The descent to Earth was not like falling—it was like unbecoming.
As Kael and Lyra passed through the rift between realms, their celestial essence fragmented into particles of radiant thought. Time didn't pass in seconds, but in memories, and each one they'd ever lived flickered like stars around them.
The entity inside Kael no longer silent—spoke with startling clarity.
> "This is the Price of Freedom. You do not descend as gods. You descend as sparks."
He expected pain.
But there was only stillness.
And then—birth.
Kael awoke in a world familiar, but unrecognizable.
The mortal realm no longer moved by the hidden threads of fate. The skies shimmered with colors that did not belong to the spectrum, time wavered in short breaths, and the people… they were aware in a way they hadn't been before.
The Loom had not only unraveled the divine.
It had awakened the world.
Lyra stirred beside him. Her dark hair shimmered with residual starlight, and her eyes—no longer bound by prophetic glow were deeply, beautifully human. And yet, within her, Kael could feel the same paradox he carried: the infinite restrained in mortal flesh.
"We're weaker," she whispered.
"We're truer," Kael replied.
They stood atop a hill overlooking a city that pulsed with chaos and rebirth. The skyline was shattered in places, but from the rubble rose monuments of creation—spires of glowing stone shaped not by engineers but by thought, by will.
Children played with sparks in their palms.
Old men argued with time, rewinding their last sentences in frustration.
And above all, people dreamed—and those dreams manifested.
"What have we done?" Lyra asked, awe in her voice.
"We've given them freedom," Kael said.
"But what if they destroy themselves with it?"
Kael turned to her. "Then we teach them not to."
They made their way into the city, walking among mortals who now wielded pieces of the divine like toddlers holding fire. The remnants of the old gods had scattered, some hiding in fear, some trying to reclaim relevance.
But Kael didn't come to reclaim a throne.
He came to build a school.
A place to teach not spells, not rituals—but responsibility. Balance. Vision.
He would call it The House of Echoes, in memory of the Loom that once dictated reality—and in honor of the voices that now had the power to shape it.
As the sun dipped low, Lyra placed her hand on his chest.
"You're trembling."
"I'm afraid," Kael confessed.
"Of what?"
"That they'll look to me not as a teacher… but as another god."
Lyra smiled softly. "Then remind them you were once broken. That you bled. That you chose them over immortality."
In the distance, a tremor passed through the earth.
The Abyss had followed them.
Its shadow loomed on the horizon—not as destruction, but as mirror. A force that would test this new world with choices, with doubt, with the haunting truth that freedom carries consequence.
And Kael would face it not as a god…
But as a man reborn.