The man arrived in the village barefoot and soaked to the bone.
One moment, the shoreline was empty. Then he stood there, as if the world had just blinked.
He was tall. Very tall, with broad shoulders. His eyes were gaunt and had the look of dead stars.
They asked him his name. He didn’t know.
They gave him food, though he never seemed hungry. Offered him a place to stay, though he never slept.
Days passed. Then weeks. Then months.
The villagers grew used to his presence, even comforted by it. Sick children stopped crying when he was near. Crops began to sprout where his feet touched the fields. The old priest, blind for thirty years, claimed he saw a golden crown hovering just above the man’s head when the sun hit him just right.
Still, he said nothing. Did nothing. Just watched the sea.
Until the tide turned red.
Fish surfaced to the surface, all eyeless. Salt turned to ash. And the waves seemed to move, as if something was under them.
He walked to the church that night. His first words came like thunder buried in snow:
“I remember.”
And the sky screamed.
Rain poured down. But not the usual rainwater you expect. Red like velvet, sweet as raspberries, and thick.
It wasn’t blood.
At least, the villagers told themselves that.
Blood didn’t smell like flowers during springtime.
Didn’t pool in the gutters and glisten like syrup beneath the moonlight. It didn’t make the children laugh in their sleep or the dogs howl at nothing.
He stood in the doorway of the church as the velvet rain fell.
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Eddard, the old priest, was already waiting for him. Kneeling. Shaking. Whispering prayers he hadn’t remembered in years.
“You’ve come back,” he said. “All this time, and we—”
“No,” the man interrupted. His voice was wrong. It didn’t echo—it lingered.
“I did not come back. I was left behind.”
A single drop of rain slipped down his cheek. It sizzled where it touched the floorboards.
“I was bound. Buried. Forgotten.”
Eddard’s breath caught. “By who?”
Not cruelly. Not kindly.
Just… tired.
“By me.”
The man turned from the altar and stepped outside.
The sky was wrong now.
It blinked when he did. Clouds moved in reverse. Stars shifted into different areas, some blinking in different colors, some didn’t.
He walked to the center of the village square. The velvet rain still fell. The villagers gathered, drawn not by fear—but memory.
One by one, they knelt. Not in worship. Not in awe.
In recognition.
Some wept. Some whispered his name, though none had been told it.
And he… he looked at them like a stranger.
Like someone reading a story they had written and then buried in the earth.
“I was the seal,” he said, voice low. “And I am undone.”
The ground trembled.
The waves reached the edge of the fields now, whispering across the crops he’d once made bloom. Beneath the surface, something vast stirred. Not a creature. Not a god.
A question.
And still he stood there, dripping velvet rain, while the village remembered what it had forgotten. What it had once locked beneath the sea. What he had become to keep the world safe.
“I chose this,” he said. “And I choose it again.”
Then he stepped toward the ocean.
The villagers called out, but no one moved to stop him. They couldn’t. Their legs wouldn’t work. Their voices caught in their throats.
He reached the shoreline just as the tide kissed his feet. The water was warm. Alive.
And then he vanished.
No splash. No sound.
Just gone.
By morning, the sky was blue again.
The tide had retreated. The fields were dry. No one remembered why they had gathered in the square the night before.
No one remembered the man.
Except Eddard.
And the girl who watched from the tower, sketching a tall, barefoot figure again and again, hands shaking with something deeper than fear.
Years later, the tide turned red once more.
And somewhere on the empty shore, the world blinked.
A man, barefoot and soaked.
The Spine of the Fallen God, my main dark fantasy/LitRPG novel!
