Lord of the Mysteries: I'm Not Evil God

Chapter 11: Echoes in the Fog

Perspective: Klein Moretti (The Fool)

The room hadn't changed.

But the temperature had dropped by degrees too subtle for normal senses.

Klein, seated in his Fool's throne, felt the weight of Lyra's words settle into the corners of the room like invisible fog.

"I am of the Heartbound Pathway."

A forgotten pathway.

Not erased by divine war.

Not sealed like the Door.

But forgotten — as if memory itself had been rewritten to skip over it like a broken note in a song.

Klein didn't speak. He couldn't.

A part of him — the magician trained in secrets, the Fool raised in lies — had learned to listen to what wasn't said.

And in that silence, he heard it:

A heartbeat that no longer existed.

A name once beloved, now scattered in dreams.

A throne, empty for so long the world stopped looking for it.

He tried to recall anything about the Heartbound Pathway.

But the Fog resisted.

Even here, in the sanctum of belief and myth, it came only in fragments:

A candle lit by longing.

A vow screamed in despair.

A soul that could anchor gods simply by being loved.

No official sequence. No symbol in the Book of Natural Order.

And yet, it felt… right. Familiar. Terrifying.

And then the next word came from Lyra's lips.

"Another pathway was forgotten, too... One born of mirrors and lies."

Klein's eyes narrowed.

"No, not gone," Klein corrected himself.

"Forgotten."

Which was worse.

Because death leaves behind echoes.

But forgetting—

True forgetting — leaves nothing.

Not even grief.

He hadn't heard the name aloud, not in this place — not since he found that corrupted thread in the Gray Fog.

But now the pieces began to slide into place.

Heartbound... and Fake.

Two gods unremembered.

Two truths buried under silence.

Two thrones missing from the divine map.

A shiver passed through him. Not from fear.

From recognition.

Because the way Lyra looked at them... was the same way he had looked at himself in the early days.

Before the Fool had a name.

Before belief made him real.

"What will you do," Lyra asked, "if one day, everyone forgets you ever existed?"

It wasn't a question for mortals.

It wasn't even a question for gods.

It was a curse.

A prophecy.

And maybe… a warning.

Klein didn't know what Lyra was hiding.

But he knew this:

If the world had truly forgotten what it meant to feel —

And also forgotten what it meant to pretend —

Then it wasn't just gods at risk.

It was reality itself.

Klein didn't answer.

But in his mind, above the Fog, the question repeated again and again — each time louder.

And somewhere far below, in a place beyond divination, Velkaris stirred.

Not because of power.

Because someone remembered what should not have been known.

And now the balance between truth and lie, between love and erasure, was shifting again.

End of Chapter 11