The wind had changed.
Nael felt it before he heard it.
Before the scent of the earth turned stale.
Before the silence grew wrong.
The ashes no longer danced. They hovered—suspended mid-air, as if held in place by a breath unspoken. And beneath his boots, the ground pulsed.
He turned slowly.
At the edge of the ruined valley, where the stones rose like broken teeth, something stood.
No, not stood.
Waited.
A figure cloaked in stone-gray robes. Hooded. Motionless. Ageless.
Its presence was a wound in the world.
Nael's hand drifted instinctively to the pouch at his side. Salt. A relic of old rites. A barrier, a binding. It had worked before.
But this thing—it wasn't divine.
It wasn't mortal.
It was something left behind.
The figure stepped forward.
No footsteps. No sound.
Only weight.
The earth cracked beneath it, not from mass, but from memory.
Nael narrowed his eyes.
"I know you," he said, though he didn't.
"You've watched before."
The figure tilted its head—slowly, like stone grinding over stone.
No reply came from beneath the hood. Only stillness. Stillness so pure it screamed.
And then… the air whispered:
"We are the ones who do not forget."
Nael's pulse quickened.
The phrase. The voice.
Not male. Not female.
Not spoken, but remembered.
He reached for the runeblade on his back, the steel humming faintly with the echo of forgotten wars.
"What do you want?"
A pause.
Then:
"The gods stir. And when they breathe… we bleed."
The figure raised one hand—skeletal, white as marble, fingers elongated, inhuman.
The stones around them trembled.
One by one, tombs opened.
Not physically.
But spiritually.
The seals groaned. The bindings cracked. Nael felt it—like a scream from beneath the crust of the world.
He stepped forward.
Salt in one hand. Blade in the other.
"You came to stop me?"
The figure's head shook.
"We came to warn you."
Nael froze.
"Warn me?"
A silence.
Then, very quietly:
"The gods do not wake kindly."
And with that, the ground beneath the figure shattered.
No sound. Just stone breaking into darkness.
And the Watcher fell—no scream, no resistance—into the deep.
Gone.
Only the whisper remained.
"One of them remembers you."
"And she is not grateful."
Nael stood alone once more.
But the world was no longer the same.
The stones wept dust. The sky pulsed red. The salt in his hand burned.
The past was no longer content to stay buried.
And something beneath him had opened its eyes.
Nael did not move for a long time.
The silence after the Watcher's disappearance was louder than any roar. The stones had stopped trembling, but the weight in the air remained, like the echo of something ancient pressing against the surface of the world.
He knelt, brushing ash from the broken earth where the figure had stood.
There was no trace—no burn, no mark, not even a scent.
Only something cold… beneath.
The runeblade on his back vibrated gently, as if reacting to something not of this layer of reality.
Nael pressed a hand to the ground.
Warm.
Too warm.
And then, it happened again.
A whisper.
"Nael…"
But it wasn't the Watcher this time.
It was a voice from somewhere far below—deeper than the tombs he had sealed, deeper than bones, deeper than time.
A voice he had once known.
A name, wrapped in longing.
Seriah.
His breath caught.
He hadn't heard her voice since—
No.
He forced the thought away.
Seriah was gone. Burned in the flames that had swallowed the last god-war. The last flicker of her life had vanished with the pyres of Eir.
But that voice… it wasn't memory.
It was now.
He rose sharply, turning toward the nearest sealed tomb.
This one was older. The runes etched into the stone were crumbling, worn by centuries of salt and silence.
But something was wrong.
The seal was fractured.
A hairline crack ran through the glyph at its center. Nael touched it gently. The stone hissed beneath his fingers.
The glyph shimmered, and a flicker of gold leaked from within.
Divine essence.
Faint.
Familiar.
Nael's heartbeat thundered.
"Seriah?"
The name fell from his lips like a prayer—and the glyph exploded.
He stumbled back as blinding light burst from the tomb, casting skeletal shadows across the valley. The ground shook violently. A gust of wind—not natural, not weather—howled across the ruins, scattering ash and memory alike.
From within the light, a form began to rise.
She stepped through.
Or… what remained of her.
Seriah.
Her eyes glowed like molten amber, her hair like living fire braided with strands of night. Her skin bore cracks of light, as though her very body could no longer contain the force burning within her.
She wasn't whole.
But she was awake.
Nael's voice broke.
"You're… alive."
She looked at him—not with recognition.
But with judgment.
"You left me," she said.
"When the heavens burned, you buried their corpses. But not mine."
Her voice was not angry. It was worse.
It was betrayed.
Nael stepped forward, trembling.
"I searched for you. I—"
"You dug for the gods," she cut him off.
"But not for me."
He wanted to explain. To tell her how long he had wandered. How many false graves he had opened. How many names he had whispered into the dust.
But there were no words.
Only truth.
And silence.
Seriah looked past him, toward the stone fields behind him. Toward the other tombs.
"They're waking, Nael. And they remember."
"Do you?"
Nael took a step back.
Not from fear.
But from the unbearable weight of memory.
Seriah stood before him, her form pulsing with fractured divinity, a thing half-born of fire and ash. And yet—she was still her.
He saw it in the way her lips trembled as she spoke.
In the way her eyes lingered just a second too long.
In the way her hands, though aglow with godlight, clenched like a mortal woman's hands.
"I didn't bury you," Nael whispered, the words ash in his mouth.
"Because I couldn't find what was left."
Her gaze turned sharp.
"But you found them. The gods. Every one of them. You bound them, salted them, sealed them like relics in your little graves."
"And me?" Her voice cracked.
"I screamed for you. I called for you."
Nael dropped to one knee. Not in reverence. In shame.
"I thought I'd failed you. I thought you'd burned with the rest."
"I did burn," she said. "And I am still burning."
She stepped forward, her feet not quite touching the ground.
Flakes of light peeled from her skin like golden cinders.
Nael looked up at her, his throat tight.
"Seriah… I didn't stop looking."
"No," she said softly. "But you stopped remembering."
For a long time, there was only wind.
And then, the tremor began.
Low. Subterranean. Like breath caught in the chest of the world.
The other tombs—fifty, sixty, more—began to hum.
The runes shimmered.
The seals pulsed.
And above them, the sky cracked.
Not with lightning.
With sound.
A chorus.
Not of voices.
But of names.
Divine names.
Old ones.
Lost ones.
And every name Nael had buried now rose, one by one, in a whisper that shook the stars.
Seriah turned toward the tombs.
"You kept them from waking," she said.
"But their dreams never ended."
Her eyes glowed brighter now. No longer soft.
"They remember you, Nael. The Gravekeeper. The one who put them in the ground."
"And they remember what you took."
The wind howled.
Nael stood, blade in hand, heart pounding.
"What are you?"
Seriah's smile was sorrowful. And infinite.
"I am what they made me."
"What your silence shaped."
And then, her body began to fragment—cracks of white fire running through her form. A divine vessel breaking.
But instead of pain, there was release.
Light exploded from her, engulfing the valley in brilliance so pure it turned shadow into memory.
Nael staggered, shielding his face.
And in that final moment, as the brilliance faded, she said:
"You buried the gods."
"Now bury what they left behind."
Silence returned.
But the world had changed.
The tombs no longer slept.
The seals were breaking.
And somewhere beneath the stones, something laughed.
Nael sheathed his blade with trembling fingers.
Salt slipped through his grip.
The past had risen.
And the Gravekeeper of the Gods had no more time to mourn.
Only to choose.
To bury.
Or to burn.