The figurines shifted like dust upon the great table, though each was carved with such perfect detail they seemed to breathe. Farmers bent backs to plows, merchants haggled over bolts of cloth, and children ran laughing through cobbled streets. A thousand tiny lives, too small to see without the table’s own guiding light, yet each filled with triumphs and failures enough to echo in eternity. Auralion’s eyes lingered on them, as they had lingered too many times before.

How long had it been since he had walked among them? A hundred centuries, or two? Time was a river he had stepped aside from, and though he had not drowned in it, neither could he drink from it anymore. A god, they named him—though it had been little more than a mantle thrust upon his shoulders, and the weight of it pressed heavier than any chain. Divinity left little room for the small joys of a hearthfire or a lover’s smile.

His heart ached with a strange hunger, a longing that no feast of eternity could fill.

“Auralion!” The voice cracked across the still air like a whip. His brother’s voice, sharp and edged, always with a flame beneath it. Royalan the Red had ever burned where Auralion only smoldered.

He sighed, the sound vanishing into silence as if the air itself swallowed it. Smoke of deep green coiled from his form, tendrils rising and curling, until all of him unraveled. With the faintest shimmer, he was gone, drawn toward the call of his twin.

The table remained, and the tiny figures lived on, never knowing the eyes that watched, or the god who once had walked among them.

View of a God