"I stayed. And it was enough to damn me."

  POV: Kinunnos

  There had been a moment—a single, crystalline moment—where he was sure the end had finally come to cim him. A moment of exquisite crity that rose and bloomed with such promise he had dared to believe. He had dared to trust in its surety. And for that moment, all that he had ever been dwindled away almost beautifully, almost like an act of grace. Not with rage. Not with fire or thunder or divine retribution. Just... with a soft dissolve. A slow forgetting. A quiet obliteration that left no mark, no pain. He could feel it. He could feel it at the edges of himself, unspooling like a tide pulling loose every thread. A gentle undoing. A gentle letting go. Like even the Between had started to release him, let him slip away into nothing. He'd welcomed it. He'd sunk back into it, heavy-limbed and half-light, letting the static take him. He'd welcomed the release.

  But then. Then. The candle lit again, with a cruel insistence, and pulled him back from the brink. The chain pulsed with a harsh, relentless light. And everything––everything burned.

  Now he y still, not out of peace, but because moving hurt. Not physically—he'd long outgrown that kind of pain—but cosmically. Existence itself scraped against him like gravel under skin. He was being held here, not by force, not by w, but by something far worse. By memory. That wickedly keen, unpleasantly sharp thing that seized him, unrelenting, dredging up every moment, every fracture of what he had been. By ritual. Those binding acts of devotion, performed over and over, imprisoning him in a web he had no strength left to untangle. Endless repetitions that marked him, that branded him across every inch of his spirit. By a name spoken with too much belief to ignore.

  He y still, and every bit of him chafed against the stubbornness of it, raw from the insult of continuity. He y still, heavy from every tick of existence, every second that refused to let him go. The Between cradled him. The Between smothered him. It should have been kindness—a way to st, a way to remain—but it cut him open with persistence, with duration. He y still, because defying them only made it worse. Every pulse of conviction kept him pinned and wounded. He y still, because there was nothing else to do. Nothing else left but to be.

  He y still and waited. Waited for the impossible: that one moment of blessed, unbelievable release to come again, to let him slip once more beyond the tether of longing and of want and let him sink and let him drift and let him become the nothing he longed for. It didn't come. It never would.

  "Riven," he muttered, voice like soot borne on smoke-stained air. The name burned like regret, like raw nerve, like a wound long left to fester. Tasted like rejection. Tasted like ash.

  He rolled onto his side, heavy and hollow in the doing. The Between groaned beneath him, bending to his weight with a sigh full of disdain. As if it resented his continued presence. As if it wished him gone.

  Above, one of the old chains still clung to the sky, thin and glowing, its dim light humming. Trembling like it hated itself. Trembling like it held the world together. He hated it too. He loathed every frail, clinging particle of it. The others had snapped. He'd let them. He'd unspooled himself across eons, across entire eternities, burned down every whisper of worship, every flickering candle and every faithful heart, until he was almost free. Until he was almost gone. Almost.

  But this one—this single, stubborn thread to which he'd been tied—refused to break. Refused to release. Wouldn't let him go.

  "Why..." His voice cracked like a shattered bone. "Why couldn't you just stop?"

  His fingers twitched with the memory of power. Smoke curled from his nails. The urge to sever it, to scream until it shattered like the rest, shook in his bones and filled every hollow in his being with a fierce, desperate longing. But he didn't. He couldn't. Too much was left. Waiting.

  Not yet.

  It was there again, as it had been for as long as he could remember, as it would be until he could remember no longer. The shrine. The cruelest and most faithful of all the chains, a ghost of itself, built of belief and persistence so complete it was almost real. A living thing in the world of the dead. The memory of it filled his sight, hazy but precise. Present.

  It was there again. Not the real one, not exactly. Not the one that left earth and air to stink of longing.

  This version bled into the Between like a scar that never healed clean. A memory soaked in devotion, stitched into reality by repetition. By the very stubbornness that now tethered him here.

  Kin stood at its edge. The shape never stayed the same—sometimes the wall was intact, sometimes colpsed, sometimes bleeding ivy that glowed faintly red at the tips. But the altar was always there, defying ruin. And the objects... they never changed.

  Each piece was a prayer. A coin. A feather. A bit of broken pstic. That damned candle stub.

  The candle had no right to burn, not here, not now.

  But it did.

  Over and over.

  He stepped forward, boots crunching on stone that had no business holding weight. Stone that had no reason to exist. The air shimmered with the scent of wet moss and ash, the kind of holy decay that only came from something once-loved and now left behind.

  Each object pulsed with memory. Each object pulsed with the past.

  The coin—heavy with meaning neither of them could name. Kin touched it once and saw eyes that didn't look away.

  The feather—too red. Too alive. It hummed with every flicker of Riven's voice when he whispered, "Kinunnos. Or whatever you are now."

  He hated that name.

  He hated all of it.

  But when the candle fred—sputtered, re-lit itself against the silence—he didn't move.

  He just stood there, caught in the loop.

  It had happened dozens of times. Hundreds. He wasn't sure anymore. He had lost count, and the losing cut him open and left him raw across the edge of time.

  The Between had built it from memory and repetition, echoing every time Riven had come back, every word he'd spoken. It pyed out like a recording carved into space.

  Kin tried to leave. Kin tried to move.

  His foot froze mid-step.

  The world wouldn't let him go until the ritual finished. Until he lived it again and again.

  "Same time next week, you moody bastard," the memory-Riven muttered.

  The scene dissolved.

  Darkness returned.

  And Kin was still there. Still waiting.

  "Stop," he whispered to no one. "Just stop coming back."

  But he knew he wouldn't. Not yet. Not while the chain still held. Not while the st thread still burned.

  He didn't remember pacing.

  But the Between had warped underfoot, a trail burned into it like fire left behind by indecision. Footsteps that looped, cracked, doubled back. Each turn sharper. Tighter.

  His hands shook. His form flickered—now bone, now brilliance, now smoke twisting in the shape of a man who should've been forgotten.

  The worst part wasn't the pain. It was the pull.

  A warmth in his ribs, where no heart should beat. A thread curling tighter with every breath he didn't want to take.

  He could feel the prayer still—like a hook behind his sternum. Not loud. Not demanding.

  Just present.

  Steady.

  The way he used to be. Back when gods meant something.

  He hated it.

  He hated that it felt good.

  The candle's echo flickered again in the dark, a memory of light that seeped into everything. It was there, as it always had been, as it always would be. Kin saw Riven's hands—rough, tired, stubborn—pcing each offering like it meant something. Like Kin still meant something. He saw the way the boy id them down, careful even in his anger, precise even in his exhaustion. A coin. A feather. A candle that refused to die. He saw it all. And then... the dream. That word. That moment. The one that cut him deepest. The one that left him wanting.

  "Mine?"

  Kin's knees buckled. He caught himself, breath ragged, fingers digging into the Between like it might give him something to hold on to. Like it might give him a reason.

  "Don't," he muttered. "Don't want that."

  But he did. He wanted it fiercely. He wanted the boy with the ash-smudged sleeve and the hesitant voice. He wanted the boy who looked at him like he was more than myth. More than just a fading story. He wanted the one person who hadn't asked for a miracle—only consistency. The one person who saw the god that Kin was and didn't flinch.

  He wanted to burn for that.

  Wanted to burn and keep on burning. Wanted to believe it wouldn't be forever.

  And that was the worst sin of all.

  He could feel the wanting tighten the chain, could feel it promise him a thousand more openings, a thousand more beginnings, none of which would ever let him go. He could feel it bind him with every prayer, every repetition. That moment of grace he craved—held out like a lure, always beyond his reach, always whispering that it could be his, could be real, if only he let it matter. If only he let everything else burn.

  "I was a god." The words spilled from Kin like blood from a fresh wound.

  "Now I'm a wound with a name."

  And still the chain pulsed, refusing to release, uncaring that it split him open, unrelenting in its promise. It throbbed warm and red and terribly alive. He did not want to hope. He did not want to care. But something in him still did.

  Something else watched him.

  Not Riven. This was before Riven's time.

  Not mortal.

  Not kind.

  Kin's spine arched, breath snagging, as the Between rippled not with memory but with a cold, precise, familiar pressure. He knew who it was. He had known longer than he had known himself, longer than he had been Kin, longer than he had been anything at all. Longer than he'd been Forsworn.

  He turned slowly, a smile spreading across his lips.

  The air thinned around him, and he knew they would leave him again until he broke, until he surrendered, until he burned. Space warped inward, like the entire realm was holding its breath, like they all held their breath, waiting.

  Then came the voice—no mouth, no body, no weakness, just a presence that scraped inside his skull like a chisel.

  "You're not supposed to be awake."

  Kin grinned, slow and toothy, savoring the sound, savoring their desperation even as he hated himself for it.

  "And you were never supposed to speak again. Looks like we're both breaking tradition."

  The Between didn't answer. But the presence remained. Watching. Judging. Measuring how far he'd unraveled. Measuring how close he was to coming back. Hoping.

  "Tell them," Kin said, standing taller despite the flicker in his form. "Tell the others they should've broken me properly."

  "You are still Forsworn."

  "I'm still here."

  The pressure flinched.

  Barely.

  Kin stepped forward with what should've been defiance. Light hissed from his skin like steam off a bde, like the burn of anger in a god who was not supposed to burn. The words flew out before he could stop them, wild and reckless and more true than he had been in centuries.

  "He said my name. He meant it. That's more than you've had in millennia."

  The silence that followed tasted of old gods shaking in their thrones, of thrones trembling on their pedestals. It had a thickness to it, a heft that smeared disgust across the dark like sweat on hot iron. Like uncertainty and fear and every other mortal thing the old ones cimed they were above. He ughed, a sound like kindling snapping. Heeled steps into the Between, daring them to challenge him again.

  But underneath the fear, the disgust, the scrambling of divinities who realized they might not have him after all, underneath it all, there was something else. A different thread. A colder thread, barely there but precise as a knife. At first, he thought it was them. He thought they'd snapped somebody else's heartstring this time. That they'd found him that expendable. But this thread was closer. This thread was not aiming for him.

  He stopped ughing. His chest went tight, tighter, tightest.

  It was another gaze. Another god.

  Looking not at Kin—but at Riven.

  "No," he whispered, voice venom-soft, dangerous like the hurt had turned him mean. "He's not yours to notice."

  Kin smmed his fist into the Between, sent the force of it ripping through the dark, through the thin walls between dream and waking. A wall cracked. The watching presence recoiled like smoke torn by wind. And Kin grinned again, because the fear was still there, the fear that maybe he was stronger than they'd thought.

  But he didn't feel strong. He felt weak and desperate, standing in the dark, body trembling, heart a furnace he'd forgotten how to tame.

  "I won't let you take this from me."

  He didn't shout it, because shouting was what you did when you needed strength to carry the words. But Kin didn't need to shout. Every god that had ever been knew how strong he was, stronger than they wanted him to be, even now. Maybe especially now.

  The Between trembled. It had never been stable—by design, by punishment, by the very nature of what it was. But now it shook like it knew something sacred was about to break. Like it knew Kin had finally stopped believing in the hopelessness of it.

  "Not again." Kin muttered more to himself at that point. "I can't bear it... again."

  Kin stood at its edge. Not a metaphor. Not a mistake. Not this time.

  The fabric of unreality had split, peeled back like paper gone too wet with longing. His longing. His. And through the tear, he saw him. Riven. The boy y asleep, curled on his side. A thin bnket twisted around his legs, up past his knees where it bunched in the center of his chest, like a crumpled, wrinkled hope. One hand clutched a single red feather, Riven's most stubborn prayer, like it meant everything. Like it meant more than it possibly could.

  Kin's breath hitched.

  The thread between them thrummed, louder than it ever had. Not because of the ritual. Not because of the shrine.

  Because of the dream.

  Because Riven had seen him. Had dared to keep seeing him. Had whispered that word like a dare. Like a plea. Like a promise that only Kin could hear.

  "Mine?"

  The Between pulled hard at Kin's shoulders, its very fabric curling around him like a relentless bind, desperate to draw him back in. It tugged at his feet, wove through his hands, burrowed under his skin like the sting of a thousand needles. It knew, down to its most fragile thread, what would happen if he crossed.

  It knew how deep the cut would be. How raw. How real. So did he. But Kin refused to flinch.

  Refused to falter. Each step forward felt like tearing himself from a living thing, like breaking a promise that even the gods believed unbreakable. His fingers unfurled, slow and deliberate, toward the edge of the tear. He could feel it split light around him, feel it promise something he hadn't dared hope for in longer than he could recall.

  It burned. Not fire-hot. Not punishment-sharp. It burned like welcome. Like the rest of that terrible, excruciating word. A voice echoed behind his ribs—his own voice, breathless and fierce, barely more than a thought, a whisper that shook him with how true it was:

  "I remember how to touch the world."

  Riven's world, the world he had sworn to leave behind and yet never really had. His fingers brushed the edge of the tear. The air hissed. In the ghost-shrine behind him, the candle fred its disapproval, bzing bright red even as the Between writhed and pulled and failed. Kin didn't step through. Not this time. Not yet. But the line had been crossed. He wouldn't need to stay behind it for long. He wouldn't let them keep him behind it for long. He felt that promise, too. Felt it in every breath. In every beat.

  Riven awakened from the dream, and the first thing he saw was the feather in his hand.