Her Exiled Husband Is A Forgotten God

CHAPTER FIVE

POV: Kael

We ran.

Ava drove because my hands wouldn’t stop shaking — not from fear, but from excess. There was too much energy in my body now, spilling over like water from an overfilled cup. The dashboard lights flickered when I breathed too deeply. The radio cycled through stations without being touched.

“That’s creepy,” Ava said, eyeing the radio. “Can you make it stop?”

“I don’t know how I’m making it start.”

“Fair point.”

I told her everything. The warehouse. The creature that used to be Chen Wei. The golden blood. The voice inside my skull that spoke in languages I don’t know but understood perfectly.

She didn’t crash the car. Didn’t pull over and demand I get out. She just drove faster and asked questions.

“How long have you felt different?”

“Since last night. Maybe longer. Maybe always.”

“What do the memories look like?”

“Fragments. Sensations. Nothing clear.”

“When you hear the voice, does it feel separate or does it feel like you?”

“Both. Neither. Something in between.”

She nodded like this made sense. Like she’d been assembling puzzle pieces in the dark and finally found an edge.

Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “We’re being followed.”

I looked back. Three black vehicles had fallen into formation behind us. No plates. Tinted windows. They weren’t pursuing — they were herding, gradually boxing us toward an exit ramp that led away from the city.

“Take the exit,” I said.

“Are you crazy?”

“Running won’t help. Whatever these things are, they found us once. They’ll find us again.” I cracked my knuckles, felt that strange warmth building in my palms. “Better to face them while I still have some control.”

Ava took the exit. Construction site. Half-built towers reaching for the sky, no workers, no witnesses.

The black vehicles formed a blockade. Figures emerged — men and women in ordinary suits, beautiful the way mannequins are beautiful, moving too smoothly, too coordinated.

Divine hunters, the voice in my head supplied. Seekers. Sent to retrieve awakening threats before they become problems.

“What the hell does that mean?” I muttered.

You’ll see.

One figure stepped forward. Female, though that felt like a costume. Her face was symmetrical in ways human faces never are.

She spoke — not English, not any human language. Something older.

And my brain translated it anyway.

You are summoned to answer for your survival. The binding should have held. You should have died mortal and forgotten. Instead you killed a Seeker and remembered how to resist.

My mouth opened. Words came out that I didn’t choose — the same language, flowing from my throat with terrible fluency.

“I remember nothing. But my body remembers everything. Tell your masters the chains are cracking. Soon I will remember why they feared me enough to do this.”

The woman’s face spasmed. Something moved beneath her skin — her true form pressing against the human mask.

Then she spoke my name.

My real name.

Three syllables that hit me like physical blows. The first drove me to my knees. The second cracked the asphalt beneath me. The third ripped open doors in my mind that had been sealed since before I was Kael, since before I was human, since before I was anything except what I was originally created to be.

Memories cascaded. Not images but sensations.

A throne of compressed starlight. Beings of impossible light and geometry, bowing before me. Voices crying out for judgment. My own voice, passing sentences that erased lesser gods from existence.

I saw myself standing at the center of a vast chamber, surrounded by the highest powers in creation. I saw them trembling. I saw them afraid.

Not of war. Not of chaos. Not of death.

Of justice.

I was the god who judged other gods. The one who held heaven accountable.

They didn’t exile me because I was dangerous.

They exiled me because I was right.

The memories released me. I was on my knees in a construction site, gasping for air.

The awakening accelerates, the lead hunter said. The Architect will want to know.

She turned to leave.

And the thing inside me disagreed.

My body rose without my permission — the ground itself seeming to reject the concept of me kneeling.

“Who is the Architect?”

Silence.

“Tell me.”

The command carried weight. Absolute certainty. The kind of voice that expects to be obeyed.

The hunter’s mouth opened. She whispered a name.

Then her body dissolved into golden mist — self-terminating, choosing destruction over the risk of revealing more.

The other hunters fled. They didn’t walk or run. They simply ceased to be here.

Ava’s hand touched my shoulder.

I spun, and for one terrible moment I didn’t recognize her. She was just a shape and s threat.

Then the moment passed, and she was Ava again. My wife.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to answer.

Because I wasn’t sure I was still me.