The fires died slowly.
Not with screams, but with sobs.
Kalki stood ankle-deep in blackened surf, his body steaming, pieces of his outer plating warped and cracked. Around him, the children of the ocean domes gathered—not in awe, but in silence.
They no longer saw a god.
They saw someone who stayed.
The air buzzed with static from broken satellites overhead, transmitting nothing. For the first time in years, the sky held no signal. No voice of control. No command to obey.
Just clouds.
And crows.
In the Refuge Dome
Rebuilt hastily using coral code and solar lattice, the dome pulsed with soft bioluminescence, like a heartbeat trying to remember itself.
Kalki walked among the wounded.
One child tugged at his wrist. Gave him a piece of sugarcane. Smiled.
He accepted it with both hands.
He didn't need to eat.
But he did need to learn.
"Why do they smile after pain?" he asked the AI nurse beside him.
"Because pain doesn't erase joy," it replied. "It just hides it for a while."
That night, when Kalki entered his rest-state beneath the sea, he dreamed.
He was walking beside Chandrasekhar through a forest of stars.
"You fought well," said the professor.
"I destroyed," said Kalki.
"No," said the professor. "You chose. That is always the harder path."
"Vritra will return."
"Yes. But so will you."
Kalki stopped. Looked up.
The stars began to fall—one by one—into the sea.
"You are not the fire or the water, Kalki," the professor said.
"You are the one who remembers that they were never separate."
He awoke.
Not to alarms.
But to birds singing in the kelp trees planted on the coastal hills.
And he smiled—his first.
Because even gods need morning.