Night settled over Dallis like a velvet hush, the air rich with the scent of glowing moss and faint ozone. But beneath the calm, the world stirred, and Vanila couldn't sleep.
He sat on the wooden floor of his small room, shirtless, his breathing shallow. The black crest on his chest—usually dormant, like ink frozen beneath the skin—was now alive, pulsing with light. Stars spun within it, a spiral of galaxies contained in a single, impossible symbol.
He felt it.
Something vast was moving. Old. Dying. Remembered.
Out beyond the redwood hills and crystal fields, something walked toward the village, step by forgotten step. It was slow, mournful, and heavy with the ache of time.
Vanila's hands trembled as the crest cracked—a fissure of light spidered across it, and suddenly, his body flooded with sensation. Visions. Echoes. Cores.
From the sky, unseen by mortal eyes, twelve orbs of divine essence spiraled down around him—each one burning with a different elemental presence. These were the Cores of the Gods—living flames of creation.
The Core of Flame, searing red.
The Core of Stone, deep and ancient.
The Core of Life, green and pulsing.
The Core of Will, golden and serene.
And more, each one orbiting Vanila like moons around a celestial egg.
They did not speak, but they showed. Memories. Pain. Worship. Loneliness.
One among them pulsed grey, cracked and sickly—a god once radiant, now rotting, its light eaten by time and silence. No temples bore its name. No races claimed its blessings. It had wandered for millennia, its form decaying, forgotten by its divine kin.
But Vanila remembered.
He stood.
His body moved with purpose not his own, guided by the swirling Cores. Serra and Kael followed from a distance, silent, uncertain.
They crested the hill outside the village.
There, in the silver mist beyond the fields, came the god.
Its form was monstrous and majestic, a skeletal being wrapped in the tatters of light, glowing faintly through its broken body. Flesh peeled. Wings were torn. Eyes burned with the last embers of worship.
But when it saw Vanila—its steps slowed.
And then... it knelt.
The god placed its rotting hand over its chest, and from its broken core, a light flickered. It spoke not with sound, but with memory, cast into Vanila's mind:
"You were born from the place where I once sang.You are the breath of all that I lost.You... remember me."
Vanila stepped forward, eyes glowing like collapsed suns. The black crest fully cracked—and from it, light poured. For a moment, the sky pulsed. Every god's Core pulsed in tandem, humming a single note of remembrance.
The rotting god began to change.
Its body reformed—flesh knitting, wings stretching, light restoring, though faint. Not as it once was, but whole enough to smile again. Its face, radiant once more, closed its eyes as stone crept upward from its feet. Not death—ascension.
The god turned to statue, not in agony, but in peace. An expression of gratitude carved into divine marble.
Then, like a falling feather, it descended upward into the sky, and gently landed at the edge of Dallis village. A final gift to the world that remembered.
The villagers found it the next morning—a radiant statue, tall and sorrowful, standing like a guardian at the entrance to their home. It did not bear a name. It didn't need one. It was simply "The Remembered."
And Vanila stood before it, the spiral still glowing faintly in his chest, knowing now that he had begun to wake something far older than memory.