It began on the coldest day the world had ever known.
The rivers froze mid-flow, and breath turned to ice. Crops blackened in the fields, and cattle fell silent. It was as if the world itself held its breath.
Then the sky split.
Two gods descended one cloaked in radiant flame, the other in shadows deeper than night they were beautiful and terrifying at the same time. They fell from the heavens not as saviors, but as warriors, dragging their divine fury into the realm of men. Where they clashed, the land screamed. Mountains flattened into plains, snow turned to steam, and stars fled the sky like prey being chased by a predator.
The battle lasted seven days.
On the eighth, for a moment, silence took over.
That was when a man stepped outside.
He had spent those seven days in agony, watching his wife fight a quieter battle without being able to do anything. She was in labor through the storm, through the earthquakes, through the terror. Her cries were drowned out by divine thunder. Her pain ignored by the heavens.
When the shaking stopped, and the light faded, he thought that perhaps it was over. Perhaps now, finally, the world will let her bring their child in peace.
He left her side just long enough to go outside to confirm the end of the battle.
But in the end he was wrong the battle wasn't over, however he never saw the final blow.
A flash ripped the sky in half, the last strike, the killing blow that felled the brighter god. A pulse of raw, divine force blasted across the land like a wave of a thousand suns. It's echo hit him squarely. His bones cracked. His flesh split. He was thrown backward like paper in fire, the scream trapped in his throat.
Then darkness.
He woke up to silence, broken only by a single sound:
The cry of a child.
Pain lanced through his body as he dragged himself back toward the house, each breath a jagged flame. The doorway was shattered, the walls were cracked but held and there was a gaping hole in the ceiling letting the rain come in. Ash floated in the air like drifting snow.
Inside, the fire was dead.
So was his wife .
She lay still on the floor, her face pale, her arms limp, blood pooled beneath her like a quiet sea. A few centimeters away, their newborn child, alive, wailing, still tethered to her by the umbilical cord reached into the air as if calling for the sky to give her back.
He wept then.
"My son"
He had no strength left to cut the cord, only to cradle the child against his chest and sob until he bled into the silence. The gods had gone. One dead, one vanished. And this was what they left behind.
When the shattered god had fallen, fragments of his divine form rained across the earth. Wherever they landed, they changed people. Marked them. Gave them power they never asked for.
Those over eighteen felt it first the burning, the awakening. The rest? They waited, unknowingly branded by godfire.
The boy was born in that moment.
Marked before his first breath.
His mother died to give him life.
They would call him cursed.
They would call him blessed.
They would never understand.