The scar woke him again.
Not gently, not with the half-familiar ache he'd grown used to, but with a violence that felt personal. The burn pulsed beneath his skin as if something inside had been pounding a fist against his ribs, demanding release. He pressed his palm hard against it in the dark, whispering every curse he knew. None helped.
By the time the city lights bled through the curtains, his shirt was damp with sweat. He didn't sleep again. He rarely did these days.
Xuemei's shop was still shuttered when he arrived. The street outside was half-alive with the morning: delivery trucks coughing diesel, a scooter honking at a grandmother who ignored it, and the faint perfume of dumpling steam rising from the stall across the lane.
He leaned against the doorframe like a beggar until Xuemei swung the bolt back and found him there.
"You look worse than usual," she said flatly. Her hair was bound in its habitual knot, and she carried a kettle in one hand as if daring the universe to interrupt her routine.
"Good morning to you too," he muttered.
"Don't flatter yourself. Sit down before you scare away the paying customers."
There were no paying customers yet, but he obeyed anyway. She poured tea into a chipped porcelain cup and shoved it toward him.
He tried not to wince when the steam curled past his face—the scar throbbed at the sight of it.
"Another omen?" she asked, watching him with the patience of someone who already regretted asking.
"I don't know." He swallowed the tea too quickly, burning his tongue. "But it's getting louder."
She raised an eyebrow. "Scars don't get loud."
"Mine does."
Xuemei snorted. "Then perhaps yours isn't a scar."
By midmorning, signs were everywhere. The newsfeeds at the kiosk out front showed footage of a fire in Puebla: candles that refused to burn out, melting backward into perfect unburnt wicks. Another article claimed that in Geneva a raven had perched on the United Nations building and refused to move for three days straight, wings spread like banners in the rain.
Xuemei folded one newspaper neatly and set it aside. "Miracles breed faster than rabbits. Or lies do."
The Seeker kept silent. His chest was already smoldering. He didn't need headlines to tell him what was happening.
That night, the diner returned.
The same cracked linoleum floor. The same smell of grease and sugar that never belonged to this century. And across the booth, the Whisperer was waiting, silver teeth glinting as he chewed through a stack of pancakes drenched in syrup.
"You're dreaming me again," the coyote-god said with his mouth full. "Or maybe I'm dreaming you. Hard to say. Dreaming is a two-way street."
The Seeker tried to speak but his voice came out as broken yelps. The Whisperer laughed, drumming clawed fingers against the scar until it pulsed like a beacon.
"You think they hunt you because of that fire?" The god licked syrup from his paw. "No. They hunt you because you are a library that refuses to burn. And libraries make poor servants."
The Seeker clawed at his throat, desperate to answer. The pancakes steamed. The neon lights flickered.
The Whisperer leaned across the table, syrup dripping onto the Seeker's hands. "Better prey than tinder, little book. Tinder only has one destiny."
The words crawled under his skin, and when he woke—mouth sticky with phantom sweetness—he could still taste the syrup.
The Lantern Keepers came two days later.
They did not descend in robes or with choirs of warning. They arrived like commuters, dressed in gray coats, their lanterns disguised as steel casings with LED cores. But the light within them flickered like fire that remembered what it once was.
The Seeker saw them first near the ruined shrine beneath the underpass. A place where the city had long ago poured concrete over older stone, and the gods had never forgiven the insult. Shadows clung to the arches there like old dust.
Xuemei had tried to warn him. She'd gripped his wrist that morning and said, they erase, not kill—remember that.
Erase. He hadn't asked what she meant. He already knew.
They blocked the tunnel with quiet efficiency. No weapons raised. Just lanterns lit, their light pressing into the dark like a wall.
The leader stepped forward—a woman with calm eyes and a voice that cut clean as glass.
"You carry what cannot be carried," she said. "We offer you two mercies. Come with us, and be hidden where no pantheon can reach. Or refuse, and be unmade. Better a shrouded flame than a world in ashes."
Her words echoed, not because the tunnel was hollow, but because language itself seemed to lean toward them.
The Seeker's scar burned so fiercely he thought it might split open. He staggered, clutching his chest. And then—just as suddenly—it cooled, as though someone else's hand had pressed against it from the inside.
Behind the Keepers, the shadows shifted. For an instant he saw the outline of a raven's wing. Then the muzzle of a coyote. Then firelight writhing into the forgotten face of some other god entirely. They crowded the edges of sight, each staking a claim.
The woman watched him steadily. "Choose."
He laughed. The sound was bitter, cracked, wrong. "If I am tinder," he said, "then strike the match."
The lanterns flared—white, unbearable—
And the world dissolved.
When sensation returned, it was not sight but sound. Whispering. Not one voice but hundreds, tangled together. They spoke in dead tongues, in prayer-chants, in mathematical sequences that hurt to hear.
He opened his eyes and found himself on his knees. The Keepers were still there, surrounding him, lanterns blazing. Yet beyond them the shadows had thickened, not thinned. Something enormous pressed against the walls of the world, as if waiting for permission to step through.
The scar glowed faintly, unseen by their eyes but bright in his own. It pulsed like a second heart, and he realized with a sick twist that each pantheon would see it differently. To one it would resemble Odin's knotwork, to another the glyphs of Xiuhtecuhtli, to another the sun-mark of Amaterasu.
And none of them would be wrong.
The leader raised her lantern higher. "This is your last mercy."
But another voice cut through hers, not human at all.
"Mercy?" The diner-voice, syrup-slick, mocking. "No. This is the part where the tinder learns it can burn back."
The lanterns flickered. Shadows lengthened. And the Seeker understood that whatever choice he made, he was already chosen.
He staggered to his feet, half-blind. Xuemei's warning echoed in his mind: they erase, not kill. Perhaps that was worse. To be forgotten was a death without body, a grave with no marker.
He clenched his fists. The scar answered. The glyph seared against his ribs, and this time he didn't fight it. He let the fire climb.
The leader's calm faltered. Just for a breath. Enough to know she had seen something she didn't expect.
"You don't understand what you carry," she said.
"Neither do you," he answered.
And the tunnel convulsed with light, divine and artificial colliding.
The Keepers shouted, lanterns blazing to full flame. The shadows pressed closer, gods straining at the edges of the world. The scar burned, carving him open with its language.
And in the middle of that storm, he laughed again, not because it was funny but because there was nothing else left to do.
The world split, white and black, flame and shadow.