh meant for no one, a laugh that returned to silence as soon as it was born. "I don't even know if he can feel warmth."
She looked out across the island. Mist drifted low over the terraces, winding through hills and half-formed cities of crystal and vine. Stairways climbed toward the empty sky. Doorways opened onto clouds. Temples stood in silence, as if caught between dreams. All of it was hers. All of it unfinished. "I make," she said softly, "because I don't know how not to." Then, after a pause, in a smaller voice, almost like a confession. "Maybe that's foolish." She drew the little sun closer to her chest. "Maybe I'm foolish."
She sat silently for a long time. The little sun rested in her hands, flickering softly. And just like that, the sun went out. Her hands closed around nothing. She blinked, confused. But the truth settled in quickly. He had been nearby. Not a touch nor a strike. Just the Severant passing too close. And that was enough. He hadn't meant to destroy it. He never did. It was simply what happened... Always.
The Keeper sat very still. She was not angry. She felt the ache of something more profound. She rose slowly. Her gaze shifted toward the center of the island. Toward the Temple. She had never walked its full path. But now, the hum that quiet pulse stirring in the ground, in the air, tugged at her, steady and low, like a voice without language. The sky above grew darker as if the void itself had paused. As if it were also waiting.
She descended through fields of grass that swayed without wind, each blade humming softly with each pass. She crossed a bridge made not of stone, but of hope. At last, she reached the Temple. And elsewhere across the floating vastness, on the other side of the drifting island, the Severant stood at a high ledge, his silhouette sharp against the dimming sky. He, too, looked toward the Temple, that ancient thing at the island's heart. His sword hung at his side, sheathed in silence. Untouched, but not forgotten. "She walks the path," he said, voice low, as if speaking to the clouds themselves. Then, after a pause, softer still: "…Then so shall I."
For he had seen the sun vanish just as she had seen it born. He had felt its warmth, however briefly, and touched the cold, hollow spaces beneath his armor. It had reached something buried, something forgotten. And for the first time in an age without name, that something stirred. "I have judged worlds," he said, his voice low, rough with ancient memory. "I have ended gods." Then, quieter still, "But I do not know what I am… when I am not destroying."
He took one step forward. "I would know what it is to build," he said. His voice cracked, raw with something unfamiliar. "I would know her." The Temple pulsed again, deep and slow as if answering a call older than time. Above the island, the void stirred. Two paths. Two hearts. One island suspended between what was and what might be. And between them… the first thread of something new. Not a battle. Not yet. But not peace either. Only a question. And questions, like seeds, are where dreams begin.