The sky had always looked wrong.
Children in the orphanage were told never to stare too long at it—That endless ceiling of gray where the corpses of gods drifted like broken stars. Some whispered they were only clouds, only tricks of the sun. But he knew better. He had seen the shadows of twisted limbs thought the mist, the hollow sockets watching the earth below.
Faith was supposed to make the sight bearable. The priests said the gods still listened, even as their husks rotted above. Every morning, they forced the children to kneel and chant, their knees pressed into stone until skin spilt and bled. "The gods died for us," The priest would rasp. "We live by their sacrifice."
But the boy—he had no name anyone cared to remember—didn't believe it. Not anymore. Not after last winter, when half the orphanage froze while the priest hoarded firewood. Not after he'd seen a relic glow in the priest hand as he beat a child senseless, muttering the corruption was mercy.
He pressed his forehead to the floor with the other, lips moving in the prayer he no longer meant. Outside, the bells tolled, hollow and broken. Somewhere in the distance, a voice wailed—a sound that did not belong to any living thing.
He lifted his eyes for a heartbeat, against every rule.
Above the shattered roof beans, thought the veil of smoke from the incense, he saw it again. A shape drifting where the sun should have been. Vast, ruined, magnificent, A god's carcass, ribs like shattered mountains, its chest a cavity gnawed open by something greater.
The boy's breath caught in his throat. For an instant, he thought he saw it move.
And then the priest's hand slammed across his face.
"You dare look upon a god without a blessing?" Spittle flecked his lips. "You will learn obedience, child. Or you will join the hollowed."
The boy tasted blood. His gaze sank back to the stone floor, but in his mind he saw it—the endless, rotting sky, and the hollow gods that watched him in silence.
Something stirred deep inside him, a whisper that did not belong to the prayers
A hunger.