The desert stopped pretending to sleep.
It began with a shiver, almost gentle. The sand under my boots shifted, not from wind, but from something deeper. The dunes nearby took a breath together—up, down—like a chest rising.
Lysa froze mid-step.
"We're standing on it," she said.
"Yes," Sareth replied.
She swallowed, eyes fixed on the horizon. The glass spires we'd seen after the Dream Exchange were taller now, more of them pushing up through the dunes. Some leaned, some pierced straight up like spears. Their surfaces caught the washed-out sky and bent it into warped, bruised colors.
"It wasn't this close before," she whispered.
"It was always this close," Alinor murmured. "It just hadn't decided to show you yet."
We were walking without meaning to.
The desert had a slope now. It nudged us forward, toward a low dip between dunes where sand poured slowly into itself like water down a drain.
The drain was growing wider.
Veyra walked with her arms out, pretending to lose her balance every few steps. "It likes us," she sang.
Kaen grinned, firelight flickering deep in his chest. "It thinks we're a meal," he said.
Lyra's eyes were half-lidded, tracking invisible lines in the air. "It thinks we're smaller than we are," she said. "That's cute."
Cirel walked backward again, smiling. "Do you feel it?" she asked Lysa.
"Feel what?" Lysa snapped.
"The curiosity," Cirel said. "It's trying to decide what shape to give you when it eats you."
Lysa's jaw clenched. "I hate this world," she muttered.
"No," I said. "You hate what's under it."
She looked at me sharply. "And you don't?"
"I don't know it yet," I said.
Another shudder ran through the ground.
The low dip opened.
Sand poured away faster now, revealing a circle of smooth, translucent material beneath. From up close, it was clearer than in the dream: glass shot through with faint, milky veins, symbols etched along its surface in a language that didn't care about letters.
A circle of glass in a sea of sand.
We reached its edge without trying.
"So this is where it wakes up," Kaen said.
"Yes," Sareth said.
Lysa stared down, breath coming too fast. "I don't want to be here," she said.
"You chose this," Cirel reminded her.
"I chose to live," she snapped.
Veyra smiled. "This is the same thing for us."
The glass beneath the sand pulsed.
Once. Twice.
The Eclipsed Bond pulsed back.
My mark burned under my ribs, heat and cold together. The Shattered Crown's ash shard flared. The others' symbols answered—Spiral Needle, Smiling Tear, Broken Frame, Crumbling Triangle, Fractured Eye, Looping Flame—all heating up at once, as if something was knocking on them from the inside.
"It's looking at us again," Lyra said.
"Then look back," I said.
The sand in the circle collapsed.
For a few heartbeats, we stood on the rim of a wide, sinking bowl. Sand poured down into darkness, hissing. Then it cleared.
Beneath, the glass city lay exposed.
Towers jutted from the pit's walls, leaning on each other. Bridges hung at strange angles. The plaza we'd seen in the dream spread below—a smooth disc at the center of it all, ringed by crowned statues.
Only this time, nothing was half-there.
This was waking.
The air above the pit shimmered. Heat waves, at first. Then something else—like the distortions above the demon city when it fell, but thinner, sharper.
The world here was realizing it had depth.
Lysa clutched her broken staff. "We're not going down there," she whispered.
Veyra was already walking along the rim, looking for a path.
"Yes, we are," she said.
"No," Lysa said. "No, you're not listening, you can't just—"
The ground heaved.
She lost her footing, sliding on her heels. Sand poured out from under her boots.
I grabbed the back of her robe and hauled her away from the edge.
Around the pit, dunes collapsed inward, turning into smooth slopes that led down to the city. The desert wasn't asking for permission anymore.
"It's inviting us," Alinor said.
"That's one word for it," Kaen said.
I let Lysa go when she found her footing again. She stepped back from the edge, eyes huge.
"You can't go down there," she said. "You saw it. In the dream. That thing—"
"Yes," I said. "I liked it."
She stared at me like that was the worst possible answer.
"Stay if you want," Cirel told her. "Run. Hide. Pray. Witness. It doesn't matter. This is happening with or without you."
Lysa looked at the slopes leading down, at the rising glass spires, at the carved symbols glowing faintly under the thin skin of sand. Her throat worked.
She followed us down.
Of course she did.
—
The city smelled like dust and heat and something old.
Not rotting. Not alive. Old like an idea someone had once and never let go of. The glass forming its streets and towers was cool under my boots despite the air's warmth. It rang faintly when we stepped on it, sending small, clear notes into the quiet.
The crowned statues ringed the plaza, just as in the dream. Up close, they were even more wrong. Too human in some ways—broad shoulders, strong arms—and too not in others. Extra joints. Fingers that bent backward. Faces smooth as river stones, with one simple circle carved where eyes should be.
The circles were black.
They weren't in the dream.
Lyra ran her fingers along the nearest statue's arm. The glass hummed under her touch. "Awake," she murmured.
"Hungry," Sareth said.
Lysa stayed close to me, steps cautious. Every time her reflection warped in the smooth glass of a nearby wall, she flinched.
"You don't have to stare at yourself," Veyra said.
"I have to make sure I'm still here," Lysa muttered.
The plaza opened before us.
Exactly as we'd seen it.
Wide. Perfectly circular. Surface so smooth it reflected the sky, the statues, us. Our reflections looked wrong—taller, thinner, edges flickering a little behind reality, like the glass saw the parts of us we weren't using yet.
In the center was emptiness.
A circle of slightly darker glass, etched with deeper grooves, scorched lines radiating outward like old burn marks.
"That's where it sits," Kaen said.
"For now it lies," Alinor corrected.
As if on cue, the glass darkened.
The air above the center thickened. Light bent. For a moment it was just heat distortion. Then, slowly, a shape appeared.
Huge.
Hunched.
Not really there.
Not yet.
The Silent God unfolded inside the air like someone finishing a drawing they'd abandoned halfway. Lines of darkness sketched limbs, torso, head. Then those lines filled in with milky glass-shot substance, dense and heavy. Its surface crawled with tiny, shifting marks—circles, lines, symbols, old wounds.
It put one massive hand down on the plaza.
The entire city shook.
The statues around the ring straightened, crowns flaring. Their single circles brightened, thin bands of white-gold light.
Lysa dropped to her knees.
"I can't breathe," she choked.
"Yes, you can," Lyra said. "You just forgot how for a second."
The god lifted its head.
Up close, the not-face was worse.
No mouth.
No nose.
Just that single circle in the center of where eyes should be. It wasn't entirely empty. If I stared long enough, I saw something moving in the depth—a swirling field of tiny lights, like stars trapped in glass.
It looked at us.
Not with curiosity now.
Recognition.
You don't need language to feel that.
The marks under my skin flared.
Behind my ribs, the ash shard burned cold.
The Eclipsed Bond tightened until it hurt. Seven pulses beating in the same moment.
It felt like standing at the lip of a cliff with the wind pushing from behind.
Kaen exhaled. Fire flickered along his arms, unmuzzled.
Veyra's pupils dilated. The petals moving under her skin turned darker, blood-red.
Lyra's fingers twitched, and glowing lines traced themselves in the air around her, forming a web only she could see.
Cirel's outline blurred, small mirrored plates hovering off her skin, turning lazily.
Sareth's chains rattled of their own accord, each link whispering with the sound of distant sands.
Alinor's hair lifted in an invisible breeze, feathers forming briefly at the ends before melting back into strands.
Lysa looked around wildly.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
"Nothing yet," I said.
The god rose.
The statues moved with it.
They stepped down from their ring, glass feet ringing against the plaza. Each raised their hands toward the central figure, palms open, circles blazing. Threads of light extending from their chests flowed into the god's body, feeding it.
The air grew thick.
Not physically.
Metaphysically.
Reality here was paying attention.
"That's its court," Sareth said. "Its children. Or its memories."
"They're ugly," Veyra said.
Lysa scrambled backward, palms scraping on the glass. "Can it… can it leave this place?" she asked. "Or is it stuck here?"
"Everything can leave," Kaen said. "If you push hard enough."
The god took another breath.
The desert bellowed.
It wasn't sound. Or it was, but more. The dunes above rumbled, shifting. Glass spires around the rim of the pit shook, some snapping, some growing taller. The pale sky dimmed, a faint hairline crack forming straight overhead.
Lysa's teeth rattled. "You said we wouldn't die if we stayed near you," she said.
"That was before we woke a god," Cirel said.
"I hate all of you," Lysa whispered.
"I know," I said again.
The god moved.
One hand lifted, dripping sand and shards of its own glass flesh, and extended toward us. Not fast. Not slow. Just… inevitable.
Lyra's head tilted. "It wants to… file us," she said. "Put us in its dream-cabinet. Neat little labeled boxes."
"We don't fit in boxes," Veyra declared.
"That's sort of the point," Kaen said.
The god's hand drew closer.
Heat radiated from it without warmth. My skin prickled.
The marks in my body flared white-hot.
The Eclipsed Bond snapped tight, then settled into perfect sync.
Seven hearts.
One rhythm.
I smiled.
Lysa saw the smile and shuddered. "You're going to do something terrible," she said.
"Yes," I replied.
The god's hand reached out, palm open, a massive circle of etched glass.
I raised my hand, mirroring it.
My fingers were still human-shaped.
For now.
The air between us vibrated.
"This," I said quietly, "will hurt the world."
"To be fair," Kaen said, "it started it."
Veyra laughed.
Alinor hummed.
Sareth bowed his head.
Lyra closed her eyes.
Cirel's grin widened.
"Auren," Lysa said, voice small and thin. "Please don't."
"Wake," I said.
The world listened.
—
It began inside my bones.
A sharp, clean crack, like ice breaking under too much weight. Then another. Then a cascade—snaps, pops, shifts that should have been agony but weren't. Pain requires limits. This was… removal of them.
My skin dissolved.
Not in gore.
In light.
Golden-orange at first, the same shade as my hair, then streaked with black lines that spidered out in intricate patterns. The shape of my body stretched—spine lengthening, limbs thinning, joints loosening into smoother, more fluid pivots.
My hair unfurled, the tie dissolving into nothing. Strands extended, each one a trail of luminous miasma, flowing behind and around me, drifting like smoke underwater.
My face—what counted as one—simplified.
No nose. No lips. No ears.
Just the line.
A perfectly straight slit where a mouth should be. Closed, it was nothing. Open, it split my head in a clean, vertical arc, revealing not teeth, but light. Blinding, sharp, edged.
My eyes were never eyes in the first place.
The inverted crosses burned through the black void of my head, clean and crisp, brighter than any star this new world hadn't finished inventing. No sclera. No iris. Just the red marks, floating where pupils should be, casting thin beams of crimson.
My clothes melted into me.
Armor, coat, boots, all becoming part of the glow, lines and sigils and miasma woven together. Only Eclipsera remained distinct—its form stretching as I grew, the long orange blade lengthening, curve exaggerating, handle thickening into something between staff and spine.
Around my head, the white crown appeared.
Not the ring from the demon world. This one was purer. A simple circlet of impossible white, floating an inch above where hair met light, spinning slowly. Tiny cracks spidered along its surface, each one leaking a faint, colorless glow.
When I inhaled, the air around me darkened.
When I exhaled, it brightened.
Every movement bled miasma. Not just black now. Strands of color from dead worlds threaded through it—dull red, ash gray, ember orange.
I stood taller than I had any right to.
Not god-tall.
Not yet.
Tall enough that the Silent God's hand no longer felt huge.
Just… comparable.
—
To Lysa, it was like watching a nightmare she hadn't known she carried stand up and stretch.
Her breath caught. Her mind tried to pull back, to refuse to process what she was seeing. Something in her cracked instead, making room.
She saw Auren's body become light and lines.
She saw his smile appear without lips.
She saw the crosses become his whole gaze.
She saw the floating crown and understood for the first time that the one Vaedros had worn had always been a toy.
She would see that image again every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life.
If life was what this was anymore.
She barely processed the others.
But the world did.
—
Veyra's skin turned translucent.
Veins appeared, not blue or red, but dark crimson petals flowing through her blood like leaves in a current. Her bones were thin, long, jointed like branches. Her hair spilled down to her ankles, each strand ending in a small bloom that opened and rotted and regrew in an instant.
Her eyes lost their whites, becoming pits filled with slow-turning red blossoms.
When she laughed, tiny petals drifted from her throat, landing on the glass and burning small black spots.
Her symbol—a tear with a smiling curve—flared over her heart, then sank into her ribs, pulsing like a secondary organ.
—
Kaen's flesh burned away.
Underneath was not bone, but a framework of dark metal and glowing lava. His ribs were furnace doors, opening and closing with each breath, casting out waves of heat that made the glass soften under his feet. His hands were forge tongs, fingers ridged and hooked.
His hair became a plume of fire that bent not with gravity but with intent.
When he grinned, the light inside his skull dazzled.
—
Lyra lost edges.
Her body thinned, lines replacing curves. Where her limbs moved, threads appeared—silver, black, translucent—spanning from her elbows and wrists and fingers to the air, to the ground, to the god, to us. She was a spider at the center of a reality-web only she could fully see.
Her eyes were pools of mirrored glass. Looking into them was like falling sideways.
With each lift of her hand, threads tightened or loosened, twisting the plaza's perspective, making distances lie.
—
Cirel shattered.
Not really.
Her body turned into a collection of floating plates, each a mirror reflecting something slightly wrong—us, the god, the city, but fractured, doubled, reversed. They orbited around an empty center where her torso should be, moving with lazy grace.
Her laughter came from all of them at once.
—
Sareth elongated.
Tall, thin, more shadow than substance. His cloak melted into a cascading fall of black sand, pouring constantly from his shoulders and vanishing before it hit the ground. His chains lengthened, wrapping around his limbs and torso, each link marked with small, shifting runes.
His face hollowed. Eye sockets were dark, mouths of tunnels. When he opened his mouth, no teeth—just a slow tumble of small bones and dust that dissolved into whispering air.
—
Alinor spread.
Wings burst from her back—not flesh and feathers, but sheets of translucent light, white edged with black, each feather a narrow shard of moon-pale crystal. Her legs thinned, ending in sharp, birdlike talons. Her hair tangled into a mane of soft, glowing threads that drifted in a wind only she felt.
Her single Fractured Eye mark split, becoming two luminous, mismatched eyes that saw too much.
—
Lysa dropped flat onto the glass.
She didn't decide to.
Her knees simply stopped working.
Her mind tried to run in seven directions at once. It failed and instead settled on pure, animal awe.
She was a speck of dust in a room of knives.
They had always been wrong, these people. Too beautiful, too calm. But this—
This was a different category.
They weren't just stronger.
They were more.
More angles. More light. More weight. More… everything.
She had seen pictures of gods in her temple once.
They were nothing like this.
—
The Silent God flinched.
Not visibly, not in its posture, but in its presence. Its one not-eye widened, the swirling stars inside shifting faster. The threads of power flowing from the statues into its body stuttered.
It had expected to wake in a world that still fit in its palm.
Instead it had woken to something that didn't fit at all.
Perfect.
"Hello," I said.
My voice scraped the air.
It wasn't louder. It wasn't deeper. It just bent space a little, the way my smile bent light.
The god's hand closed.
Not around us. Not yet.
It clenched, glass fingers grinding against each other, spraying shards that hardened mid-flight and embedded themselves in distant towers.
Then it swung.
The enormous limb arced through the air toward us, palm flat, intent obvious: flatten the impossible things.
I moved.
Not far.
Just enough.
The world dragged behind.
Each step in this form was heavier. Not for me. For reality. The glass under my feet cracked in neat lines. Miasma trailed from Eclipsera, thick and colorful, staining the air.
I stepped into the swing.
Eclipsera's blade met the god's arm.
Glass shrieked.
The sound tore through the city. Statues trembled. Towers cracked. The god's circle-eye blazed.
My scythe cut a line into its forearm.
Not deep.
Enough.
Black lines crawled out from the cut, running along the god's limb like veins of decay. The marks on its surface—symbols, scars—twisted, rewriting themselves in languages that didn't belong to it.
It tried to pull back.
Lyra's threads snapped into place, latching onto its joints.
"You woke in the wrong shape," she said. Her voice was soft, but the air shook with it. "Let me fix that."
She tugged.
The god's elbow bent the wrong way.
Glass splintered.
Veyra laughed and leaped, too light for something so elongated. She landed on the god's forearm, translucent feet sinking slightly into its surface. Petals poured from her hands into the cut I'd made, burrowing.
"Grow," she whispered.
Red blossomed along the fracture.
Not flowers.
Cracks.
They spread, spiraling.
Kaen planted his burning hands on the plaza. Heat rushed through the glass toward the god's feet, softening its support.
"I'll cook the bottom," he said.
Cirel's mirrors swarmed.
They darted around the god's head, reflecting it back at itself. In each plate, it saw a different version of us—bigger, smaller, less contained. Its one eye flicked between them, confused. Disoriented.
Sareth's chains lashed out, wrapping around the god's legs. The runes on the links glowed faintly.
"Fall," he murmured.
Alinor took to the air.
She soared up, wings cutting silent arcs, then beat once, hard, sending a wave of pale light down that dimmed the god's inner glow.
It staggered.
The statues around the ring moved.
They marched forward, glass footsteps ringing. Their crowns flared, lines of power snapping from their faces to their god, trying to stabilize it.
One reached for Veyra.
She turned her head toward it, smiling wide.
"Mine," she said.
Petals erupted from under its crown.
They poured down its smooth face, filling the single circle, spilling over its body. Wherever they touched, surface clouded, turned black-red, then cracked.
The statue froze halfway.
Veyra tilted her head. "Sit," she told it.
It shattered.
The god roared.
Not with a mouth.
With its whole body.
The sound wasn't sound.
It was pressure.
The plaza buckled. Towers groaned. The desert above collapsed further, dunes pouring into the pit in rivers.
Lysa clung to the ground, glass biting into her palms.
Everything inside her screamed Run run run run—
But where?
The surface trembled harder, pitching her sideways.
She grabbed at the nearest stable thing.
It was my foot.
Or what passed for it now.
Her hands passed through light and solidness at the same time. Her fingers burned cold.
I spared her a glance.
She was trembling, eyes wild, face streaked with sweat and dust.
"Don't fall apart," I told her.
"You're—" she gasped. "You're all—"
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it nice to finally see it?"
The god swung again.
This time it didn't aim at us.
It slammed its hand down on the plaza's edge, fingers stretching toward the city beyond. The glass under its fingertips liquefied, turning into a ripple that surged outward.
Reality bent.
The towers nearest the wave folded in on themselves, angles twisting. Streets broke apart and rearranged. For a second, gravity flipped; debris fell upward, hung in midair, then snapped back down.
Lyra's threads snapped taut.
She grinned.
"Oh," she said. "You play with angles too. How cute."
She flicked her wrist.
The ripple split.
Half of it rebounded toward the god, smashing into its own side, warping its torso. The symbols on its surface scrambled.
The other half shot upward, slamming into the sky.
The pale blue cracked.
Hairlines at first, then thick fractures. Through them, something brighter glowed. A second sun? A third? Or just the raw, unfiltered light of a world that hadn't decided how many stars it needed.
The god flinched.
It didn't like its ceiling broken.
We understood each other.
I stepped forward.
Eclipsera's blade lengthened with my intent. The miasma around it boiled, spilling colors across the plaza. Each color was a memory—a demon city, a quiet village, a red sky—all smeared together.
"You woke up to the wrong guests," I told it.
It lunged.
Not with its hand this time.
With its circle.
The not-eye expanded, stretching across its face, across its head, turning into a hole—wide, dark, ringed with tiny lights. It rushed toward us, swallowing reflections, sucking in light, trying to consume.
For a heartbeat, I saw other things behind it—other deserts, other cities, other gods. This thing didn't just dream this realm.
It dreamed many.
It wanted to make us part of them.
Lyra's threads snapped around me, tethering my limbs to the plaza.
"Stay anchored," she said.
The others anchored themselves in their own ways.
Kaen dug furnace-ribs into the ground, melting a grip.
Sareth's chains plunged into the glass, linking to deep-rooted pillars.
Cirel's mirrors stabbed edges into the floor, reflections anchoring in alternate angles.
Alinor's wings beat downward, pushing her into resistance.
Veyra sank translucent roots into cracks, petals blooming along them.
The circle rushed over us.
It swallowed light.
For a heartbeat, everything went dark.
Not absence.
Too much.
Endless images flickered in the black—past worlds, broken crowns, forgotten prayers, other versions of us that had never existed. The god wanted to catalog, to file, to label.
I let it look.
Then I smiled.
The line of my mouth split open.
Light speared out.
Not white.
Not yellow.
Black-edged red.
The beams from my crosses shot outward too, lancing into the god's not-eye from inside. Eclipsera's blade erupted with brightness, cutting through the dark like a scythe through tall grass.
"Mine," I told it.
Not a request.
The god shrieked.
The circle collapsed in on itself.
The head snapped back, cracking at the neck. Cracks raced along its torso, arms, legs. Where my light had touched, its inner stars went out, tiny lights flickering dark.
The statues around it convulsed.
Some shattered without moving. Others bent backward at impossible angles, their crowns snapping. Power arced from their broken forms back into the god in ragged, uncontrolled spasms.
The ground shook harder.
Sand poured into the pit in waterfalls.
Above, the crack in the sky widened.
We didn't need the Crown of Ash to finish this one.
We had something else.
Hunger.
—
Third-person eyes would have seen this:
A god of glass, too long asleep, finally raising itself to full height in a pit at the heart of a desert. Seven impossible shapes—light, fire, threads, mirrors, sand, feathers, flowers—swarming around it like locusts around a flame.
With every clash, the city broke.
With every breath, the sky cracked.
The desert's surface rippled, dunes rising and falling in waves. Glass spires burst upward like teeth. In the distance, where no one watched, mountains of sand turned inside out, revealing more structures, more forgotten architecture, all of it doomed.
The realm had never had oceans.
It had waves now.
Of glass.
—
Lysa felt none of that scale.
All she knew was that the floor under her kept trying to move and that every time it did, one of the Seven put it back, just enough not to lose her.
She watched Auren—if that word still belonged to this shape—move through the god's reach like he'd always known how.
Cut.
Smile.
Cut again.
Red crosses burning.
She watched Veyra dance along the god's limbs, planting seeds of ruin that bloomed as jagged cracks. Every time a new fracture burst open, petals scattered, burned, reformed.
She watched Kaen tear chunks of molten glass from its knees and hurl them into its chest, where they exploded like small suns.
She watched Lyra weave invisible nets that turned the god's own attacks back on itself, making its limbs overshoot, its strikes bend.
She watched Cirel's mirrored plates swarm its head, showing it a thousand versions of itself broken in a thousand ways.
She watched Sareth's chains burrow into its feet, pulling it slowly, inexorably, deeper into the pit it had made for itself.
She watched Alinor's wings flash, each gust of light shaving slivers of substance from its arms.
Her mind had no room left for prayers.
Only for watching.
And screaming, but her voice was gone.
—
The god realized it was losing.
Slowly.
But surely.
It had never lost before.
Not like this.
It had slept through collapses. Children had forgotten it. Worlds had shifted on top of it. But nothing had ever walked into its bed and said no.
It tried one last thing.
It let go.
Of itself.
Glass shattered.
Not in small breaks.
In totality.
Its body exploded outward into a storm of shards, each one carrying a fragment of its dream. They whirled through the air, a blizzard of cutting reflections. Each shard held a tiny, separate reality—a frozen city, a lone figure, a sun, a moon, a sea.
They spun faster.
Then they dove.
Not at us.
At the world.
The pit walls were stripped in an instant, all the clean glass surface torn away. The plaza cratered. Towers disintegrated into splinters that shot toward the sky. The desert above was pierced by thousands of shining knives, dunes collapsing as the storm ate the ground.
It wasn't trying to kill us.
It was trying to take everything else with it.
If it couldn't have the world, no one could.
Fair enough.
Lyra laughed, delighted. "Oh, you spiteful thing," she said. "I like you."
She spread her arms.
Threads shot out from her body in all directions, intercepting shards mid-flight. Each thread that touched a fragment bent its path, changed its angle, redirected its momentum.
The storm twisted.
Some shards still hit the world, carving long scars in the desert.
Most turned.
Toward us.
Toward her.
Toward me.
Toward the others.
We let them.
They hit our true forms and didn't cut.
They sank.
Small, bright stabs of glass entering light, petal-flesh, furnace-ribs, thread-sculpt, mirrors, shadow-sand, wing-feathers.
I felt a dozen shards sink into me through my chest, my arms, my head. Each carried a tiny world—an ocean under two suns, a city of glass, a star collapsing.
They dissolved into my miasma.
Behind my ribs, near the ash shard, something new formed.
Not heavy.
Not light.
Sharp.
The god's scream cut off.
The storm died as fast as it had started.
The fragments that had missed us fell to the plaza, tinkling softly. Those falling above the pit pierced the last dunes, then stopped. The desert froze mid-collapse.
Silence.
Real silence.
No hum.
No breath.
The god was gone.
Not dead.
Not in a way that left a body.
Just… gone.
We had eaten it.
—
The world noticed.
The sky shattered.
The pale blue tore open, revealing a black vault behind it, studded with faint points of light. Then that cracked too, splitting to show yet another layer. Light poured through each break—a white so bright it hurt, streaked with all the colors this realm had never used.
The desert rolled.
The pit widened.
The city fell apart.
But we stood.
We always did.
Lysa knelt, palms on the glass, trembling.
She felt the god's absence like a pulled tooth. The ache, the strange numbness. Shortsighted mortals later would never know anything had been here.
She would.
Her vision blurred.
She blinked hard, forcing it clear.
A new light formed.
Not in the sky.
In the air above the plaza's empty center.
A ring.
Smaller than the Crown of Ash had been.
Sharper.
Where the ash crown had been built from bone and ruin and memories of fire, this one was made of pure, clear glass. Thin and perfect, its surface flawless except for tiny fractures that caught light and split it into faint rainbows. Within its loop, space wobbled, reflecting and reversing the ruins around it.
It spun slow.
Delicate.
Deadly.
"The Crown," Alinor said.
"Glass," Sareth confirmed.
Veyra leaned on nothing, translucent body relaxed. "So pretty," she said.
Lyra's threads rippled toward it, stopping just short, as if afraid to touch first.
Cirel's mirrors angled to reflect it from every side.
Kaen's furnace-chest cooled a fraction, heat bleeding off in lazy waves.
My true form's crown—white, cracked—tilted slightly.
"Who gets this one?" Veyra asked. "We gave you the last."
"I took the last," I said.
"Same thing," Cirel said.
The Crown of Glass slowed.
Then stopped spinning.
It hung there, perfectly still.
We all felt it turn its… attention.
Not like the god had.
Not like a mind.
More like a coin deciding which side to land on.
Thin threads of light extended from its inner edge.
One toward me.
One toward Veyra.
One toward Kaen.
One toward Cirel.
One toward Sareth.
One toward Alinor.
One toward Lyra.
They touched us lightly, tasting.
It could have been any of us.
It wasn't our choice.
"Let it decide," I said.
The threads withdrew.
Six vanished.
One remained.
It stretched, solidified, and drew the Crown of Glass along its length like a bead on a string.
Straight toward Lyra.
She watched it come with wide, bright eyes, head tilted, lips parted in a small, genuine smile.
"Hello," she whispered.
The ring paused just before her mirrored eyes.
Then, like the Ash Crown before it, it shifted.
It widened, looped over her, and sank into her form.
For a moment, Lyra was all lines.
Her body reduced to threads of light and shadow, drawn tight across the plaza in a pattern too complex to fully see. The threads pulsed.
Then they snapped back into place.
She stood again.
Her humanoid outline—still wrong, still too fluid—regained its coherence. But something new glinted above her head.
A thin circlet of glass.
Barely visible unless the light hit it.
It spun slowly, then shattered.
Not outward.
Inward.
Shards sank into her scalp, disappearing.
Lyra closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the mirrored irises were deeper. Layered. Like standing on the edge of a well and realizing you couldn't see the bottom.
"Dominion?" I asked.
She smiled.
"Reflection," she said. "And… recall." Her fingers brushed the air. The glass beneath our feet rippled, briefly showing not the ruined city, but its previous form—whole, proud, crowned god asleep at its heart. Then the image vanished, leaving only the current wreckage.
"I can show things what they were," she said. "Or what they think they are. Or what they fear they could be."
Veyra clapped her translucent hands. "Oh, that's going to be fun."
Lysa found her voice. "You let it choose," she said, hoarse. "Just like that."
"We didn't let it," Cirel said. "That's the point. Crowns that matter don't ask."
The marks under our skin cooled, our forms settling.
It would be wasteful to stay like this now that the main entertainment was gone.
I let the true shape bleed back.
Limbs shortening. Light dimming. Skin forming over lines. Features arranging themselves into the familiar mask of a beautiful boy with long golden-orange hair and red crosses for eyes.
Eclipsera shrank back to its usual size.
The white crown retreated into something faint, half-seen.
The others folded themselves back into human disguises too.
Veyra's translucent skin opacified. Kaen's ribs closed, hiding furnaces. Lyra's threads sank. Cirel's mirrors rejoined into a continuous body. Sareth's cloak thickened. Alinor's wings disappeared, leaving only faint shadows on her shoulder blades.
In a few heartbeats, we looked almost normal again.
Lysa stared at us like that was the most offensive part.
"How," she said slowly, voice cracking, "do you just… put it away?"
I shrugged. "Practise."
"We tried staying like that once," Kaen said. "World died too fast. Boring."
Lysa's mouth twisted. "Right," she whispered. "Wouldn't want that."
The plaza cracked again.
The realm was still ending.
Without its god's dream to hold it together, the glass city had nothing to be on. Sand poured down from the collapsing desert, burying, grinding. The cracks in the sky yawned wider, spilling raw light.
"We should go," Sareth said.
"Where?" Lysa demanded. "There's nowhere here."
"Down," Alinor said. "There's always down."
Lysa laughed once, hysterical. "I hate that word now," she said.
"Get used to it," Veyra said.
Souvenir.
We hadn't taken one yet.
Lyra lifted a hand.
The plaza surface near the god's former center bulged. A small column of glass rose, then broke off, dropping neatly into her palm. It was a ring—a miniature version of the Crown that had just chosen her, thin and perfect.
She flipped it once, then tossed it to me.
I caught it without thinking.
"For you," she said. "You took the king's sword. Take the god's toy too."
The little glass ring was cold and hot at once.
Souvenir.
"Fine," I said, slipping it into a pocket that hadn't existed before.
Mercy.
There wasn't much left to show it to.
This world had been almost empty.
Almost.
I looked at Lysa.
She flinched. "No," she said immediately. "No more marks."
"I already gave some mercy to a demon girl," I said. "Her life will carry this. That's enough of that trick for now."
She hesitated. "Then what—"
Kaen gestured toward the dunes above, what little we could still see through the widening cracks. "No one will remember this place," he said. "Just us."
"Not quite," Lyra said, smiling faintly. She touched the center of her chest, where the Crown had sunk. "Fragments will leak. Little reflections. A seer here, a prophet there. Dreams of glass and buried suns. Stories of a god that choked on its own pride."
Veyra sighed. "Soft," she said. "That's your mercy?"
"No," I said.
We all turned toward the edge of the plaza.
There, half-buried by falling sand, was a single crowned statue that hadn't moved.
Its circle was dull.
Its crown dim.
It hadn't fed the god.
It had just stood and watched.
I walked to it.
Lysa watched, wary.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Being kind," I said.
I touched the statue's chest.
The glass was cool.
Inside it, something tiny flickered—a last ember of the god's original dream, pure and uncorrupted by the years of sleep.
I pinched it out.
Then I didn't crush it.
I cupped it.
A small, bright spark floated in my palm, barely bigger than a fingernail. Inside it: a tiny world. A flat plane of glass under a single, unmoving sun, silent and peaceful.
"A piece of it that never woke up," Sareth said.
"Yes," I said.
I looked up at the cracking sky.
At the layers beyond.
I flicked my fingers.
The spark rose.
Higher.
Higher.
It slipped through the broken sky like a seed through a gap. Up into the layers above, where we weren't going yet.
"Let it trouble someone else later," I said.
Mercy enough.
The statue I'd taken it from spider-cracked, then collapsed.
The plaza tilted.
"We really need to go now," Cirel said, laughing as the floor slid.
The pit's edges broke.
The desert collapsed inward.
The sky tore open completely.
The realm lost the argument with gravity.
We fell.
Again.
Lysa had just enough time to grab my arm and squeeze it with bruising force.
"Name it," she gasped, as the world twisted.
"What?" I asked.
"The world," she said. "You always name them after."
Kaen barked a short laugh. "She's paying attention."
Lyra's eyes gleamed. "You killed the god," she said. "And I took its reflection. You should name it."
The glass fragments rose around us like snow in reverse.
The desert became a funnel of falling debris and sand and light.
I thought for a heartbeat.
"A good name," Veyra said, grinning as we tipped into the void. "Do it properly."
"The world that dreamed itself wrong," Cirel suggested.
"Too long," Kaen said.
"The bed of a dead sun," Alinor offered.
"Trash," Sareth muttered.
Lysa's hair whipped around her face as we fell. "Well?" she yelled over the roaring nothing.
I smiled.
"The Crownless Glass," I said.
It fit.
The world heard it on its way out.
Then it shattered completely.
Light.
Dark.
Falling.
Again.
Lysa screamed.
Again.
The dream of glass and still suns was gone.
The Seven fell on, bound by their Crown shards, by their rituals, by their boredom and hunger and the petty, terrifying kindness they sometimes called mercy.
Somewhere below, another world waited.
It just didn't know, yet, that it was next.