The Sky is Amiss

The wind had teeth that night. It bit through the gaps in Nargas’s armor and howled across the barren flats of northern Racthas, driving flurries of snow into ghostly spirals. The peaks beyond his watchtower stood cloaked in mist, their jagged spines like ancient blades turned toward the heavens. Above them, the sky burned with shifting ribbons of light, green, blue, and silver, weaving together in slow, silent majesty.   The northern lights. The Varkaan called them the Breath of the Primes.   Nargas had watched them countless times before. From his post upon the cliffside tower, he often found comfort in their quiet rhythm, a rare moment of stillness in a land that seemed to know only wind and cold. The auroras swayed tonight like dancers in the high air, graceful and familiar. He allowed himself a faint smile.   Then something changed.   The colors bent in strange ways, curling back upon themselves like threads drawn tight. The greens deepened into jade, the blues thickened to stormlight, and faint tremors began to hum in the air, not sound, but something felt, as if the very sky were holding its breath. Nargas straightened, his tail flicking once behind him.   Something was amiss.   The aurora’s motion became deliberate. Purposeful. Each ribbon of light seemed to spiral toward a single point high above the northern peaks, where the color gathered and churned like a living thing. The wind stilled, unnaturally sudden. The usual whisper of snow against stone went silent.   And then came the smell, faint, yet sharp and wrong. Rain and ozone. Storm on the air.   His scaled hands tightened around his spear. The lights flashed once more, brilliant white, and in that moment Nargas saw what no Varkaan should ever have to see: a shadow moving within the light. Enormous, coiled, and ancient, the silhouette of a creature vast enough to swallow the horizon.   The aurora pulsed. The shape’s eye, if it was an eye, turned toward him.   Nargas felt the world fall away. His thoughts blurred, his heartbeat thundered in his ears, and into that chaos a voice pressed itself. It was not heard but felt, an ancient will forcing itself through the veil between realms.   “I’ve returned to reclaim what is mine.”   The words crawled through his skull like thunder given thought. The lights flared once more, and then vanished, leaving only a moonless dark.   The wind returned, softer now, brushing frost from his armor. The tower creaked. The stars shone, calm and indifferent, as if nothing had ever stirred above them.   But Nargas did not move. He stood frozen, staring at the emptiness where the lights had been. For the first time in many winters, he felt small, smaller than the snow, smaller than the mountains, smaller even than the silence pressing down from the heavens.   Whatever had spoken was not gone.   And though the sky now seemed still, every instinct within him whispered the same truth.   The sky had not been watched. It had been watching.