Darkness.
But not the simple, silent dark of closed eyes or moonless nights. This was a presence, ancient, immense, and ever-watching. It coiled like smoke in the spaces between thought, pressed cold fingers against the hollow where a soul once lived.
He floated there, not as a body, nor even a mind. Just... fragments. Shattered echoes of what he had been.
No breath.
No heartbeat.
No name.
Yet pain remained. Not the kind that burned flesh or broke bone, but deeper, spiritual, cosmic. A hurt etched into the very fibers of being, the residue of betrayal left to rot in the silence of eternity.
He remembered dying.
Not in the mortal sense. Not with blood and final gasps. But in the way gods perish, when belief fades like the last ember in a dying flame, when truth is a blade sharper than any forged by hands.
He had once walked the shining halls of Atherion, realm of the divine. A place woven from starlight and ancient oaths, where time folded gently, and truths were cataloged in endless archives.
Aetherion had been more than home. It had been purpose.
He was not born into godhood. He had earned it. Through trials, through sacred study, through mastery of the runes that shaped reality. While others basked in celestial glory, he had walked the threshold of creation, a guardian of the Veil, that fragile barrier which separated order from madness.
He had believed in it. In all of it.
The structure.
The balance.
The silence that followed sacred duty.
But belief had a price.
The memory was fragmented, but vivid in its pain. A discovery, accidental, yet impossible to ignore. In the deep layers of the Veil, beyond the runic inscriptions and protective wards, he had found a truth.
The Veil was not divine protection.
It was a prison.
Something lurked beyond it, ancient, older than even the first light of Aetherion. A being? A force? He hadn't known. Only that the gods feared it. And worse, hid it.
When he brought the truth forward, they did not thank him.
They silenced him.
His name, ripped from the songlines.
His essence, bound in dimensional chains.
His soul, sealed behind the very fabric he once guarded.
There had been no trial. No chance to defend himself. Only wide eyes, whispered fear, and swift judgment.
And so he drifted.
For how long, he did not know. Time held no meaning in the dark. He only felt the ache of abandonment, the slow erosion of identity. Faces of those he once called kin faded into fog. Laughter, once shared across starlit temples, grew faint. Even his own voice, once used to recite sacred runes, was lost in the silence.
Loneliness became a second skin.
Until…
A ripple.
It began as a tremor, a subtle distortion in the veil of silence. Then came the pull, a gravitational hum, like a memory clawing its way back from the abyss. Something on the mortal side had reached across the forbidden boundaries.
A spell? A relic corrupted by time?
It didn't matter.
It called to him.
And for the first time in an eternity, he felt.
Not joy. Not hope. But friction. Tension. The resistance of a prison cracking.
He surged toward it, driven not by thought, but instinct, raw and primal. The fabric of his captivity tore, and through that wound in space and meaning, he emerged.
But not whole.
What spilled into the mortal realm was not the god he had once been, but a shadow. A fragment. A whisper of glory cloaked in pain and memory.
His power, scattered like glass.
His form, masked, faceless.
His name, gone, like breath on glass.
Yet something new burned where his name had once lived: resolve.
Not vengeance. That was too small, too mortal.
Not redemption. That was for those still tethered to belief.
Truth.
The world had changed. The Veil had weakened. And he had returned, not to reclaim thrones or temples, but to find the reason behind it all.
Why had Aetherion sacrificed its own?
What lay beyond the Veil that terrified even gods?
And who still remembered the divine that had fallen in silence?
He would find the answers.
In shadow.
In silence.
And through the blades that would speak where his voice could not.
The mortal world would not know his name.
But they would know his presence.
He was the last remnant of a forgotten truth.
He was the Veilwalker.
And his story had only just begun.
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