The wind moved before them.

  Two figures carved shadows across the pale ash, their silhouettes long and sharp against the horizonless gray. Behind them trailed a third—Akasha—silent, watchful, and deliberately apart. Not far enough to be forgotten, but never close enough to be counted among them.

  This was her realm. The Death realm. She had been shaped by its silence, taught by its stillness. But walking beside him—Death—felt like stepping into it for the first time.

  Astraxian moved with no sound, no weight. And Death—with the patience of a starless void—drifted beside him like memory left to rot. Between the two of them, Akasha felt like a smudge of ink in a book too ancient to read.

  The closer she walked to Death, the heavier the air became. Not cold in the ordinary sense, but laden—thick with meanings that defied language. Sound dulled. Light dimmed. The ground beneath his feet smoothed to glass, bone-white and glinting in the dimness. The realm leaned into him, folding in like loyal subjects drawn to a forgotten king.

  But Astraxian?

  He didn’t still the world. He unsettled it.

  Where he passed, the ground flexed—not visibly, but with the suggestion of tension, like the land itself didn’t know whether to bow or resist. The ash didn’t fall after his steps. It hovered. Waited.

  The realm knew Death and obeyed.

  It saw Astraxian—and hesitated.

  Death made the world feel familiar. Still. A heavy kind of silence that pressed but did not shift.

  Astraxian made it feel like the rules were being rewritten as he walked.

  So she kept her distance.

  Akasha had walked beside monsters before. Bargained with ghosts. Witnessed endings. But this? This was different.

  Astraxian didn’t speak unless required. Death didn’t speak at all. And she—

  She felt small again. Mortal. Fragile.

  The silence between them stretched thin.

  She opened her mouth.

  Closed it.

  Questions had circled her for days, ever since she chose to follow him. Some she feared to ask. Others, she feared she already knew the answers to.

  But one made it past her lips.

  "What was the Celestial Realm like?"

  Her voice came out softer than she meant. She hated that.

  Astraxian didn’t break stride. Didn’t look at her. For a moment, she thought he would ignore her entirely.

  Then:

  "Oh, it was glorious," he said. "Radiant. Impossibly vast." A pause. "On the surface of course. If you stared long enough, you could see the rot underneath."

  Death tilted his head—just enough to suggest he was listening.

  Akasha waited. The silence yawned.

  She tried again.

  "Last time we spoke, you mentioned the gods dying. But if Death is here… then what did you mean?"

  Astraxian sighed. Not with frustration, but with something colder. Something practiced.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Death turned his head for the first time. His voice was dry, distant.

  "Go on. I'm curious about your answer."

  Astraxian paused. Then spoke:

  "There were two realms once. The Celestial. And the Mortal."

  His voice was flat. Not emotionless—measured.

  "The gods lived above, in the Celestial Realm. And we—the Wardens—alongside them.

  As you know, every sentient being carries a soul. But the souls of celestials... they were vast. Too vast. They bled into the world below, and for a time, that was considered natural."

  He still didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to.

  "The gods didn’t merely exist—they shaped the world. Life gave breath to the soil. Death allowed endings. Order wrote the rules. Chaos gave freedom. Knowledge gave memory. War gave it blood."

  A breath. Unneeded, but taken.

  "It worked. Until it didn’t."

  "They grew. That’s what souls do. The longer a god lives, the more they remember. The more they are. And when that happens—the seams of reality begin to warp."

  "Conflicts with no cause. Species vanishing like they were dreams. Love curdling into hunger. Death coming without reason."

  "The Mortal Realm began to crack under the pressure. That was when we, the Wardens, came in—tools made to mend what the divine could no longer hold."

  He raised his gaze slightly.

  "We could touch the mind. Cut pieces from it. Make gods forget. It wasn’t death—not truly—but close. It dulled them. Dimmed their influence."

  "You see, a god doesn’t truly die. Not to our knowledge at least. When one is slain, their soul doesn’t end—it’s reborn. Somewhere in the mortal world, in someone new, they begin again. And given time, they remember what they were. They become gods once more."

  The silence that followed pressed in.

  "And no matter how carefully you erase a mind… something always lingers. A whisper. A shape."

  His voice dropped a shade.

  "Let it happen enough times, and the whispers grow louder—insistent, impossible to ignore."

  Death spoke then. His voice wasn’t somber—just simple, like truth stripped of ceremony.

  "It started with loss. Not grief—just a... hollowness. A sense that something was missing. We felt it like déjà vu, like walking through lives we had already lived but couldn’t name."

  "It was maddening."

  "Dānessa, goddess of knowledge, was the first to remember. She breathed the truth into our ears. And that breath became an echo. Then a memory—not whole, not even close, but enough to show us what we had lost."

  Astraxian continued, voice unchanged, but the air grew heavier.

  "We noticed. We’d lived beside the gods for eons. We knew their voices. Their silences. Their breaks."

  "We tried to guide them. To convince them nothing was wrong. That this was part of the design."

  "It didn’t work."

  "We had planned for this day."

  His eyes drifted—distant.

  "We forged weapons, seeded fragments of ourselves into them. We mapped behaviors. Crafted contingencies. Chose targets."

  "Dānessa was the one we feared most. But she vanished before we could find her. We didn’t have time to chase shadows."

  "So we turned to the second most dangerous."

  "Verethragna. The God of War."

  "He couldn’t be allowed to find her. Not him. His power rivaled them all. If they had time to align, we would lose."

  "We cornered him. Struck before the others understood what was happening."

  A pause.

  "He still killed Casiel."

  His voice didn’t break. Not even then.

  "After that, it was war. Gods and Wardens fell, one by one."

  "Until I stood alone. Among corpses and ash. In what was left of the Celestial Realm."

  A beat.

  "Its aura had become corrupted. I tried to stay. Tried to mend it. But the damage was too deep—and I was unraveling."

  "So I came to the mortal world."

  "The effect was... harrowing. My presence alone threatened to shatter minds. I needed an anchor. I searched. I found a host—an ancient elven being, buried deep beneath the earth. One of the last."

  "This was before the Death Realm. Just a dying patch of soil, cracking under pressure."

  "I possessed him. His body couldn’t hold me fully. So I slept. As he had."

  "I woke a few years ago. And now… here we are."

  Akasha said nothing.

  Not because she doubted.

  Because she didn’t.

  It was too seamless. Too deliberate. Too cold to be false. And more than that—it felt like history, not confession. Like something carved into the bones of time.

  And besides, what reason would something as vast as him have to lie to her?

  So yes. She believed.

  And she was... fascinated.

  The tale wasn’t pretty. But it was elegant. Ruthless. A story only something ancient and exhausted could tell so plainly. It wasn’t myth. It wasn’t regret.

  It was just what happened.

  And as she walked beside them—Astraxian and Death, relics older than her realm’s foundation—she realized she was walking through the ruins of something once holy.

  She fell into thought.

  But then—

  They stopped.

  Astraxian and Death, in unison, turned to face a direction she couldn’t understand. As if seeing through the world, rather than into it.

  Death spoke first. Amusement curled in his voice.

  "She is awake."

  Astraxian didn’t reply. Didn’t move. Just stared.

  The world shifted.

  Not violently. Not visibly. But subtly. The shadows bent wrong. The ground pulsed. His outline blurred, just for a moment.

  Akasha winced. A spike of pain behind her eyes.

  Astraxian closed his own.

  She shivered.

  She turned to Death.

  "Who is awake? What’s happening?"

  He smiled faintly. Looked at her. Then back to Astraxian.

  "Lythara. The Goddess of Life."

  His voice was light.

  "He is saying hello."