Part 1
Darkness breathed. It pulsed like the slow beat of a heart that had forgotten how to die. Every inhale drew whispers through the cavern, every exhale carried the scent of rusted divinity.
Erevan Sol woke within it.
For a long moment he lay still, letting the dark press against his skin. It was warm—too warm—and alive in ways no corpse should be. The ceiling above him was bone: pale, ridged, and faintly luminous, as if stars had been carved into its surface and then buried beneath centuries of dust.
He remembered light. He remembered falling through a dream that bled. And he remembered the voice that had said, "Sleep, thief of divinity."
Now he was awake again.
He rose slowly. His hands trembled, not from weakness but from the shock of feeling—after so long without a body. Beneath his bare feet the ground rippled. Veins of red light throbbed beneath translucent stone, flowing outward into the dark like rivers of molten glass.
A god's corpse. He had fallen into a god's corpse.
Not for the first time.
Erevan drew a breath. The air burned his lungs. Tiny motes of silver swirled in it—Ashes of Dreams—residue left when divinity decayed. Mortals mined it for miracles. He had once woven it into weapons.
Once, he thought. But not now.
He reached inward for his Dream Core, the spiritual center where his will had once rewritten reality. It was still there, a cracked mirror glimmering faintly inside him. The reflection that stared back was hollow-eyed and furious.
Fragments of memory surfaced: a spiral tower of crystal; a blade forged from a god's final thought; laughter that ended in betrayal. Someone had pushed him into this dream before the divine body collapsed. Someone he had trusted.
The darkness shifted.
A whisper echoed through the ribs of the cavern—soft, endless, and older than words. He could not tell whether it came from within the corpse or from the remains of his own mind.
You devoured what was mine.
Erevan smiled without warmth. "Then take it back."
Silence answered. Only the slow drip of golden ichor broke the stillness.
He began to walk. Each step left faint cracks in the bone-floor, spiderwebbing outward as if the corpse itself remembered who he was. Even powerless, fragments of his old Authority lingered—small rebellions of reality that refused to forget his command.
The tunnel opened into a vast chamber.
A cathedral of ribs arched overhead. Between them hung strands of flesh hardened into crimson glass. At the center rose a spire of petrified marrow, and within it glowed the faint shimmer of a heart that refused to stop.
The god was not entirely dead.
Erevan circled the spire, studying the patterns that pulsed beneath the surface. Symbols drifted across it like constellations: runes of worship, belief, and fear. Every civilization that had ever prayed to this god had left an echo here.
He pressed his palm against the glassy marrow.
Pain lanced through his arm. Visions flooded him— a thousand cities burning, angels weeping light, oceans turning to mirrors, and in each reflection, his own face staring back.
He tore his hand away. Smoke rose from his skin, the mark of Dreamfire trying to reclaim him.
Still connected… after all this time.
The corpse's pulse slowed. The air thickened, filled with the low hum of divine instinct—a warning, perhaps, or a memory of hunger. Erevan knew better than to stay. He turned toward the faint glimmer ahead, where a tunnel led upward through the ribs.
As he walked, he spoke softly, to himself or to the lingering god he could not tell.
"Centuries asleep, yet the world above still feeds on your remains. They call it the City of Veins now. They trade your blood for faith, your marrow for miracles."
He paused.
A faint laugh escaped him—dry, bitter, almost human.
"They think they own the dead. They've forgotten what it means when the dead begin to dream again."
Part 2
The passage narrowed until it became a throat of bone. Erevan climbed through it, hands slick with congealed ichor, until a faint red glow bled down from above.
He emerged into light that was not sunlight.
The sky above the City of Veins shimmered like a wound refusing to close. Clouds of crimson mist drifted between towers grown from ossified ribs; bridges arched over canals where diluted god-blood pulsed in rhythmic tides.
Sound returned—low chanting, hammer strikes, the hiss of steam drawn from veins beneath the streets.
Erevan drew his hood over his face. The air here smelled of incense and rot. Faith was an industry now.
He passed a shrine where priests siphoned golden droplets from a pipe that vanished deep into the ground. Pilgrims knelt to receive the residue upon their tongues, eyes glazing with momentary bliss.
They drink from a corpse and call it salvation.
A child tugged at his sleeve, holding out a vial of dream dust. "Mister, buy some? Keeps nightmares away."
He looked at the glittering powder, then at the faint mark of burn-scars on the child's palms—proof of handling raw divinity without protection. He dropped a shard of bone-coin into her hand and moved on.
Every street beat with pulse-light, every wall whispered scripture. Yet beneath it all he heard the same slow rhythm as the heart below—the god still dreaming through its remains.
He paused near a vendor stall, his focus not on the goods but on the subtle current in the air. A psychic static, familiar and sickening.
Forbidden knowledge.
Erevan Sol, the forgotten heretic, had invented a methodology for harvesting divine dreams—a unique psychological technique for navigating the divine mindscape. It should have died with him in the abyss.
But here, in the heart of the City of Veins, someone was using his keys to unlock new, dark doors.
Erevan's eyes narrowed beneath his hood, catching the reflection of the city lights in a shard of bone-coin. "Centuries asleep, yet the world above still feeds on your remains," he murmured. A dry, bitter laugh escaped him. "They think they own the dead. They've forgotten what it means when the dead begin to dream again." His descent had just begun.