He fell from the heavens like a star cast aside.
The winds tore at his skin, the world below rushing up to meet him in a blur of ash and gold. His arms flailed uselessly, body still reeling from the escape, heart thunderstruck with the scream of gods still echoing in his ears.
Then, it stirred.
Aetherfang.
The dagger no, the relic embedded in his soul pulsed once more. And with a sound like a divine breath held too long, it unfolded.
From his back burst wings.
Golden and radiant, each feather a blade of light, humming with the last warmth of a dawn long gone. The transformation was sudden, yet it felt as though the blade had always been waiting for this. Waiting to fly.
Tithonus soared.
He glided on wings not made of flesh but of celestial memory, and below him, the scorched land gasped.
Wherever his golden light swept, parched fields began to twitch. Wilted trees blinked open green eyes, and vines curled skyward like children reaching for a vanished mother. Flowers, colorless for years, burst open in hues too bright for the eye.
The world sighed.
He smiled.
And then… he staggered.
A sharp pain lanced through his spine. The wings flickered, light dimming. His breath grew ragged.
"Of course," he muttered between gasps. "There's a cost."
He let himself drift lower, the wings vanishing as quickly as they had come. The earth grew closer.
And his mind wandered backward.
He remembered that final night.
He had been bones barely held together by skin. A husk that could neither scream nor cry. His body betrayed him, but his soul still clung to her. Eos. Kneeling before him, voice calm and trembling all at once, holding the dagger to her chest.
She had cupped his cheek, her touch warm despite the cold creeping into his limbs.
"This blade," she whispered, "Even I don't know the origin of this the only thing i know is when it pierces a god, it captures their essence. But if blood is shed from one mortal... it can anchor a soul and bring them back from the curses of god."
He had blinked, barely.
"You'll live," she said. "But not as you were."
He tried to speak, to protest, to beg. But the sound never came. Not even a whisper.
"Don't mourn me," she had said. "Become."
He hated it.
The gods. The helplessness. The cruelty of time. The curse of eternity without strength. He remembered thinking: This is the price of love? To be kept alive just to rot beside her?
He had wanted to die… and yet not like this.
He had seen her cry. Just once.
And he had never forgiven the world for it.
The sands rose to meet him as he landed hard, tumbling through dunes that clung to his skin like ash. The desert was wide and yawning, painted in shades of rust and sorrow. The sun still hung in its eternal position, the dawn, yet never morning.
Nothing here lived easily.
In the distance, he saw it.
A single mountain rising from the dunes, jagged like the broken tooth of a god. Black stone, too high, too steep, too wrong to be natural. But it was a vantage point and he needed one. A place to think. To breathe.
He moved.
The desert did not welcome him.
The air shimmered unnaturally. The silence thickened.
Then the ground twitched.
Something long slithered beneath the sand, displacing dunes with silent hunger. Tithonus drew Aetherfang, its blade no longer burning gold but humming quietly, like a predator tasting blood.
Then it rose.
A centipede no, a monstrosity.
Twice the length of a war chariot, its segmented body shimmered with chitin black as midnight oil. Its legs, hundreds of them, clicked with maddening rhythm, and its face, if one could call it that , was a mass of mandibles and needle-like barbs. Eyes, faceted and lidless, gleamed with cruel intelligence.
It screeched a sound like bones being scraped across glass and lunged.
Tithonus rolled aside, slicing upward. Aetherfang cut through a leg, ichor hissing into the sand. The beast recoiled, but only for a moment.
From behind, the second came.
It surged up from beneath him like an avalanche, coiling its massive body around his legs. A sting needle-sharp and cold buried itself into his side. Poison sang through his veins.
He swung wildly. Missed.
The world blurred. His limbs weakened.
He felt himself dragged downward, into the belly of the desert