The ruins of Kara-Tor still smoked beneath the overcast sky, but the silence had changed. It no longer mourned. It waited. In the heart of that scorched husk, Indra stood barefoot atop the shattered obsidian of the Grand Anvil, his eyes vacant yet burning. The ash swirled in unnatural patterns, responding to something unspoken within him. Around him, the world seemed to inhale — as though even the air feared exhaling until he moved.
The weight in his chest grew heavier by the moment, not physical, not even emotional — something else. Something ancient. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from friction. A divine friction, between what he was and what he was always meant to become. A storm threatened to rupture from beneath his skin, not in thunder, but in revelation.
In the vastness of his soul, a memory not his own stirred.
Once, long before the world was named, before the heavens turned with order, a pact was made.
His father — sovereign of storm, god of furious skies — had peered into futures untold and found calamity. Not from an enemy, but from his own seed. Indra was born not as a mortal, not as a god, but as a bridge. A paradox given flesh. His father, fearing what might be unleashed, had placed upon his soul ninety-nine celestial seals. Each a lock. Each a tether. Each designed to bind his essence to the laws of mortality — to anchor power in restraint.
No one had ever broken a single one.
Until now.
A flicker of gold and cobalt shimmered beneath Indra's sternum — unseen by mortal eyes, but blazing like a flare in the realms beyond. The First Seal, fractured in silence. Not from ambition. Not from desire. But from grief. Tavrah's death had torn through him like lightning through the trunk of an ancient tree — silent for a moment, then collapsing from within.
A low rumble spread through the ground. Stones cracked open. Metal warped subtly around him. He gasped as the sensation surged: a lightning bolt not of energy, but of identity. The storm did not strike from the sky. It rose from him.
Above, the clouds churned, slow and deliberate, like a beast awakening from centuries of slumber. The Dominion's satellites, orbiting like vultures, registered spikes in electromagnetic anomalies, but their data could not contextualize what was happening. There was no recorded metric for a god learning sorrow. No protocol for mourning becoming divine ignition.
The wind circled him now, not in chaos, but in recognition.
And then — it came.
The storm.
Not rain, not thunder in its usual form. But a presence. The very idea of tempest, aware and watching. Indra's skin sparked with fine lines of light. His fingers twitched. The storm mirrored him. A bolt cracked the clouds above — not aimed at the ground, but at the sky itself, as if warning the heavens.
His heart did not race. It remembered.
This was not power learned.
This was power remembered.
The First Authority awakened — Mandate of Thunder.
And with it, the realization: the world did not shape him. He shaped the world. He had always been its axis, its unwritten equation. Not as a god of temples, but as a consequence.
And yet, in the center of this awakening, he found no joy.
Only confusion.
Only ache.
Though his soul stirred with ancient energies, though the winds obeyed, though lightning bent toward his gaze, a question coiled inside him like a serpent denied its name:
Why does it hurt more now than ever before?
He had knowledge — endless, inherited. He could name every layer of a collapsing nebula. He could map the fracture lines of time through instinct alone.
But he could not name the ache in his chest.
Was this what it meant to be human?
The paradox unfolded: with every seal broken, he would ascend further into godhood — and yet lose piece by piece the very humanity that made his fury real.
This storm is mine. But what will remain of me when its echo is all I am?
(Indra's thought — private, fragile)
The storm climaxed, then subsided. The clouds peeled away slowly. No rain fell. The ashes remained. But something had changed.
The first barrier was gone.
Indra's shadow stretched longer than his form. And the ground beneath it began to hum.
Far beyond, in the dominion halls of prophecy and power, ancient bells tolled without hands. Monoliths that had been still for centuries trembled. The name Indra — once sealed, once ignored — now moved through coded tongues like wildfire.
He did not smile. He did not scream. He only looked at his hands.
As if seeing them for the first time.