The sky cracked open.
It was not loud, nor frightening—just a sound like wind sighing through the trees, too soft to wake most of Miren Hollow. But seven-year-old Nivi was awake. She had always been awake during strange hours, the way children sometimes are when the world shifts.
She stood by the window of her small cottage, barefoot and curious, watching as a star fell with a tail of silver flame. It struck the fields beyond the eastern ridge, near the brook where frogs sang and fireflies danced.
She did not scream. She ran.
Elira found the bed empty moments later, the covers tossed aside. Her heart dropped, and she raced outside, a lantern in one hand, panic in her breath.
She reached the brook just as Nivi knelt beside something—or someone—half-buried in a shallow crater of scorched grass and glowing earth.
A man. Tall, silent, and strange. He wore no armor, no emblem. Just loose white clothes stained by smoke and starlight. His eyes were shut, but his chest rose and fell slowly, rhythmically.
Nivi looked up at her mother and said quietly, "He's cold."
Elira hesitated. Then, against all reason, against the whisper in her chest that warned of omens and sky-cursed things, she knelt too.
"He's alive," she murmured. She did not yet realize that the man who fell from the sky would never leave. And that the god who had made the stars had just taken his first breath as a man.