The scroll still glowed long after the words faded.
The First God.
City of Stone.
The boy sat alone outside the shrine, the wind brushing through his hair, thoughts spinning like dust devils in the air.
He didn't sleep that night.
Not because of fear, but because something inside him had awakened again. A heat in his chest that wouldn't fade. The mark pulsed quietly. Not burning, not screaming, just… waiting.
Morning came cold.
Mist covered the hills.
Yume handed him a pack.
It was heavier than it looked.
"Everything you'll need," she said.
He looked at the path ahead. "Is this where I'm supposed to go?"
She nodded. "It's where the gods once walked. If your name really is divine, then you'll find answers there."
He took a deep breath.
Then asked, "Will I come back?"
Yume's eyes didn't meet his. "No one ever does."
The journey was long.
He walked past broken fields and wild rivers. Through forests thick with vines and thorns. He saw things—shadows that moved like animals, whispers behind trees, ruins buried in moss.
The world outside the village was louder.
It felt… alive.
Even the silence wasn't empty.
He met a man with no eyes who offered him salted fruit.
He met a girl with a stitched mouth who handed him a black feather and whispered into his thoughts: "They're watching you now."
He didn't ask who "they" were.
He didn't want to know.
On the fifth day, he found it.
The ground turned gray first—dusty, smooth like melted rock. Then pillars. Then statues.
Then the city.
It rose from the earth like a skeleton trying to crawl out of a grave.
Massive towers bent under their own weight. Bridges hung in mid-air, broken at both ends. Everything was made of stone. Even the trees were petrified, their branches frozen mid-sway.
He stepped inside.
His breath echoed too loudly.
There were no people.
Only statues.
Hundreds of them.
Men, women, children. All frozen mid-scream.
Their faces were terrified.
Their mouths open.
Their eyes wide.
"They weren't carved," a voice said behind him.
The boy spun.
A girl stood there, barefoot, cloaked in a black hood. Her skin pale, her hair silver. A small tattoo beneath one eye shaped like a teardrop.
She didn't move.
Just watched him.
"They were turned."
He stepped back. "By what?"
She pointed at his chest. "By your kind."
"…My kind?"
She nodded. "Nameless. Or worse—Named with something stolen."
The boy's mark pulsed.
He could feel the city reacting to it.
Dust rose around his feet. The statues trembled.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
"I was told to come. By a scroll."
"Divine ink?"
"…Yes."
The girl narrowed her eyes.
"Then you're not cursed," she whispered. "You're chosen."
Before he could reply, the ground beneath them split.
A scream.
Stone cracking.
A tremor like a heart beating below the earth.
The girl yelled, "RUN!"
The boy did.
A massive hand burst from the ground.
Stone fingers, each longer than a man.
Then another hand.
Then a head.
A giant, carved in cracked marble, its face blank—no eyes, no mouth.
But it roared anyway.
A sound that didn't come from lungs.
It came from memory.
The creature dragged itself from the depths of the city.
It was tall as the towers.
Old dust rolled off its shoulders like smoke.
The boy tripped.
Fell.
The girl grabbed his wrist.
"What did you awaken?!"
"I don't know!" he yelled.
But he did.
It was written on the scroll.
The First God.
It had been sleeping beneath the city.
And now it had heard its name.
The giant raised one hand.
Rubble floated into the sky—statues, stones, broken pieces of the city, all rising slowly, caught in some invisible force.
The boy's mark was burning again.
Letters moved across his skin like worms.
He screamed.
The girl turned to him.
"Say its true name! Now!"
"I don't know it!"
"Yes, you do! It's the same as yours!"
The boy's eyes widened.
The moment he had spoken his name, he had awakened something.
Not just his power.
Not just the voice.
He had awakened a god.
And now… that god was staring right at him.
TO BE CONTINUED…