CHAPTER 1: A RUDE AWAKENING

A sensation, alien and unwelcome, pricked at the edges of oblivion. Wind. It was a coarse, gritty thing, scraping against skin that felt too thin, too vulnerable. With an effort that seemed to span millennia, Sun forced his eyelids open. The light was harsh, a pale, indifferent yellow filtered through a haze of dust.

"So," a voice rasped, his own yet unfamiliar, "this is the grand new beginning? Looks like a bloody cosmic joke."

His vision swam, then slowly focused. Wasteland. As far as the eye could see, a desolate expanse of cracked earth, skeletal trees clawing at the sky like supplicating corpses, and sand. Endless, shifting sand that whispered a mournful dirge with every gust. This wasn't the Empyrean Fields, not the crystalline palaces or the gardens that bloomed with starlight he vaguely recalled. This was…nothing.

A flicker of instinct, a habit ingrained over eons, urged him to draw upon the ambient energies, to feel the pulse of the world, to tap into the Ki that should have saturated the very air. He reached out with his senses, expecting the familiar rush, the boundless wellspring.

Nothing.

Or, not quite nothing. There was a thread, thin and anemic, like a dying man's last breath. "Shit," he muttered, the word a dry crackle in his throat. "The energy in the air… it's piss-poor. Where in the nine hells is the paradise I carved out of existence? This is an insult."

He lay there, the wind his only companion, for what felt like an eternity – perhaps a few hours. The shock was a physical weight, pressing him down. He, Sun, a being who had once commanded celestial phenomena, who had reveled in power that could shatter stars, was now…this. Weak. Grounded.

"Where the fuck am I supposed to be?" he growled, finally pushing himself into a sitting position. The movement sent a chorus of complaints through his unaccustomed body. "I was expecting a welcome party. A gilded temple, maybe some terrified mortals offering sacrifices. Not this…this arse-end of creation."

He took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to rein in the burgeoning panic. Panic was for lesser beings. He was Sun. Or he had been. He needed to think. But his thoughts were a jumble, fragments of unimaginable power juxtaposed with the stark, bleak reality of his current state. With no discernable landmarks, no divine intuition guiding him, he picked a direction at random and began to walk. Each step was an effort, his body protesting the simple act of locomotion.

"With this pathetic trickle of energy," he grumbled, kicking a loose stone, "it'll take centuries to even begin to regain a fraction of what I was. I need a nexus, a place to meditate, to cultivate. I didn't go through all that just to die of exposure in some nameless desert like a common vagrant." The thought was so ludicrous it almost made him laugh, a harsh, barking sound lost in the wind.