Whispers Beneath the Dying Sky

The sky had stopped singing three nights ago.

Ezra noticed it first when the stars no longer shimmered in their usual rhythms. Born under the breath of the constellations, he had always been able to hear them—not as music, exactly, but as whispers stitched between the wind and silence. Now, there was only stillness above.

The old legends spoke of a city buried deep in the Wound of the World, a fissure left when the sky cracked open long before memory. Some said the stars had once lived there, wearing cloaks of fire and bones of light. Others believed they had been imprisoned, long forgotten by the gods who created them.

Ezra had nothing left in his village. The rivers had dried. The soil had turned bitter. Dreams became dust. So, with nothing but his skyborn blade and a map inked in the blood of a fallen scribe, he walked into the Wound.

What he found was not ruin—but awe.

Beneath the surface lay a city carved of obsidian and starlight. Towers hummed with faint energy, like sleeping giants. At the center, an orb pulsed—dimly—floating above a crystalline altar. And around it: beings.

They were not quite human, not quite flame. They flickered in and out of shape, whispering in a tongue that curled the air. Ezra stepped forward, and they turned. Their faces shimmered with galaxies, and in their gaze he saw memories not his own.

“You carry the sky,” they said in a voice both singular and many. “But it is fading.”

Ezra felt something rise in him—a fire that was not heat, a sorrow that was not his. They called him Luminarch, a word he didn't understand but that filled his lungs like breath after drowning.

They led him to the orb. “This is the heart,” they said. “Its rhythm once fed the heavens. Now it slows. Will you carry the last flame?”

Without fully knowing what he agreed to, Ezra laid his hand upon the heart. In that moment, he felt every star die—and every story they told light up again, within him.

The sky didn’t sing that night.

It roared.