She did not fall like fire. No comet's scream split the sky. No trail of flame announced her arrival. Instead, something far stranger happened: a hole opened in the world, subtle and wrong, like a breath that never finished being exhaled.
The sky dimmed. Not with clouds, not with storm—but with absence. A patch of blue simply… ceased to be, as if reality had momentarily forgotten to exist there. From that hollow in the heavens, something slipped through.
Her.
She tumbled without wind, without sound, without the rush of air or heat of friction. Light bent away from her as she fell, recoiling as if afraid to touch what was being exiled from infinity. Below lay a quiet rural valley. Fields of grain rolled in soft gold waves. A narrow river curved lazily between them. Smoke drifted from the chimneys of a small village nestled against the hills.
Life, fragile and ordinary. The moment she crossed into this world, everything knew it was wrong. The grass beneath her darkened as if frostbitten by summer air. The insects went silent. Birds circling above the fields suddenly veered away, their wings beating in panicked, erratic spirals. Even the river faltered, its surface rippling with a strange, shivering hesitation.
When she struck the earth, there was no explosion.
There was only stillness. She lay crumpled in a shallow hollow in the field, her body curled inward like something trying to protect itself from existence. The ground around her had turned gray and brittle, as if drained of whatever made it alive. Stalks of wheat bent toward her, blackened at their tips, their seeds shriveled in quiet, invisible agony. The world held its breath. And for the first time since time began, so did she.
Pain ripped through her. Not the distant, abstract awareness of destruction she had once commanded—but sharp, intimate agony that burned through nerves she had never possessed before. Her lungs convulsed, dragging air into her in choking, uneven gasps. Her heart slammed against her ribs, frantic and weak.
Heart. She had a heart.
The realization hit her with more terror than any divine battle ever had.
She tried to move and cried out—a thin, broken sound torn from a throat that had once spoken reality into shape. Her limbs were heavy, clumsy, uncooperative. When she lifted a trembling hand, she saw skin, dirt beneath her fingernails, a faint smear of blood where the earth had cut her.
Blood. Gods did not bleed.
"I…" The word caught in her throat. Her voice sounded small, cracked, like glass barely holding together.
Memories surged—stars igniting at her command, galaxies collapsing into beautiful nothingness, the vast, endless freedom of being more than a body— Then they were gone.
All that remained was pressure behind her eyes and a hollow, aching terror in her chest.
She rolled onto her side and retched, though there was nothing in her stomach. Each breath scraped her lungs raw. The sky above her was painfully blue, far too close, far too finite. No endless dark, no spiraling constellations—just a simple mortal sky that did not know her. Or feared her.
The silence was wrong. No insects buzzed. No birds sang. The wind barely stirred. It was as if the world itself was watching her, uncertain whether it was safe to move again. She tried—instinctively—to reach for her power. To call the stars. To end the pain. To unmake this fragile, unbearable form. Nothing answered.
Inside her, where infinity had once roared, there was only a faint, distant warmth—like the last coal of a dying fire buried under ash. Panic took hold.
"No," she whispered, clutching at her chest. "No, no, no—"
She could feel the truth now, even if she could not yet name it. She was trapped. Bound inside flesh. Exiled from eternity.
Around her, the crops continued to wither, their leaves curling inward as though in mourning. The land itself recoiled from her presence, yet she was too weak to do anything about it.
A god reduced to a weeping, fallen woman in a dying field. And far beyond the quiet hills and soft river, far beyond the village that had no idea what had just arrived at its edge, the heavens were watching.
Waiting to see whether she would break.