The village had no name anymore.
It once had stone gates and proud banners, a bell tower that rang across the valley. Now it was nothing but scorched walls and ash-choked fields. The outer buildings still stood — some by chance, some by stubbornness. But most of the village lay in ruin. Collapsed homes. A broken fountain. Graves dug too shallow and too many.
Aeon approached on foot, his steps silent, his presence cloaked in deliberate restraint. He wore no radiance, no divine aura. And yet, the wind recoiled from him. The crows above turned mid-flight.
His path brought him through the burnt remnants of what had once been a church. Its roof was long gone. Its altar shattered. But its walls were covered in something else — charcoal sketches, etched into the stone by nails or bone. Not of gods or saints.
Of fire. Of a figure with no face. Of a blade descending from the sky.
Children's drawings, warped by fear. Prayers scrawled in reverse. Warnings.
"When the Flame Walker comes, bury your name in salt."
"He does not bless. He burns."
"Hide the living. Feed the dead."
Aeon paused, his gaze heavy. The drawings were not old. They had been renewed. Maintained. As if to remember.
Or to warn.
He walked on, deeper into the village. The few who remained — gaunt figures wrapped in wool and soot — watched from behind doorways and broken carts. They said nothing. But their eyes said everything.
He passed a man sharpening a rusted pitchfork. The blade trembled in his hand.
A woman crossed herself three times and turned away, muttering.
Aeon didn't look at them.
Until the child called out.
He was sitting in the shadow of a burned tree. No older than six, marked by a red brand on his shoulder — old blood caked into the wound. His eyes were sunken, but sharp.
When Aeon passed, the boy stood and whispered.
"Flame Walker."
Aeon stopped.
The boy didn't run. He stepped forward.
"Are you going to burn us again?"
The words hit harder than any weapon.
Aeon knelt slowly, his expression unreadable.
"No," he said.
The boy's lip trembled. "Everyone says you did. Mama said you killed the sky."
Aeon reached into his coat and pulled out a piece of cloth — part of an old blanket he had brought from another world, clean and warm. He wrapped it around the boy's shoulders.
"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it.
The boy blinked. "Will it happen again?"
"I don't know," Aeon said quietly. "But I came to make sure it doesn't."
A whisper curled at the edge of the wind. Not from the child.
From the land.
From beneath.
From the Shadow.
"You were beautiful when you burned.
Why do you weep now?"
Aeon stood, spine rigid.
The boy clung to the blanket.
He turned — and at the center of the ruined village, saw a shrine.
Its walls had once borne prayers.
Now, they bore curses.
Painted in ash and blood, a single phrase looped over the stones like a chant:
"He judged. He wept. He did not stop."
Aeon stepped into the shrine. The air grew colder.
Inside, piles of bones lined the base of the altar — not sacrificed, but hidden, buried in grief. Candles long extinguished left trails of soot like claw marks. At the center of it all, a broken statue.
Not of a god.
Of him.
Headless.
Hands reaching upward in agony.
He stared at it in silence.
Behind him, the villagers gathered.
Quiet.
Distant.
Afraid.
Aeon placed his hand on the statue's broken crown.
"I will not deny what I was," he said, more to himself than them.
"But I will not be that again."
And outside, as the wind shifted, one of the villagers whispered the name with something other than hate.
Just once.
"Aeon."