what I want to say is that I'm hungry for any type of feedback. you think a particular line was good? let me know. you think something's off or doesn't make any sense? please let me know. my writing made you feel something? oh please, please let me know.
in the last post, I shared the epigraph. well, if that epigraph is the idea between the lines, something to keep in mind, then the prologue is the novel's heart. it's the heart of this creature of a story, the air in its lungs, it's the mythic lore that feeds it. my love for this world I'm building is in every line of the prologue.
so I hope you enjoy.
There was once a god who heard all things – whispers in the quiet of the night, confessions murmured on the wind, every plea sent forth with trembling lips and quiet hope. No sound slipped ever past him.
He bore no court and wore no crown but the weight of thousands upon thousands of secrets. And yet his name crossed every tongue. It lived in the catch of a child’s breath before a leap over a bonfire, in the rasp of rope against a hanged man’s throat – a syllable lodged in the unspoken tapestry of life.
They called for him in threshold places, where worlds bled together: doorways, crossroads, cliff edges and mountain peaks. Most of all, they came to the shoreline where salt kissed land over and over before vanishing into the depth of the sea. They’d press their lips into the wet sand, only to feel the tide lick their prayers away.
He was the god of safe passage and hidden truths. This was his domain – messages voiced and unspoken, secrets too fragile for ink – and he was its keeper.
Between the Heavens and the Hells, he moved – unchallenged – as he pleased, as if the world itself parted at his feet. Even after the gates of the Nether were forced shut with old, terrible magic – a binding older than stars, cast by the raging Sun-goddess – still, he found a way to slip through. In every seal, there was a crack; in every spell, there was a whisper that betrayed it. And he made sure to use them – for one goddess always welcomed him.
The Moon herself – gentle-handed and silver-eyed – guardian of tides and dreams and tenderness. At dawn, when the world turned its face from her, she would meet him. And he – he came to her not as a god, but as a man who had no home save the curve of her arms. He would shed his divinity and duty like an old cloak, let it slide from his shoulders – and press his brow to the pulse of her throat as if it were his altar. His last harbour.
In the Hells, they wandered together, but no further – for that wicked seal held fast against all Hellan blood, and she could not follow him out. She would trace the obsidian arches with her fingertips while he memorized the way her laughter echoed through the caverns.
When they parted, he would walk the narrow paths between realms – and he would listen.
Every plea too raw for temples, too desperate for any other deity – it was he who bore it. From dying lips. From prison walls. From lovers parting. From rulers begging in private.
He heard them all. That was the weight of it – never to intervene, but to remember. To be the place the pain went when no one else would take it. To offer solace to those who would not turn to any other god. So he kept listening.
Until the day they fell quiet.
At first, it was a wrongness in the wind. A stilling in the current that flowed between him and the world. Then came the ache – sharp and sudden, a pressure behind his ribs where divine power once pulsed like a second heart.
The offerings turned to ash. The altars crumbled and dulled as eyes do in death. And the space he had always walked so freely – the space in-between – fell silent.
He ran to her – to the only voice he could still hear through the silence that scraped at him like blades. To the only one whose name still stirred in the marrow of his bones.
He had to tell her. To warn her–
She waited at the arch of her hall, the delicate silhouette of her edged from behind by the dim glow of the hearth. She didn’t ask why he had come running. He always did, when the ache of the world became too much to bear. When he heard a mother offering herself to death instead of her babe, or when he witnessed two lovers part at the wrong hour and never find their way back.
Selis only opened her arms.
And he collapsed into her embrace, his weight trembling, his breath coming short and shallow.
‘You’re shaking,’ she murmured, brushing the damp from his brow. ‘My love, what is troubling you? Was it a child this time?’
She had asked him that once before – long ago, the first time he broke like this. And, as before, she kissed his temple, his trembling fingers, the insides of his palms, and whispered, ‘You don’t have to hold the world alone’.
But this time, he didn’t smile.
He gripped her tighter – clutching her hand as if it might tether him to the world a moment longer. His voice wasn’t his own when he spoke. Gone was the quiet confidence, the cadence that could coax laughter from the dying.
‘I can’t hear them,’ he rasped. ‘The world’s gone… quiet. I think I’m… being–‘
One heartbeat, and he was there – breathing, breaking, beloved. The next, gone. No name. No memory. No mark among the stars. Just absence, sudden as a snuffed candle. His name dissolved from her mouth like sugar in rain. The memory of his touch evaporated mid-breath, leaving only phantom pressure against her palms – the way a severed limb still aches.
Her hands curled empty against her ribs. Somewhere deep inside her, a space yawned open, shapeless and starving. She pressed harder, aching with sorrow, a yearning she could not name.
Across the sky, the Sun did not mourn. She did not pause in her ascent. If anything, her light burned fiercer – gold gone molten, searing away the last traces of night. The Sun-goddess rose, vengeful and unchecked. Triumphant.
The god who once heard everything was the first to be erased from the teeming consciousness of the world.
Since then, there were two others.
Forgotten by the mortal world, remembered still by gods – unlike the first of them, who was torn from Selis’s arms with such exquisite, merciless precision that her divine mind could no longer recall the shape of what she lost. The Moon was left with a hollow in her soul, an unseen wound no language could name. That one had been an act of vengeance – so thorough in its cruelty it could not be undone. None who followed were erased with such devastating finality.
Even the Sun herself, who so brazenly tampered with the cosmic weave, could not say why the magic had never obeyed her again in quite the same way. Perhaps it was the universal balance of the world, resisting. A god could be revoked from memory, stripped of prayer, unraveled by silence and lack of recognition – but something always remained. So small and inconsiderable the radiant ruler of the Heavens never deemed it a threat. Never feared that someone might one day stumble upon such a trace – and remember.
Unmaking, they called it. The last resort for a god past redemption – corrupt, unstable, lost to inner ruin. It was spoken of as sorrowful but necessary. For those too restless in the abundance of their power, too strange even for divinity, too uncontrollable. For those who blurred the boundaries of what the Pantheon could safely allow.
‘You lost your way’, the Sun would say, voice thick with grief. ‘You leave me no choice.’ She would reach into the Underskein – the cosmic tapestry beneath all things – and pluck a single thread from it as if it were no more than a speck of lint on her robes. And sever it – by casting the thread, their stem, into a chalice forged from that same weave, molten and re-bound by ancient hands. A vessel of chaos, stolen from the depths of the Nether, still humming with the power of all it had consumed. A cursed thing, so endlessly hungry that nothing could survive it.
No one knew how she came to hold such ancient power, older then gods themselves, nor how she bent it to her will. To have received such a gift… she must have been worthy. None dared say otherwise.
And so it was. Once every hundred years, a god was lost to corruption – oblivion and death the only mercy the Pantheon could offer. Since him, two others were unmade. The beings of the Heavens remembered them, though they rarely spoke of the matter. It was easier to forget. That had always been the way of things.
After all, they were perfectly capable of ruling their domain. They cast no questions. Kept their heads low.
