Eryndor' POV
I opened my eyes to grey nothing.
For a moment, I didn't know who I was or where I was. I only knew I had been asleep for a long time, and something had pulled me back from that deep, comfortable darkness.
My body felt wrong. It felt too light and too cold. I tried to move my fingers and heard a stone crack. When I sat up, dust fell from my shoulders like snow. I looked down at my hands and saw they were covered in grey powder, the kind that comes from things that have been dead for centuries.
Where was I?
I blinked slowly, trying to focus. The room around me was dark, except for a faint grey light coming from somewhere above. As my eyes adjusted, I began to see shapes: broken columns, collapsed walls, rubble everywhere.
This was a temple. My temple.
The knowledge came suddenly, like a door opening in my mind. I knew this place. I had built it. I had walked these halls when they were whole and beautiful. Thousands had come here to pray to me, to leave offerings, to speak my name with respect.
But now, it was destroyed.
I pushed myself to my feet, stumbling slightly. My legs felt weak, unused for so long that they had almost forgotten their purpose. Dust fell from my clothes in clouds. I looked down and saw I was wearing robes that had once been white but were now grey with age and dirt.
How long had I been asleep?
I walked slowly through the ruins, my bare feet leaving prints in the thick dust on the floor. Everything was covered in it: the walls, the broken furniture, the shattered statues. Nothing had been touched in a long time. This place had been completely abandoned.
As I walked, more memories began to surface. My name was Eryndor. I was a god. I had siblings, other gods who ruled different aspects of creation. We had once worked together, building the world, shaping mortals, and creating order from chaos.
But something had gone wrong.
I stopped walking and closed my eyes, trying to remember. What had happened? Why was I here, alone in this destroyed temple, covered in the dust of forgotten years?
The memories were frustrating. They came in pieces, like a broken mirror. I remembered arguing with my siblings. I remembered being angry about something important. I remembered Celestara, my eldest sister, looking at me with disappointment in her eyes.
And then nothing. Just darkness and sleep.
I opened my eyes and continued walking. The temple was larger than I had first thought. Room after room stretched out before me, all in the same state of ruin. In what had once been the main hall, I found my altar. It was buried under fallen stone and earth, barely visible beneath the debris.
I knelt beside it and brushed away some of the dust. Beneath, I could see carvings: my symbols, my stories, all the things that had once defined who I was to the mortals who worshipped me.
But something was wrong with them. The carvings had been damaged, not by time or collapse, but deliberately. Someone had taken a chisel and scratched them out, removing my face from every image and crossing out my name wherever it appeared.
A cold feeling settled in my chest.
This was not simple abandonment. This was erased.
I stood and walked to what remained of a window. Outside, the view made my breath catch. My temple sat on a floating island of dead earth, surrounded by nothing but grey void. In the distance, other ruins drifted like broken ships on a still sea: more temples, more forgotten places.
This was not the mortal world. This was somewhere else entirely.
The Forgotten Realm.
The name whispered through my mind like a ghost. This was where discarded things went, where broken gods and lost souls drifted in silence, waiting for an end that never came.
My siblings had cast me out. They had thrown me here and sealed me away. But why? What had I done to deserve this?
I tried again to remember, pushing harder against the fog in my mind. The argument with my siblings had been about mortals. I had wanted something for them: freedom, perhaps. Choice. I had believed they deserved more than the careful, controlled existence my siblings had planned for them.
But the details stayed blurred. Every time I reached for them, they slipped away.
A sound broke the silence. Footsteps, soft and uncertain, came from somewhere behind me. I turned quickly, my body tensing.
A figure stood in the doorway of the ruined hall. It was small and thin, barely more than a shadow in the grey light. As it stepped forward, I saw it was a woman, or something that had once been a woman. She was transparent in places, like she was not completely there.
"You are awake," she said. Her voice was quiet, barely more than a whisper.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"My name is Mira," she said. "I am an oracle. Or I was, before I was forgotten."
"How long have I been asleep?"
She tilted her head, studying me with eyes that looked through me rather than at me. "A thousand years. Maybe more. Time is strange here. It does not move like it does in the world above."
A thousand years. The words hit me like a physical blow. Everything I had known was gone. Everyone who had prayed to me was dead. The world had moved on without me completely.
"Why am I awake now?" I asked.
Mira stepped closer. Her feet made no sound on the stone floor. "Because someone called you. Mortals in the world above performed a ritual. They spoke your name in the old way, with the old words. The seal weakened, just enough."
"My siblings sealed me here?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
She was quiet for a long moment, her strange eyes never leaving my face. When she finally spoke, her voice was sad. "That is the question you must answer yourself. But be careful, Eryndor. Memory is a liar. What you think you remember may not be the truth."
Before I could ask what she meant, she faded, becoming less solid until she disappeared completely. I was alone again in the ruins of my temple.
But something had changed. I could feel it now, a faint connection to the world above. The ritual the mortals had performed had created a crack in the seal. It was small, but it was there.
And if there was a crack, it could be widened.
I looked around at the ruins one last time. Then I closed my eyes and reached for that connection, that thin thread linking me to the mortal world. I pulled on it gently, carefully, testing its strength.
Far above, in the world I had been cast out from, I felt something respond. Power, faint but present, flowed down to me through the crack in the seal.
I was still weak and still forgotten. But I was awake.
And I would find out why my siblings had done this to me.