He wore the shape of a man because it frightened people less. The gods had learned that long ago; shave the horns, bend the spine, gray the beard, and mortals would offer food instead of salt and fire. They’d point you towards water. They’d call you ‘sir’ instead of ‘monster’. He wore the face of an old man because mortals no longer believed in gods who walked among them untouched by age. Now, they only trusted things that looked fragile, things they could pity, things they could forget.

So he walked the wild lands hunched and hollow-eyed, leaning on a gnarled branch an ashwood tree older than the mountains had once offered him. The villagers saw this false form as harmless, a pilgrim lost in the endless fog, unaware that beneath his heavy cloak lay starlight and storm and a heartbeat older than creation itself.

The last time he had opened his eyes fully the world had been louder and hungrier. It’s kings built towers to the heavens and offered their sons in his name. Its queens wore his sigil on rings made of bone. That was before the orchard. Before the pact. Before they buried him beneath a tree that no longer bore fruit.

Long ago, they’d scratched his name from the temples and burned his texts. Now, the land remembered him only in shadows and the root system that expanded underground across the continent. The trees remembered him and half-whispered his name through loam, bark, and the whisper of wind through the leaves.

Still, he moved with the patience of stone and the certainty of the tide. The skin on his face sagged like wet cloth, but his eyes were unweathered. Bright as the first star and hungrier than anything born of man.

He was searching for her.

She had not been named. That was how he knew it was her.

The villagers had always known. The first child was a gift. The second, a continuation. The third through eight? Proof of God’s favor. The others, the eight born before, had been marked and celebrated. Their names were sewn into quilts, etched into wood, carved into the lintels of the house. The but the ninth? She had no name.

The villagers refused to name her, hoping that without a name she might pass unnoticed, untouched by the hands of immortals who whispered promises through the mist and made dreams into prophesies. They hid her from him, kept her voice small and her eyes averted, as if gods couldn’t see the fire burning quietly behind lowered lashes.

But he saw. Oh, he saw.

The mortals used to celebrate the birth of the Ninth Child. They offered her up with garlands of ivy and crowns of wild lilies. They sang and danced around fires, whispered her name to the stars. To be the Ninth was sacred, for the Ninth belonged not to the world, but to the gods who walked beside it, loved and feared, precious as sunlight on deep water.

Yet now the mortals feared what they do not understand. They mistook blessings for curses, hid the truth behind shutters nailed tightly against wonder. They spoke of omens instead of miracles, trembled before the presence they refused to name.

But a lack of name could not shield her forever.

She had already whispered his name into the silence. Soft, tentatively, as if testing the weight of it on her tongue. And from the grave of roots and the quiet earth, he woke.

The orchard had stirred around him, branches arching, blossoms bursting with startled petals, fruits ripening too soon— offerings to a waking god.

Now, as he crossed empty fields and moonlit pathways, every step tugged him towards her, towards a village that cowered in fear, towards the house that pretended she did not exist, towards the girl who had begun singing lullabies to herself, not knowing she sung to him as well.

“She waits without knowing,” he murmured, voice rustling like wind through autumn leaves. “Hidden but not forgotten. Denied, yet destined regardless.”

He raised his eyes, gazing across hills softened by darkness, towards the orchard and the sleeping village beyond. The wind carried her scent of rain and wildflowers.

He smiled, gentle and ancient and achingly patient.

“Soon, little Ninth,” he promised. “Soon, I will give you a name.”