In the age after gods, the bones still burned.
The wind moved like a breath held too long, then broken all at once — a hollow moan across the corpse of the city. Emberlight flickered over shattered spires, once temples, now nothing more than spears of stone that pierced the ash-choked sky. Beneath them, the ground was still hot — centuries after the fall — and smoke curled up from the deep veins of godshard that pulsed faintly underground, like blood glowing beneath ruined skin.
Kaelyn Mora crouched at the edge of a broken column, her hand pressed to the cracked stone as if it still held memory. Her fingers were dirt-caked and scraped raw, her nails black with soot. She had learned long ago that silence had a shape — and she was listening to it now.
Something had shifted.
The ash was never still in Kireth Hollow. It whispered and danced with the heat. But tonight it moved differently — warily, almost reverently — as if something sacred had stirred beneath the ruins.
She adjusted the rag wrapped around her mouth and nose, pulled her scavenger's hood tighter. Her eyes — sharp, slate-grey, almost colorless — watched the descent of flakes from above. Each one was a whisper from a time before time. Every one a lie the world told itself about being alive.
She descended the slope.
The relic site had revealed itself only that morning — a minor quake, then a tremor that cracked open the old god-mining shaft like a ribcage split with a chisel. Most of the other scavengers had passed it by. Too unstable. Too deep. Too cursed.
But Kaelyn had never cared for warnings. The world had never warned her when it took her mother. Or when the Inquisitors came to the orphanage with their chains and their holy knives. Or when the Syndicate branded her a thief and broke her brother's legs for a pouch of smuggled shard-dust.
She descended because something called her. And she had learned to follow that call.
It was deep in the shaft that she found it — not a relic, not a shard, not a machine or bone-chiseled scripture. It was a cocoon of crystal, half-buried in molten slag, suspended in a cage of ancient steel marked with the glyph of the Nameless One — a god whose very name had been scrubbed from memory, worship, and text.
The glyph should not have existed.
But it pulsed. Faintly. Like a heartbeat.
And Kaelyn, despite herself, reached out.
She should have walked away.
The rules of scavenging were carved into every alley wall, every rusted safehouse door: If it glows, don't touch. If it hums, run. If it whispers—run faster.
But this was no relic. This was alive.
Her fingers brushed the surface of the cocoon — not smooth, not cold. It shivered. A vibration barely felt but deeply known. As if something inside it had opened one eye. As if it recognized her.
Then — a crack, thin and white as a god's breath, spread across the shell.
Kaelyn jerked her hand back, heart hammering, but it was too late. Light spilled from the fissure — not bright, not blinding — but wrong. Not like fire or sun or shardlight. It was the color of silence before a scream.
The cocoon opened with a sound like stone drowning.
Kaelyn fell back hard onto the slag, tearing her cloak. Sparks burned through the fabric and bit into her skin, but she barely felt it. All her senses were pulled inward — toward the thing now unfurling in front of her.
It wasn't a god. Not fully. Not yet.
It was a shard — not crystal, but flesh and memory and something older. It hovered above the broken cage like it was still choosing whether to exist. The shape it took changed as she looked at it: first a burning crown, then a coiled serpent, then the outline of a human heart, still beating.
Then — it spoke.
Not with sound. With knowing.
A voice bloomed in Kaelyn's skull, not hers and yet not wholly separate.
"You are the last echo."
"You are the bone where memory clings."
"You are the door. And I am the key."
She gasped. Pain shot through her skull like hot iron. Her vision went white, then black, then deeper than black — into a place without shape or time or thought.
And in that place, she remembered things that could not be remembered.
The forging of stars from godbone. The screaming birth of cities made from prayer. The moment the gods were betrayed — not slain, not exiled, but unmade. Their names devoured. Their thrones shattered. Their remnants buried beneath false histories.
And the one who had refused to die.
The Nameless One.
Kaelyn awoke to fire.
The cocoon was gone — or perhaps it had entered her. Her chest burned, not from outside heat but from within, like a spark had been sewn beneath her heart.
The relic chamber around her had begun to collapse. She staggered to her feet, blood in her mouth, ears ringing, vision swaying. Stone cracked above her. Ash fell in thick sheets. But still she stood.
The shard was inside her.
Alive.
Awake.
She was Shardborn.
Above the ruins, far on a ridge of broken glass and petrified sand, a man in white robes watched her flee the collapsing shaft. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored lenses, his mouth set in a thin, devout line.
He turned to the figure behind him — a pale woman armored in relic-iron, her left arm replaced with a bracer of fused shardglass.
"She has it," he said. "The mark is clear."
The woman said nothing.
The man raised his gloved hand, and in it bloomed a weapon carved from old bone and sealed with seven prayers.
"Bring her to the pyre. Alive or ash."