Atlas landed on broken stone that had once been sacred.
The air here carried a different weight—thinner, older, laced with the residue of powers that no longer answered prayers. This place had been called Lower Heaven in the age before the war. Then Hell rose, his mother Lilith among the victors, and the Olympian pantheon along with every rival court of gods was broken. The survivors' children inherited the ruins. Demigods. Demigoddesses. Beings who still remembered the taste of divinity but lived now on the skin of the mortal world.
Atlas's memories of that time were fragments only—flashes of fire across a sky that no longer existed, the sound of something vast collapsing, his mother's voice saying the old order was finished. He did not need the full story. The result stood in front of him: a land of high plateaus and shattered temples, where the children of dead gods still ruled and still expected reverence.
