The bell above the door jingled, sharp and cheerful, at odds with the man who stood behind the counter.
Elarion, now known simply as Eli, looked up from his ledger. His face bore the softness of middle age—salt-and-pepper stubble, deep-set eyes that saw too much, and a silence that unsettled even the most persistent salesmen. His store, Greenhaven Grocers, sat at the corner of a quiet lane in a nowhere part of the city. Not poor. Not rich. Forgotten—just the way he preferred it.
The customer, a teenage boy with earbuds and a worn-out hoodie, didn't notice the way the fluorescent lights above flickered once, then steadied as Eli glanced up.
"Yo, just the milk."
Eli nodded and extended his hand. A glass bottle—cool, fresh, full—appeared where his fingers had just been. Conjured. No fanfare. No light. Just a quiet manipulation of matter beneath mortal understanding. A trick of molecules. A fading god's sleight of hand.
The boy didn't even notice.
"Three twenty," Eli said.
Coins clinked, the boy left, and the bell chimed again.
Eli exhaled, long and slow. Every conjuration left a small echo now—a quiet ache in his bones, a thinning in his veins. His power, once infinite, had dwindled to whispers. But it was enough. Enough to sustain the illusion of normalcy.
Behind the shop, beyond the shelves of dry lentils and rice, lay a small room—a bed, a kettle, a tattered book of poetry from a dead language, and a stone orb the size of a marble that pulsed with dull, blue light.
Eli sat beside it each night. It was a shard of the Bastion, the last fragment of the celestial realm that hadn't collapsed into myth. He spoke to it sometimes—not for answers, but to remember.
The egg was safe. That much he knew. Its vault untouched, its seals unbroken.
But something had changed recently.
The dreams.
He had seen shadows moving through ancient ruins, hands brushing against sigils long buried. Faces he did not know, speaking in a tongue that felt almost… divine. One dream showed Vireth, or a glimpse of her—her eyes turned silver, her skin cracked with the weight of time.
She was looking for it.
Or someone else was.
Either way, the winds were shifting. Not yet the storm, but the first scent of rain before the lightning.
He stood and opened the back door. The city stretched before him in dull gray: buildings of concrete and chrome, neon signs, the hum of tires on wet asphalt. It was a world that had forgotten to believe.
But belief was not gone.
It was simply buried—like the egg.
And Eli, the god in exile, was not ready to rise.
Not yet.
But soon.