While standing among the gods, I stepped forward before anyone could speak.
The basin was still. The gods remained where they stood, their wills aligned but not yet settled, like embers waiting for a breath.
I felt it then, the quiet pull in my chest. The world was formed, ordered in spirit, but it was still blind.
I rose. Not using wind. Not using fire, but my own essence.
My sandals left the stone and heat rolled outward from me in slow, measured waves. The red toga snapped once, then flowed as if submerged in liquid flame. The gods below looked up, their expressions shifting from debate to awe.
Flames bloomed around my body. Not wild, not all consuming but controlled.
They wrapped around me like a mantle, brightening from orange to white-gold as I ascended. The air screamed as I passed through it, pressure collapsing behind me. I pierced the clouds in a column of heat so intense they didn't burn, they parted, peeling away from the world like curtains drawn aside.
Higher, beyond the sky, beyond the grey veil until space greeted me in it's cold, and vast silence.
I didn't stop, I let the fire grow, the heat surged, light intensified, and something strange happened. The flames no longer behaved like flame. They hardened. Not into matter, but into form.
Solid fire that did not burn, but radiated, it emitted brilliance without destruction, fire without any hunger for destruction. The fire condensed around me like a star in the making, its surface smooth, luminous, humming with restrained power.
Below, the world responded, the clouds recoiled, tearing apart in spirals. Shadows fled. The sky, once dim and yellowed, began to pale.
I hovered there, suspended above creation.
Then I spoke. My voice did not boom, it didn't roar, it slid through the vacuum, through the atmosphere, throughout creation, smooth and inevitable.
"Let there be light"
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The fireball flared, and the world opened its eyes.
Light spilled through the heavens for the first time, not as a flicker, not as flame, but as something vast and steady. It pierced the gaps between the clouds in long, radiant streaks, washing over the land in gold and white. Shadows recoiled and thinned. Color bled into the world where there had only been dullness before.
On the earth below, the gods froze.
They lifted their faces to the sky, struck silent by what they were seeing.
"What… is that?" someone whispered.
"A fire," another murmured, uncertain. "No, that's too pure. Too still."
The basin reflected it faintly, a burning star where none had existed before. The gods felt it in their cores, a pressure that was not hostile, a warmth that did not consume. Their instincts screamed at them to kneel, to bow their heads and worship, but they resisted, standing in awe instead, hearts pounding with a reverence they did not yet have words for.
A sun.
The thought rippled through them, unspoken but shared.
Then Adam descended.
He came down slowly, deliberately, with the newborn sun burning behind him like a crown of creation. Its light framed his silhouette, turning him into a figure carved from fire and brilliance. Heat rolled outward with each step through the air, not scorching and not violent but commanded.
A triangular halo of golden flame formed behind his head, sharp and perfect, rotating slowly, endlessly. His red toga billowed in a gentle breeze that should not have existed, its edges lit by the sun's glow. His sandals touched the air as if it were solid ground.
He looked down at them.
The fire gods were the first to fall.
They dropped to their knees as one, then lower still, pressing foreheads to the soil. Their voices rose together, loud and raw, shaking with devotion.
"First Flame!"
"Bearer of Light!"
"Father of Fire!"
Their cries echoed across the basin, carried by the light itself.
The other gods did not kneel, but they stood straighter, firmer, hands still and heads lifted. No defiance or challenge was in their faces. Only respect plastered it, and a growing, undeniable understanding.
The moment his sandals met the earth, the light shifted, no longer distant, no longer only above. It pressed outward from him in invisible waves, a gravity of will rather than force. The air thickened, the basin trembled.
The gods felt it, and they couldn't help it, and their knees buckled one by one. It was not pain that drove them down, nor fear alone, but the crushing certainty that something had taken its rightful place. Power bore down on their spirits, heavy and absolute, as though the world itself had leaned closer to listen.
He saw resistance flash in their eyes, pride, ancient and stubborn but it cracked beneath the weight of truth.
They relented.
Helmets of light, crowns of leaf and stone, bodies of wind and thunder, all bowed toward him. Foreheads met the soil that had only just learned what soil was.
"Lord of All," they proclaimed, voices overlapping, trembling.
"First Light and First Flame."
"Son of the Elemental Forces."
"Ruler of Gods."
The words carved themselves into the world.
Yet not all bent.
Caelus remained standing, his gaze sharp and calculating. Kalrus stood like a mountain that refused to crumble, arms crossed, jaw set, the earth around his feet subtly resisting the pressure. And Ludfrick—Ludfrick simply watched, radiant and cold, his expression calm, almost amused.
In their eyes burned something dangerous.
Not open rebellion, but intent. Adam felt it, and merely glanced towards them.
He did not acknowledge them, nor challenge them, Instead, he turned his back on the basin.
The pressure vanished the instant he did, leaving the kneeling gods gasping as though released from the depths of an ocean. He stepped forward and rose into the air, flames gathering softly at his feet.
Behind him, the fire gods followed without hesitation.
Alto ascended last, his head still bowed, his reverence unshaken. The others took to the sky like embers carried by a rising wind, forming a procession of living flame at his back.
They flew toward the mountain, the lonely peak where he had first watched this world breathe.
Above them, the sun burned steady and eternal. Below them, the gods remained kneeling, and behind their bowed heads, three pairs of eyes followed him skyward, unblinking and glinting with a very dangerous promise.