It was something beyond fear that gripped me when I woke upon the sea of bones. Fear is a candle in a storm—fragile, wavering, and quick to vanish in the wind. What clutched at my chest was more primal, older than memory, deeper than instinct. It was dread, thick and suffocating like oil in the lungs, and it pressed upon my soul with the weight of a thousand dying stars. It was the kind of terror that births silence in place of screams, the kind that leaves a man still not because he is brave, but because he knows to move is to invite the end.
The plain on which I found myself was not earth. It was a grave without a gravekeeper, a land of endless ivory ruin. Skeletal remains stretched outward in every direction—some shattered, some whole, some so ancient they had turned to pale dust that rose in a whispering wind. The bones were human—of that I was sure, for I wept when I looked upon them. I did not know their names, nor mine, but grief clawed at me all the same. This was no battlefield. No vultures circled, no weapons lay discarded. These bones had not been broken in war, but in erasure. Something had wiped them away, not violently—but completely, absolutely.
To the farthest reaches of my vision, there was nothing but death, until the horizon yielded not an end, but a wall: a colossal range of mountains that loomed like ancient judges. They encircled the plain like a fortress or a prison, their peaks carved not by wind or weather, but by time and divinity. This sea of bones was a basin, a valley of the dead encased in stone—a fishbowl made from the weathered ribs of the world itself.
I stood naked and raw amongst the dead. My skin was marked with soot and old blood, though I bore no wounds. My hands trembled, and yet I felt no cold. The sun above—if it could be called that—was a muted eye in a grey sky, casting neither warmth nor light, only the softest of shadows. Had anyone seen me in that moment—a lone man amidst the remains of his race—they might have cried out in fear, or pity, or madness.
But there was no one.
And then the pain began.
It was heart-glutching, head-splitting, muscle-tearing agony. It came not as a wound or sickness, but as a return. Like being pulled back into the flesh from oblivion. I screamed, though no voice came. My knees struck the stone with a crack, and still I fell further, curled upon myself like a beast. My mind tore itself into pieces, each fragment screaming a different question: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?
There was no answer. Only pain, and then—release.
And then, for lack of a better phrase… I was.
I felt.
Not like a man waking from a nightmare, but as a soul summoned into flesh. I felt my head, my heart. I felt hunger and confusion and the raw, searing ache of birth. Or rebirth.
My eyes opened anew, though they had never closed.
I breathed in the scent of the dead, and did not retch.
I stood.
The dread remained, but it no longer owned me. In its place came something colder. Not courage. Not yet. But… stillness. And purpose.
I walked.
Barefoot, I stepped between the ribs of my kin. The bones shifted with each movement, sighing and creaking as though mourning my passage. My steps were slow, deliberate, as if each movement threatened to fracture something within me. Yet I felt no exhaustion. My skin cracked, my soles bled on the jagged stone, but I did not stop. There was no thought to stopping. I did not yet know my name, but something deep within me whispered that the mountains were my destination.
Time passed strangely in that place. Days might have gone by, or only moments. The sky did not change. The dead did not move. Only I, the lone grain of sand on that pale shore, shifted forward toward the blackened wall that framed the world.
And then I saw them.
Two figures, distant at first, little more than flecks against the endless white. I paused, narrowing my eyes. They moved slowly, hesitantly, as though afraid the plain itself would swallow them. As they drew closer, their shapes resolved—a man, tall and thin, and beside him a child, a girl no older than ten, barefoot like me and cloaked in rags.
They stopped when they saw me.
The girl gasped and took a step back, her wide, dark pupils swallowing the whites of her eyes. Her fear was tangible. Not the startled fear of meeting a stranger—but the trembling, ancestral terror of encountering something divine or monstrous.
The man fell to his knees.
He pulled the girl down beside him into a bow so low her forehead brushed the bones.
He raised his face to mine and spoke words I did not understand. The language was old, older than the sky perhaps, and his voice cracked with reverence and desperation.
Then, in halting Common, he said:
"Adonai… I show respect before you."
He bowed again, pressing his hands to the ground. "Asura of Yahweh and descendant of the Lord… I, David, the First Father, kneel with Eve, the First Daughter, before the Lord of the Flame."
I stared at him, uncomprehending. The names meant nothing. The titles meant less. And yet… something stirred. Not memory—but recognition. Like a song half-remembered, or the taste of a fruit you have never eaten.
"I feel nothing for Yahweh," I said at last, surprised by my own voice. It was cold and distant, hollow as a tomb. "Nor for his Asura."
The man—David—did not rise.
"I serve you, Adonai," he said fervently. "You are our lord and master, revived and reborn to rescue your people. I see it in your golden eyes… the same as the murals in the Catacombs. You are the Flame-Walker, the Soul-King, the Eye of the End. You are He-Who-Was-Buried."
"I was buried?" I asked, not with curiosity, but disdain.
"You were buried in death and resurrected in ruin," he said. "As it was written."
He reached slowly into his robes and pulled forth a pendant—an old, rusted piece of metal in the shape of an eye, ringed with flame. He held it out to me.
"This is your mark."
I took it.
It was warm.
And in that moment, something within me shifted.
A fragment of memory. A whisper. A flame.
I saw a temple, crumbling and old. I saw thousands kneeling. I saw blood upon an altar and voices chanting in the dark. I saw myself—not as I was, but greater, terrible, crowned in fire.
And I saw the sky split, and the stars scream, and the world burn.
I dropped the pendant.
"I am not your god," I said.
David bowed lower. "You do not remember, my lord. That is the cost of the Fall. But you are He-Who-Returns. I felt it in my bones when the sky shook and the wind howled across the Sea of Bones. I knew you had awakened."
Eve, the girl, looked up at me with tear-streaked cheeks. "You were asleep in the dark, weren't you?" she asked quietly. "Like the stories?"
"I do not know," I said.
But she was right.
And I hated it.
Something had brought me here—not by accident, but design.
Something had crafted this grave and laid me in it, to rise again when the time was right.
And now, two relics of a dying people knelt before me, hoping I was the god they had been promised.
I turned from them and began walking toward the mountains once more.
"Wait!" David called out. "Where are you going?"
"To the edge of this world," I said. "To find who made me."
He stood, frantic. "There is nothing beyond the mountains but silence and death!"
I paused.
"Then I will walk through them until I find something that can speak."
Eve grabbed David's hand. "He's going to the Gate, isn't he?"
David nodded solemnly. "To the Mouth of the World."
Behind me, I heard them follow.
Two worshippers trailing a god who did not believe.
And so we walked—through the bones, toward the stone—and the sky above did not change, and the wind did not pause, and somewhere, something watched.