Chapter Two: The Four That Were

They came at dusk.

Sorya emerged first, from a blur in the trees, her eyes carrying the ocean’s depth and deserts’ memory. Dren arrived moments later, silent and strong, carved like he’d been sculpted from mountain rock.

We didn’t need names. We remembered them. Just as they remembered us.

We were not ordinary. We were echoes of the gods.

Not from Olympus, not from Asgard—older than those borrowed names. We were the ones the world forgot before it could even write myths. Dream-seeded beings, born of Gaia’s first wave of consciousness—electric, pure, unshaped by culture, yet shaped by all of them.

We had rebelled once.

In a time before time, we pulled too hard. Took too much. Shattered harmony and made Gaia weep. She didn’t destroy us—she dispersed us. Broke our souls into mortal lives, time after time, hoping we’d learn what it meant to feel. To die. To love.

And we did. Over and over again.

But this life… this life was different.

The capsule was no mistake. It was a convergence point. Gaia’s signal. Earth’s breath choosing four cells in its body—us—to stabilize the unraveling edge of reality. Not with might, but with memory. With reunion.

We sat around a fire, no wood, no match. Just will.

Dren’s voice was gravel. “We’re not meant to stop what’s coming. We’re meant to remember what started it.”

Sorya added softly, “And to choose. Not all of us will want to remember.”

She looked at me when she said it. And I felt her—my counterpart. My love. The one I’d always been trying to find in every timeline, even when we died miles or centuries apart.

Gaia whispered to us not with words, but with weight. A heaviness in the bones, like gravity being rewritten. She wasn’t just the planet—she was the source, the current, the code. And she was tired. Her body stretched thin by greed, by systems built to trap the spark, not free it.

She showed us the truth.

Every human, a piece of her. Every act of care, a breath that keeps her alive. Every cruelty, a blade in her side.

And she showed us the old gods.

Some of them still walked the Earth. Not as statues or stories, but in suits and towers, hiding in plain sight. Keeping Gaia’s children in cages of comfort and distraction. They had forgotten their own origin, convinced themselves they were the architects, not the fallen.

We had a choice.

Wake and rise. Or sleep and live.

And we had to decide by sunrise.