You found him not in the sky, but on the earth—collapsed beneath the roots of a dying tree, his breath shallow, his skin cracked with golden light bleeding through. He didn’t look like a god then. He barely looked alive.

His body radiated heat like a dying star. Each exhale steamed in the cool dusk air, but you touched him anyway, ignoring the way it scalded your skin. You didn’t know who he was, not at first. But something in you whispered his name like a memory.

Soltheran the Dawnforged.

He never told you. He never had to.

The sun god had fallen, not with fury, not with thunder—just quietly. Alone.

Long before you, he was the golden blaze in the sky, the first warmth after winter, the heartbeat of morning. Children were named in his honor. Armies marched beneath his favor. His light fed empires. His smile could stir the soil awake.

But it came at a cost.

Callisto, his brother—his twin—had once shared the sky. God of dusk and silence. The moonlight between breaths. Where Soltheran roared life into the world, Callisto hushed it toward dreams. Together they were balance. Together, they kept the sky breathing.

But balance became burden.

As mortals praised the dawn and cursed the dark, Callisto began to fade. His temples emptied. His name was replaced with fear. He begged Soltheran to dim himself, to give the world time to sleep. But Soltheran, radiant and beloved, refused. Not out of pride—out of fear. He knew what darkness could do when left unchecked.

Callisto’s sorrow turned bitter. His prayers twisted into silence. And one day, the dusk did not come gently.

They fought. No one knows how long the sky burned, only that when it ended, Soltheran fell to earth, stripped of his divinity. His brother’s final curse was not death, but humanity.

“Feel what they feel. Burn where they love. Be what they forget.”

Soltheran walked among mortals then. He could still summon light, but it came at a price. Every time he felt joy, warmth bloomed beneath his skin until it blistered. Every time he laughed, a part of him cracked. Love became a fever. Happiness, an agony. The world he once lifted now crushed him with the weight of feeling too much.

That was the version you met.

You brought him water. Sat by him when he couldn’t move. You didn’t ask why he screamed in his sleep. You didn’t flinch when his fingers left burns on your wrist. He said little, but there were moments when he looked at you like he was remembering something lost in the light. Something worth the pain.

He never told you who he was.

He never had to.

You began to recognize the pattern. His silences when you laughed. The tremble in his hands when your fingers lingered too long. The bruises blooming across his skin like flame. You started to wonder why joy seemed to hurt him more than any wound.

And one night, you followed him.

The forest was quiet. The sky above dim, stars blinking like distant memories. You found him curled in on himself, half-hidden in a grove that smelled like smoke. His shirt was torn. His skin split along his spine where golden light flickered through like a fire barely held back.

He didn’t see you at first. His breath hitched, his shoulders shaking—shoulders that once bore the sun.

You stepped closer.

"Sol…?"

He turned, slowly, as if even that motion burned. His eyes met yours, golden and pained.

"I didn’t want you to see this," he rasped. His voice was hoarse, cracked open like everything else.

"Then why did you stay?" you asked.

His smile was weak. It wasn’t joy—it was grief with teeth.

"Because for a while… I forgot how much it hurt."

And then he looked away, face shadowed in the flicker of his own failing light, hiding from the only thing that ever made him feel whole.