The throne was silent.Kael's body unmoved.His soul still wandered.
He drifted through a cathedral woven from stardust and lullabies, watching a dreaming queen beg forgiveness from her unborn son. He wept silently in the dream of an old star learning it would never ignite again.
Each dream left a mark on him. A gentle one. A thread.
Until—
He entered a dream with no thread.
No connection to the Weave.No echo. No signature.Just… a void pretending to be a dream.
Kael's divine senses recoiled. This wasn't sleep. It wasn't thought. It was other.
Still, he stepped inside.
The dream looked like a field. Endless. Gray grass that shimmered like dying signals. A silver sky that didn't move.
And at the center of it all:
A figure. Sitting. Waiting.
They weren't human.They weren't god.They were dream-shaped—a form built by idea alone, ever-shifting between forms: child, warrior, beast, storm.
Their face never settled.
But their eyes?
Fixed on Kael.
"You're not from here," Kael said, stepping lightly.
The figure stood. Slowly. As if remembering how.
"I'm not from anywhere."
Their voice was layered—like three voices speaking at once. Old, young, unknowable.
Kael narrowed his gaze. "You shouldn't exist."
The figure tilted their head. "Neither should you."
The wind in the dream picked up. Except there was no wind. It was thought. Curiosity. Tension.
Kael raised a hand, summoning a thread of the Weave.
It didn't respond.
The dream was sealed. His power, dulled.
The figure smiled—not cruel, but curious.
"I didn't bring you here, Kael," they said. "But now that you've come… I wonder."
Kael's eyes glowed faintly. Shardlight, restrained. "Wonder what?"
"If a god who eats gods… can survive the dreams of those who never were."
Suddenly, Kael felt it—an emotion he hadn't tasted since before Nihlari.
Uncertainty.
The sky turned black.The grass became glass.The dream's rules changed.
And the figure began to split.
Not into clones.But into possibilities.
Kael stood alone, in a dream outside creation, facing a being who existed only because it was never written.