"I see clarity returning to your eyes," the woman murmured, her voice floating between them, soft as starlight caught on midnight wind.
She didn't turn to meet his gaze—she didn't need to. Her attention stretched somewhere both distant and omnipresent, but Dravion's eyes could not leave the sky, where destruction rained down with all the cold finality of divine judgment.
He was powerless to look away.
The spectacle playing out above was no distant legend—it was memory, bitter and raw, curling around his heart with a pain that had never faded. He remembered the war, every wound carved into his soul. He remembered dying, and the taste of that ending still lingered on his tongue.
His hands drifted unconsciously to his chest, then to his face, as if he needed to confirm—bone, skin, breath, the slow and uncertain rhythm of a heart that beat for him and yet not quite.
"Why am I here?" The question slipped out of him, trembling, caught between confusion and awe. "Why am I trapped in a body that's mine, yet not mine at all?"
"You have been reborn," the Guide replied, her tone gentle, the words carrying the hush of distant galaxies. "The why and the how—these aren't answers you're ready for. Not yet. All you must understand is this: your soul was shattered, fractured into shards that tumbled to the edges of existence, each one lost and alone."
Her voice pulsed in the air, barely louder than the whisper of stars drifting across the void. "You must find them. Only when the shards are whole again will your true strength return—only then will you claim dominion over creation as you once did."
Dravion's eyes narrowed, the old haze in his thoughts burning away beneath a rising clarity that felt colder than any winter.
"That much, I know," he said, voice firmer, steadier, as if speaking the truth could reshape it.
He glanced down at his hands, smaller than memory insisted, pale with weakness that was unfamiliar and humiliating.
"I must recover my heart," he breathed, almost to himself, the words forming from instinct. "If I am to be a god once more. But even that isn't enough…"
His chin lifted, something fierce kindling behind his gaze—a glimmer of heat, a hunger unsoftened by time.
"I need my eyes," he whispered, and for a breath his face twisted, almost childish in its defiance. But beneath that surface, there burned an ancient, relentless wrath—something divine, something denied, something that had not forgotten humiliation or betrayal.
The Guide stood silent beside him, watching with the patience of a star, waiting for him to finish.
He didn't falter. "I don't know why I live. I don't know what you truly are," he said, his voice dropping to a low, even tone. "But I know what fate demands from me now."
His fingers curled, the hand trembling, half in anger and half in anticipation. "This body is a stranger to me. The powers I touch are distant echoes. I've never felt so small, so helpless, as if I'm nothing but an insect crawling through the ashes of a broken world."
He stared at his hands, as if willing them to grow. "But this weakness—it's not a curse. It's the kindling for what comes next. I'll use it. I'll rise past what I was. This time, I won't stop at the old limit. I'll break through every shackle, every veil, every law that once held me. I'll reach higher than the gods themselves."
His voice was a shadow—dark, quiet, heavy with the weight of a promise only he could keep. "No one will ever step on me again. That shame, that betrayal—I remember all of it, and I will repay it in kind."
He drew in a breath, steadying himself.
"But not yet."
His eyes lifted, new purpose settling into his bones like an unshakable vow. "First, I have to save the universe."
Within his chest, memory pulsed—old, haunting, unavoidable. The universe was still bleeding from where his heart had once beat. There was a hollowness there, fragile and cold, and if it was left untended, it would collapse in on itself, shattering everything—his life, the innocent, even the bones of creation itself.
But how… The thought twisted out of him, cracked by fear and hope in equal measure.
"There is a way," the woman said, and the sky seemed to lean in to catch her words.
"The shard of soul that became you," she explained, "carries the essence of space itself. But over endless ages, tempered by chaos and the gnawing of time, it gained a second force—a power that should not exist. The power of time."
The world stilled around him. His breath caught, pulse stuttering as if some ancient code was being rewritten deep inside his marrow. He didn't understand how, but his soul trembled at the truth of it—whether memory, fate, or instinct, something inside him knew this power.
"But to master it… that is not something I can grant." She leaned close, her form a shadow folding over his shoulder, voice falling to a whisper that was barely sound at all. What she said next, even he could barely hear—but the meaning struck him, and his eyes narrowed in recognition.
He nodded, shoulders tightening with the acceptance of burden. "But for now," he said, voice steady, "I feel nothing of this power. I remember how to bend space, but with what mana I possess, I cannot even tear open a pocket."
"Of course," she replied, calm as always. "You are incomplete. And this world, too, exacts a price for every secret it yields."
His expression sharpened, resolve crystallizing in the dark. "So I must find my own way. That is your lesson for me."
"You learn. You struggle. You grow. That is the only path, for now."
No more words came. The world trembled. The white city dissolved, its towers folding into memory, the sky bleeding out until only the forest remained.
Dravion staggered, the vision spinning away. Earth found his feet again. The altar was just as he'd left it, silent and unchanged.
The woman was gone. Silence ruled the clearing.
He was alone, but not as before. He gazed down at his hands—these small, mortal things—and felt the weight of purpose settling over him like armor.
Restore the shards. Seal the wound. Walk the worlds he had never seen as a god. Learn, struggle, rise. Each thought was a step. Each step was a promise. He would climb out of mortality, not to reclaim what he once was, but to become what no being in existence had ever dared imagine.
He would break every chain, every law, every rule that bound the world, and when he stood at the summit, not a single being would challenge him ever again.
His head lifted to the stars, where the sky stretched infinite and ancient, veined with old scars and new possibilities. His eyes burned—not with pain, but with purpose, with the raw hunger of someone who had been shattered and was now choosing to rise.
He reached down and gripped the sword, its edge catching the starlight as if it, too, remembered. One breath—then his voice rang out, low at first, rising like thunder through the night.
"Do you hear me, universe? I have returned."
The silence offered no answer.
He didn't need one.
"This time, I will not fall. No one will make a fool of me. The wicked will find no mercy. I will live—this time, for myself."
A wind stirred, slow and reverent, brushing past as if to acknowledge the vow.
"And when I reach the peak," his voice softened, colder now, "I will repair you—stronger than you ever were."
His grip tightened around the blade.
"That is my vow."