The Rusted Colossus

The desert was littered with corpses.

Not human ones—those had long since turned to dust. These were bigger. Shattered metal ribs jutted from the cracked earth, their surfaces scarred by war and time. Aether God remains, half-buried in the sand like relics of a forgotten age. Some still hummed faintly, their lifeless circuits clinging to the last traces of divinity.

Kainen Voss had spent his entire life among the dead.

His boots crunched against rusted plating as he wove between the wreckage, his scanner pulsing with dull green light. Nothing valuable so far. Just the usual scraps—burned-out circuitry, shattered control panels, fragments of ancient scripture etched into metal. Junk.

Then the scanner blinked red.

Kainen frowned. He adjusted the dial, fine-tuning the frequency. The reading wasn't weak or scattered like usual—it was solid. Steady. Active.

That wasn't possible.

No Aether God had functioned in centuries. They were all dead—drained of their Divine Cores, their minds wiped clean. The war machines of the old world had become nothing more than monuments to the arrogance of man.

So why was something still alive out here?

Kainen's heart pounded as he followed the signal up a ridge of blackened rock. He adjusted his goggles against the sun's glare and—

There.

Partially buried beneath the dunes, a massive shape loomed against the horizon. Not just a fragment. Not a ruin. An entire Aether God, intact and untouched by scavengers.

Kainen's throat went dry.

It was unlike any he had ever seen. The old war-gods were hulking machines, all iron and brutality. But this one… this one was different.

Its armor, though rusted, was smoother, as if designed with purpose rather than brute force. Its limbs bore intricate engravings, too precise to be mere decoration. And its face—what remained of it—was eerily human, with hollow eye sockets that seemed to stare right through him.

Most terrifying of all, its Divine Core was still intact.

Aether Gods could only be powered by Divine Cores—fragments of stolen divinity, ripped from the gods humanity had betrayed. But this Core wasn't dark and dead like the others. It pulsed faintly, like the last embers of a dying fire.

And as Kainen took another cautious step forward, the fire stirred.

A voice erupted inside his head.

"…Who… are you?"

Kainen staggered back, his breath catching. The words weren't spoken. They didn't pass through the air. They arrived, directly into his mind, heavy with something ancient and alien.

The Core flickered.

A sound rumbled from deep within the machine's chest—not the groan of shifting metal, not the creak of decay.

It was a heartbeat.

The Aether God wasn't dead.

It was waking up.