The girl led him through a maze of suffering.
Riven had walked these streets before, centuries ago when he'd still worn divinity like a crown. Back then, he'd moved through the slums as an observer, studying the forgotten corners of the capital where his worship took root among those the other gods ignored. The desperate. The abandoned. The ones who understood that truth often hid in darkness because light refused to see it.
He remembered those streets as tragic but distant. Abstract.
Now, mortality made everything visceral.
The stench hit him first—human waste, rotting food, bodies that hadn't seen clean water in weeks. Then the sounds: crying children, hacking coughs, arguments that could turn violent at any moment. The Iron District earned its name from the forges that dominated the skyline, belching smoke that stained everything gray. But it could just as easily have been named for the hard, unforgiving lives its people led.
The girl—he needed to call her something, even if she couldn't tell him her name—moved with practiced efficiency. She avoided the main thoroughfares where gangs claimed territory and faith collectors extracted their weekly tithes. Stuck to the gaps between buildings, the forgotten passages, the routes only locals knew existed.
Shadow paths, Riven thought with grim amusement. Even without knowing it, she'd learned to navigate the way his followers once had.
His legs burned. His lungs protested. This mortal body wasn't accustomed to exertion, and he'd already pushed it further than was wise. But he forced himself to keep pace, refused to show weakness even to a child. Old habits. A god didn't stumble. Didn't falter.
Except he wasn't a god anymore.
The thought brought a spike of something dark and hungry. Rage, yes, but also determination. He'd clawed his way to divinity once before—fought and schemed and sacrificed to ascend from mortal to eternal. If the Pantheon thought reducing him to flesh and bone would end him, they understood nothing about what he truly was.
Gods were sustained by faith.
But ambition? Ambition was self-sustaining.
The girl stopped at what appeared to be a dead end—a collapsed section of wall where two buildings had partially merged through decades of neglect. She glanced back at Riven, checking if he still followed, then squeezed through a gap in the rubble barely wide enough for her thin frame.
Riven eyed the opening. His mortal body was lean, underfed, but still broader than a child's. He'd have to—
No. He stopped himself from simply accepting the limitation.
His shadow stretched behind him, cast by the dim light filtering through the smoke-stained sky. Riven focused on it, on the fragment of Authority still burning in his chest. It was weak, barely a spark, but it was his. Shadow wasn't just absence of light. It was potential. Hidden space. The truth of what existed beneath surface perception.
He reached for it the way he'd done a thousand times before, and—
Pain. Immediate and shocking, like touching a wound that hadn't healed. The fragment pulsed, tried to respond, but there was nothing to draw on. No reservoir of accumulated faith. No network of believers channeling power to him. Just this single, dying ember trying to burn without fuel.
Riven gasped, stumbled against the wall. His vision blurred for a moment, and he tasted copper—had he bitten his tongue? The fragment settled, dormant again, and the pain receded to a dull ache behind his sternum.
Mortal limitations. He'd have to learn them all over again.
The girl's face appeared in the gap, concerned. She gestured urgently—come on, hurry—then disappeared again.
Grinding his teeth, Riven forced his body through the opening. Stone scraped against his shoulders, his ribs. For a moment he genuinely thought he might get stuck, might die here wedged in rubble in some forgotten slum because his divine essence couldn't even manage the simple trick of shadow stepping.
Then he was through, stumbling into darkness.
He blinked, letting his eyes adjust. They were in some kind of cellar or underground chamber, part of an older structure that the current buildings had been erected over. The walls showed evidence of ancient craftsmanship—stonework from before the Pantheon's rise, when mortal kingdoms still built their own monuments without divine oversight.
Candlelight flickered deeper in. The girl was already moving toward it, and Riven followed.
The chamber opened into a larger space. More candles here, arranged in a rough circle around... Riven stopped, his breath catching.
An altar.
Crude, made from scavenged wood and broken stone, but unmistakable. And on that altar, drawn in what looked like charcoal and ash, was a symbol he hadn't seen in fifteen years.
His divine sigil. The mark of Shadow and Forgotten Truths.
It had been a simple design—a circle with radiating lines that weren't quite light and weren't quite darkness, representing the liminal space where both existed. Where truth could be seen for what it was, unfiltered by either divine radiance or absolute void.
Someone had remembered.
Movement drew his attention. There were others here—four of them, huddled in the shadows beyond the candlelight. Children mostly, one young woman who might have been sixteen. All of them wore the same look the girl had: too-old eyes, bodies marked by hardship, but something else underneath. Something that might have been hope or desperation or faith.
The oldest one, a boy with a scar across his jaw and hands that had clearly seen violence, stepped forward. His posture was defensive, protective of the others.
"Mira," he said, addressing the girl. "Who is this?"
Mira. So that was her name. She gestured rapidly—a sign language Riven didn't know, but the boy clearly did.
His eyes widened. "You're serious? He's..." The boy looked at Riven with new intensity, studying him. "Shadow-touched. That's what you're claiming."
"More than touched," Riven said quietly. The fragment in his chest pulsed, responding to proximity to his own symbol, to the thin threads of faith these children had somehow maintained. "But we can discuss that. First—who are you? And how do you know that mark?"
The boy's hand moved to his belt, where Riven now noticed a crude knife. "We ask the questions. You could be Inquisition. Could be testing us."
"The Inquisition wouldn't need tests. They'd just burn this place and everyone in it." Riven kept his voice level, non-threatening. "I'm here because your Mira decided I was worth the risk. I'm deciding if you are."
They stared at each other, two predators evaluating threat levels.
"Kess," the boy finally said. Not lowering the knife, but offering his name as a gesture. "And yeah, we know the mark. The old ones taught us before the knights took them."
"The old ones." Riven moved closer to the altar, careful to keep his movements slow. "Your parents?"
"Some. Others were just... believers. People who remembered the purge fifteen years back and kept the faith anyway." Kess's voice carried old pain. "Most died slow. Caught in the sweeps, or the shadow sickness got them when they tried to practice without proper teaching."
Shadow sickness. There was that term again. Riven filed it away—clearly something that happened when mortals tried to channel his Authority without proper anchoring.
"They told you I'd return," Riven said, piecing it together.
"They told us shadow would return when the light burned too bright." Kess gestured at the sigil. "That someone would come who could see truth again. Could teach us to see it too."