The city had learned to burn quietly.
Sirens no longer hurried to extinguish fires—they wailed as warnings, not rescues. Trash fires on corners, prayer-candles melted onto pavement, protest banners torched in makeshift rituals. Each flame was claimed by a different hand: some for gods, some for revolution, some simply for warmth. People had begun arguing not about whether miracles were happening, but whose miracle it was.
One day a statue bled in a church; the next day, an imam's sermon was punctuated by a thunderclap that never moved across the sky. In a Chinatown alley, shopkeepers swore they saw a fox with nine tails dart between steaming vats of noodles. The footage, grainy, was uploaded, dissected, denounced, adored. Each faction pulled it closer like a blanket too small for the bed.
The Seeker moved through it unnoticed, which was not entirely his doing.
His library card no longer worked. His bank account returned nothing but errors. The passport in his pocket, once a symbol of his country's indifferent embrace, had been marked void. It wasn't simply expired. According to every database, he had never been issued one. He was a ghost wearing his own face.
The Lantern Keepers had erased him with bureaucratic elegance. They had not killed him, which would have been simpler. They had folded his existence neatly into nothing, leaving him unstitched at the seams. To live without a record in the twenty-first century was a slow suffocation—no wages, no tickets, no phone contract, not even the dignity of a library login.
He tried to complain once, half-heartedly, at a government office. The clerk glanced at his ID, frowned, and said gently: "Sir, this doesn't exist." Not you, but this. She said it kindly, like telling a child their drawing was lovely but would never hang in a gallery.
He left, not angry—he had lost the fuel for rage long ago—but quietly afraid.
Outside, the streets were seething. Two crowds had gathered on opposite ends of the same square: one chanting prayers in Latin, the other screaming invocations to Kali in half-remembered Sanskrit. Between them, police stood sweating behind shields. Someone threw a bottle. Someone else claimed the bottle's arc formed the shape of a raven. Phones were held up, live-streams multiplying faster than bats.
The Seeker threaded through them with his hood pulled low. His scar pulsed under his shirt like a second heartbeat. No one looked directly at him, but a few heads turned when he passed. Eyes widened, not in recognition, but in that unsettling way dogs stiffen before earthquakes.
Xuemei had warned him. "The world doesn't need another prophet," she'd said, tossing him a stale bun from her shop. "It needs quiet. But prophets are louder." She was gone now, her shop shuttered after the riots. No one had seen her in weeks. He tried not to imagine the worst.
News tickers rolled nonsense across every screen. "UN CONDEMNS RITUAL VIOLENCE." "MARKETS UNSTABLE AS BELIEF FRACTURES." "ISRAELI CABINET COLLAPSES OVER DIVINE SIGHTING." Beneath the headlines, the footage looped endlessly—miracles staged and real, blood spilled on altars, processions broken by riot gear. Some governments outlawed new sects. Others licensed them like taxis. None held.
And through it all, the Lantern Keepers worked unseen. He saw their mark—lanterns carved into walls, painted over posters, etched on subway doors. Always the same, always fresh, as though someone walked ahead of him to leave reminders: You are already gone.
One night he found himself in a squatters' temple—a subway station abandoned during construction, filled with the smell of mildew and incense. Families gathered there, praying to gods who were once forgotten footnotes in museum guides. Xiuhtecuhtli, Aztec fire lord, had a candlelit corner. Tangaroa, Polynesian ocean god, had an altar made of shells and water bottles. Amaterasu was prayed to with halogen lamps, flickering, too harsh.
The Seeker sat against a pillar, invisible among them. He was not worshipping, not joining, merely watching belief fracture into shrapnel. It struck him, unkindly, that humans had always been like this—tribes splitting into tribes, stories into stories. The gods had only returned to make it obvious.
When he left the station, his scar burned hotter than the incense.
The following morning, he discovered what being erased truly meant. His landlord stood at his door, flanked by two men in suits who smelled of disinfectant and legal ink.
"Your lease," the landlord said nervously. "It… it doesn't exist. I don't know how you got in here."
"I've lived here three years," the Seeker answered.
The men shook their heads. "Not anymore."
And just like that, he was back on the streets, carrying nothing but his satchel of notebooks and a half-broken phone.
He wandered to the river, where protests had turned into nightly vigils. Hundreds knelt with candles, praying to whichever deity had felt closest to their hunger. The air was thick with wax and gasoline. Police lined the bridges, guns resting loosely, unsure which side they were on.
A child tugged at his sleeve. "Mister, your shirt is glowing."
He looked down. The scar burned through the fabric, faint but visible. Gasps spread. The crowd turned. Whispers multiplied: Sign, omen, mark, curse, chosen. The words were interchangeable.
The Seeker fled before they could decide.
He ran until the city blurred into shrines and alleys. One shrine in particular pulled him, though he could not say why. It was small, barely more than a tin roof over a cracked Buddha, but people had begun leaving offerings—flowers, coins, bones of small animals. Someone had spray-painted Hermes' winged sandals beside it. Multiplicity stacked upon multiplicity.
A ceremony was underway. A self-declared priestess—young, fierce-eyed—was chanting as dozens knelt. Cameras were everywhere. Phones hovered above heads, lenses glowing like mechanical halos. The Seeker tried to slip past unseen.
But the scar had other ideas.
It burned so hot he fell to his knees. A pulse radiated outward, subtle but enough to make the shrine tremble. Cracks spidered across the statue. The chanting broke into screams. And then, with the sound of stone sighing after centuries of silence, the shrine collapsed.
Dust rose. People shrieked. Phones captured every frame.
When the smoke cleared, someone pointed at him. Another followed.
"It was him!"
On every livestream, across every platform, his image was fixed: a scarred man kneeling before a broken shrine, face half-shadowed, chest glowing faintly like a lantern.
By nightfall, hashtags swarmed: The Scarred Prophet. The False Flame. Class One Threat.
The Lantern Keepers would not need to find him anymore. The world had already done the work.