The sky tore me apart.
Every inch I rose, it pressed against me—not like air, not like wind, but like a wall that wanted me dead. My bones cracked first, sharp jolts cutting through my body. Blood burst from my mouth, painting my lips red. My hand twisted until it dangled useless, skin blackening as though the sky itself had burned me alive.
I wanted to scream, but no sound came. The pain was so heavy it drowned my voice.
Below, the tribe watched in silence. Faces pale. Eyes wide. Children cried. Elders clutched their beads as if I were some curse that had fallen on them. And still, I forced myself upward—because if I stopped now, what meaning would all my pain carry?
When the pressure finally threw me down, I hit the earth broken, my body shaking, blood soaking into the dirt. I felt less like a man, more like a corpse pretending to breathe.
But the silence did not last.
By nightfall, word had spread. Priests draped in gold cloth, ministers with jeweled rings, scholars with ink-stained hands—they all came. They stood over me, not with awe, but hunger.
"How did you do this?"
"What is your method?"
"Share it—share it, or you die."
Their voices were not questions. They were knives.
I did not answer. My mouth moved only for one truth:
"I promise."
Not to them. Never to them.
Only to her. Only to him.
The crowd grew, a tide of bodies pressing close. Thousands. Eyes filled with greed, fear, hate. To them, I was no man—I was a door, and behind me lay power. They would kill me to pry it open.
Something inside me split—not my bones, not my skin, but my heart. I had thought my world ended the day my wife and child died. But no—the world still had more to take.
I bled as I stood. My muscles screamed. My ruined hand trembled. But I rose.
And then I flew.
Past their spears, past their curses, past the arrows they loosed at my back. Each breath was fire. Each flap of will felt like tearing my soul apart. But I left them.
Left their hatred, their hunger, their betrayal.
As I rose into the night, higher and higher, one truth cut through my agony:
This world was no longer mine. It hated me.
But still, for her. For him.
I promise.