The first god died screaming.
Not a metaphor. Not poetry. The thing that had called itself Eternal, that had fed on human terror for six thousand years before we learned to feed back—it screamed. The sound was wrong in ways that broke the ears of everyone who heard it. Three of our soldiers went deaf. Two clawed out their own eyes. One just stopped, mid-stride, and never moved again.
I kept walking.
The god's blood—if you could call it blood, if the luminescent filth that poured from divine wounds deserved a name so mundane—painted the temple steps in colors that don't exist anymore. I still see them sometimes, in dreams. In the fever-spaces between waking and sleep. Colors that burned themselves into my memory so deep that eight thousand years hasn't faded them.
I was twenty-three. I was in love. I was so fucking certain that what we were doing was right.
His name was Torven.
He had ink-stained fingers and a crooked smile and he wrote poetry so beautiful it made me ache in places I didn't know I had. When he laughed, the whole world got brighter. When he touched me, I forgot that anything else existed—the war, the dying, the desperate mathematics of rebellion against beings that had ruled since before human memory began.
"We're going to win," he told me, the night before we stormed the Obsidian Threshold. "We're going to tear them down and build something better. Something that doesn't require suffering to sustain itself."
"You sound certain."
"I am certain." He kissed me—soft and deep and tasting like the wine we'd stolen from a dead priest's cellar. "I'm certain because you're leading us. And you don't know how to lose."
I didn't correct him. Didn't tell him that I knew exactly how to lose, that I'd been losing my whole life, that the only reason I was still standing was spite and pattern-recognition and the absolute feral refusal to let the bastards win.
I just kissed him back. Held him. Memorized the weight of him against me, the sound of his breathing, the specific warmth of his skin.
I knew, even then, that I was saying goodbye.
The old gods didn't go quietly.
They'd been feeding for six millennia. Six thousand years of human sacrifice, human worship, human souls poured into their vast and hungry maws. They were fat with us. Drunk on us. They'd forgotten what it felt like to be mortal, to be afraid, to face something stronger than yourself and know that you might not survive.
We reminded them.
Seventeen of us breached the Threshold. Eleven made it to the inner sanctum. Seven survived long enough to see the first Throne fall.
Four of us remained when it was over.
The gods were dead. The temples were rubble. The system that had sustained their parasitic existence for longer than recorded history—the cycle of sacrifice and consumption, the wheel of suffering that turned and turned and fed their endless hunger—lay broken at our feet.
We'd won.
And standing in the ruins, covered in divine ichor and mortal blood and the ashes of everyone we'd loved, we faced the question that would damn us:
What now?
The wheel was broken.
Not destroyed—we hadn't known how to destroy it, hadn't even known it could be destroyed. But damaged. Cracked. The flow of souls that had circulated through existence since the beginning of time was stuttering, faltering, leaking through wounds we'd torn in our desperate assault on the Thrones.
Souls were falling through. Slipping into the void between existence and oblivion. Not dying, not being reborn, just... gone. Lost in a wound that would later be called the Gnaw.
"We have to fix it," Marek said. He was the strategist—the one who'd planned the assault, who'd calculated the angles and the costs. He was also missing an arm and most of his sanity, his eyes wild with the kind of light that comes from looking directly at the divine and surviving. "The cycle. The flow. It needs... it needs something to guide it. To hold the shape while it heals."
"We just tore down the guides," I said. "We just killed the things that were holding the shape."
"Then we need new ones."
I understood what he was saying. I understood it the moment the words left his mouth, and I felt something in my chest turn to ice.
"No."
"There's no other option—"
"We didn't fight them for six years to become them—"
"We didn't fight them to watch existence unravel either!" His voice cracked. The wild light in his eyes was getting wilder. "Look at the flow, Ember. Look at it. It's bleeding. Every second we stand here debating, more souls fall through. How many is too many? A thousand? A million? Everyone who's ever lived?"
I looked. I didn't want to, but I looked.
The wheel was hemorrhaging. Souls—bright points of consciousness, the accumulated meaning of mortal lives—were spiraling into the wound we'd created, vanishing into nothing. As I watched, hundreds fell. Thousands. Beings who had lived and loved and struggled and hoped, reduced to nothing because we'd broken the machine that was supposed to shepherd them home.
"There has to be another way."
"Show me." Marek's voice was exhausted. Desperate. Broken in ways that went deeper than his missing arm. "Show me another way and I'll take it. But we don't have time to search. We don't have time to experiment. We have right now, and right now the universe is dying."
We took the Thrones.
Not all of us. The others—the ones who had survived but couldn't stomach what came next—walked away. Condemned us. Some tried to stop us, and we had to...
We had to do things.
But four of us remained. Four mortals, standing in the ruins of divine tyranny, facing an impossible choice between becoming monsters and letting everything end.
We chose to be monsters.
I remember the moment I sat on the Throne of Passion. The moment the power flooded into me, remaking me from the inside out, turning everything I was into something else entirely. It felt like dying. It felt like being born. It felt like every intense emotion I'd ever experienced—every love, every rage, every desperate midnight longing—compressed into a single instant of transformation.
And then the hunger started.
I found Torven three days later.
He'd been in the city when the Thrones fell—when the old gods died and the wheel cracked and everything we thought we knew about existence proved to be built on foundations of divine greed. He'd survived the chaos. Survived the collapse. Survived long enough to see me again.
He didn't recognize me at first. I looked the same—I'd chosen to keep my mortal form, the face he'd loved, the body he'd touched—but something in his eyes told me he could see the difference. Could feel the hunger radiating off me like heat from a forge.
"You did it," he said. His voice was careful. The way you'd talk to a wild animal. "You won."
"We won."
"What happens now?"
I tried to touch him. To hold him the way I'd held him the night before the assault, the way I'd memorized his warmth and his weight and the specific way his heart beat against my chest.
The moment my fingers brushed his skin, I felt it. The pull. The hunger. His passion—his love for me, his joy at seeing me alive, his relief and his fear and everything he felt burning bright inside him—flowing into me like water into a drain.
I pulled back. Stumbled away. Watched his face go confused, then hurt, then understanding.
"Oh," he said softly. "Oh, I see."
"Torven—"
"It's okay." It wasn't okay. His voice was breaking. His eyes were wet. "It's okay. You did what you had to do. You saved everyone."
"I don't want to save everyone. I want to save you—"
"You can't." He smiled. That crooked smile I'd fallen in love with, now tinged with something that looked like grief and something that looked like goodbye. "You can't touch me without taking something. That's the price, isn't it? That's what the Thrones demand."
I couldn't answer. Couldn't speak. Could only stand there, three feet away from the man I loved, knowing that those three feet might as well be an ocean. That I would never hold him again. Never feel his warmth against me without draining him, consuming him, turning him into fuel for what I'd become.
"I'll wait," he said. "I'll live my life and I'll die when it's time and I'll pass through your Throne on my way to whatever comes next. And when I do—" His voice cracked. Broke. Reformed into something almost like hope. "When I do, you'll have a piece of me forever. That's something, isn't it? That's almost like—"
"Don't." The word came out harsher than I intended. "Don't make this beautiful. It's not beautiful. It's wrong. We broke something, Torven. We became the thing we fought to destroy."
"You became the thing that saves the world."
"I became the thing that eats it."
He died forty-seven years later.
I watched from a distance. Never touched him again. Never spoke to him again after that day, because speaking led to feeling and feeling led to feeding and I couldn't—I couldn't—be the thing that drained him empty.
His soul passed through my Throne on its way to rebirth. I took my portion—the piece of him that remembered loving me, that had carried that love through four decades of mortal life, that had kept faith with a god who couldn't keep faith with him.
It tasted like ash. Like the memory of something that used to be precious, transformed by consumption into nothing but fuel.
I kept it anyway. I've kept it for eight thousand years. A reminder of what I was. What I lost. What I became to save a world that doesn't even remember there was something to be saved from.
And now there's a mortal who sees us clearly.
Who found the math we thought we'd buried. Who died and came back without passing through our hands, his soul slipping sideways through a connection we don't understand. Who laughs in the face of divine judgment like he's got nothing left to lose.
Cael Morrow.
The Furnace wants him destroyed. The Sun wants him contained. The Corona hasn't spoken in three thousand years but I can feel it watching, calculating, waiting to see what we'll do.
I want something else.
I want to know if he's the one. The one we've been waiting for, whether we knew we were waiting or not. The one who can finally finish what we started eight thousand years ago—who can find a way to heal the wheel, to remove us without destroying everything, to give existence back to the beings we stole it from.
Or maybe I just want to feel something real again. To be near a soul that burns so bright it reminds me what burning used to feel like. To touch passion without consuming it, even if only for a moment.
Eight thousand years is a long time to be hungry.
Eight thousand years is a long time to be cold.
Cael Morrow is coming. And one way or another, everything is about to change.
I remember love.
I remember what it cost to save the world.
I remember becoming the monster so that monsters couldn't win.
The heretic thinks he's discovered something new. He thinks he's the first to see us for what we are—parasites, thieves, the frightened children who stole divinity and couldn't give it back.
He's not the first. He's just the first who might survive long enough to matter.
Let him come. Let him rage. Let him build his rebellion and sharpen his knives and discover all the terrible truths we've buried beneath eight millennia of careful theology.
We've been waiting.
We've been waiting so long.
And I am so, so tired of being a god.
END PROLOGUE