The performance had ended, but the echoes of its mythic verses clung to the air like mist on moonlit water. The townspeople began to scatter, ripples of awe in their steps, their hearts still stirred by the dramatized tale of Anu's defiance and the shattering of cosmic order.
Yet beneath the hushed twilight, the real story was only just beginning.
The amphitheater's pearl-encrusted platform shimmered under soft-hued sky lanterns. Soft winds wove through the open tiered pavilions, carrying with them laughter, debate, and fading tears from the youthful crowd. The sun, now low, spilled a gentle amber across the crystalline peaks of Mount Saelis and the still waters of the lake-valley that cradled the city of Nareth'Qel.
Among the departing audience, the boy remained.
He stood still where he had been seated at the edge of the crowd—on a stepped platform shaded by climbing silk-vines. His humble tunic swayed in the breeze, unadorned save for the faint trace of ash-gray threading at the hem. His hair, dark and loosely tied, brushed his cheeks as he turned his head to gaze upward.
The sky was blooming into dusk, pierced by a procession of celestial crafts returning home: whale-shaped palaces of bronze and marble, swallow-like personal wings trailing spirals of golden mist, and a long glider bearing the crest of the Saevareth bloodline, whose estate lay just beyond the floating gardens to the east.
But the boy's eyes didn't track the crafts. They wandered elsewhere—up, beyond sight. Into the beyond of beyond.
"Why do you always look there?" asked Imius, who had rejoined him from behind. His voice was casual, but his glance at the boy was cautious, curious.
The boy did not answer immediately. The reflection of twin moons glinted in his eyes—eyes that seemed too old, too weathered for a child of fourteen. There was no arrogance in his expression. Only distance, and a vague ache, as if something vast within him sought something vaster still.
"They say Anu defied the heavens," the boy said softly. "But who wrote the heavens?"
Imius blinked. "What?"
"Nothing," the boy replied, a faint smile curving one side of his lips. "It's just a thought."
Imius frowned. He had long known the boy was... different. Not just in how he looked—unusually serene, unreadable—but how he moved through space, how even the wind quieted slightly around him.
"You heard what they said, right?" Imius went on. "Anu wielded the Ten Thousand Laws. He destroyed everything that tried to bind him. Even that—what did they call it?—Kingly Ruler of Above."
The boy's expression did not change. "Do you believe it?"
"I don't know," Imius said honestly. "The story is beautiful. Painful too. But some say it's just a myth. A cosmic opera, passed down and embroidered by each era."
"And yet," the boy murmured, "some truths are written deeper than memory."
Imius stared. "What does that even mean?"
The boy didn't reply.
Instead, he turned and began to walk, descending the steps that wound from the amphitheater to the flower-lantern boulevard below. Imius followed, puzzled and somewhat unnerved.
Around them, youths laughed and reenacted scenes from the play. A few noble children from the Val'Shura House—renowned for their crystalline spearcraft—practiced mock duels with wooden staves. Others sang parts of the poem in jest. An elderly merchant praised the Saevareth family's lighting orchestration for the evening's spectacle. Everything seemed ordinary, yet over it all hovered a subtle tension. A sense that something was shifting.
And as the boy passed beneath an arch of shimmering dreamstone, a faint ripple moved through the air. None noticed.
Except one.
High above, from the tower of Saevareth's Third Branch Estate, a cloaked figure watched the boy's quiet movements. Her robes bore the sigil of a black sun circled by nine blades—a high-ranking scion of the family. Her eyes narrowed.
"That boy," she whispered. "He does not belong in this age."
Below, the boy turned a corner, and for a breath, his shadow split into two... then rejoined.
The tale had ended for others.
But for him, it was just beginning.