The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I.0 — A World That Drank Light

Before it had a name that any surviving mortal tongue could still pronounce, the world where the blind man and his wife were born and died was, by the plainest possible accounting, a world built on appetite.

Not appetite in the crude sense — not hunger for food, or conquest, or gold, though it had all of those things too, the way every inhabited world eventually grows them the way a wound grows a scar. This was a deeper and stranger appetite, woven into the very physics of the place: every living thing on that world was born already capable of drinking. Not water. Not air. Energy — the raw ambient current that moved through that world's sky and soil and blood the way breath moves through a body, invisible, constant, and, to anyone born knowing how to reach for it, entirely available.

A child on that world learned to walk and learned, in roughly the same season of its life, to draw a slow trickle of the world's ambient current into itself and let it settle somewhere behind the ribs, the way a child elsewhere might learn to hold its breath underwater. Most people never drew more than that single, modest trickle across an entire lifetime — enough to make an old man's grip stronger than his years should have allowed, enough to let a mother lift a fallen beam off a trapped child, enough for the small, unremarkable miracles that every ordinary life on that world quietly performed and quietly forgot. It was not power in the sense a soldier or a sorcerer would recognize. It was simply how that world's bodies were built to work.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

But some drew more. Some, through discipline, or desperation, or simple accident of birth, learned to open the intake wider than their neighbors ever managed — learned to draw not a trickle but a river, and then, if they survived the drawing, a flood. And there was, on that world, a threshold. A specific, terrible, well-documented threshold, crossed by perhaps one soul in every several million born, where the sheer accumulated weight of absorbed current stopped behaving like strength a mortal body merely borrowed, and began behaving like something the body itself was built, however improbably, to become.

They called it, in every language that world ever produced, some variation on the same word. Ascension. And it was real, in the coldest and most literal sense the word has ever been used: a mortal who crossed that threshold did not simply grow stronger. They tore, however briefly and however violently, a seam in the fabric between their own dying world and another one entirely — a second world, folded somewhere adjacent to the first the way a shadow is folded against a wall, populated already by everyone who had crossed that same threshold before them, going back further than any record on the mortal side could reliably count.

They called that second world, plainly enough, the World of Gods.