The ghosts of forgotten accords rise to judge the living.

  Before the summit truly began, the air was thick with ritual.

  A dozen glowing sigils circled the Seat of Accord, pulsing in deep hues—obsidian, indigo, crimson. As Miko Reina stood at the platform’s edge, she raised her hand. The wind stilled. The sky dimmed. The ritual began.

  With a word, a veil of shimmering light spread across the summit like a second sky. The past returned—not through memory, but through conjuration.

  The air grew denser, laced with the perfume of sandalwood and the crackle of invisible currents. The sigils pulsed in rhythm—not random, but steady, like a heart remembering its purpose. Faint whispers echoed in the wind, the kami murmuring ancient names that hadn’t been spoken since the first treaty inked in blood and stardust. Beneath Reina’s feet, the light coalesced into patterned lines resembling a divine circuit—part spell, part memory, part warning. Reina’s breath caught in her throat—not from fear, but reverence. She had seen this ritual once before as a child. Back then, she had merely watched. Now, she stood as its conduit. The weight of legacy curled around her spine.

  The last four global summits unfolded above them in ghostly fragments, looping like silent celestial theatre.

  The First Accord, set atop Mount Olympus, where Odin and Amaterasu exchanged blades—not to fight, but to honor a treaty that would keep divine wars from spilling into human realms.

  The Second Accord, held in Kemet, flared to life. The vision began amid a celestial battlefield lit with divine fire. Lightning and solar flares carved the sky. The titanic forces of Horus and Athena clashed with rogue elemental wraiths that had broken from the leyline barriers between spirit and earth. Chaos surged—skies ripped open, rivers reversed, and divine shields splintered under metaphysical strain.

  Then, from the fringe of battle, a figure stepped forth—hooded in ochre and white, face concealed behind a carved wooden mask. The Orisha Disciple, only known in surviving chants as òmìnira, lifted her arms. No one had summoned her. No faction had claimed her. Yet all forces paused—not by command, but by instinct.

  With a single breath and a phrase in ancient Yoruba—“ìdák??j?, fún ayé àti ??run” (Silence, for Earth and Heaven)—the impossible occurred.

  Sound vanished. The cries of war gods, the roar of solar flares, the gnashing of wraiths—gone. Divine auras flickered like guttering candles. Time itself seemed to hesitate.

  The storm clouds peeled back like curtains. Flames froze in midair. Horus, wings raised for a final blow, found himself rooted in glass-calm sand. Athena's spear unraveled into golden threads and scattered into the wind. Even a rogue wraith—its form half-formed and feral—let out a silent snarl before collapsing into dust.

  And then—heaven wept.

  Rain fell in reverse. Petals bloomed from scorched ground. A single tree, ancient and leafless, grew from nothing in the center of the battlefield, its bark etched in glowing Yoruba script. It bore no fruit, only stillness.

  òmìnira walked the circle of war as if it were sacred ground. Her steps did not disturb the earth. Her presence rang with ancient authority. Monsters knelt. Divine eyes followed. Odin's single eye narrowed, uncertain. Amaterasu closed hers. A wraith, still flickering with heat, turned to mist in her path.

  She did not rebuke. She did not command. She remembered, and in her remembrance, the world remembered balance.

  Without another word, she vanished—like breath into morning.

  And no one resumed the war.

  The vision faded with a faint thunderclap that no one in the summit chamber could explain.

  Then came the Third Accord.

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  A grand stone coliseum conjured itself in the sky—half-built by Greek hands, half by celestial artisans of the Chinese pantheon. A moment of true cooperation. Delegates bowed across the circle, and peace offerings shimmered like a bridge between empires.

  But then, a flash of jade. A scream. A Chinese envoy collapsed—chest pierced by a spectral blade that shimmered with corrupted Roman glyphs.

  The crowd exploded. Swords drawn. Storms summoned. It was not war, but it was not peace. The assassin, masked in golden laurel, had slipped in among the Roman contingent—a radical sect called the Sons of Saturn, long thought extinct.

  Only intervention from the Jade Empress herself prevented an all-out bloodletting. Her tears, it was said, melted five divine weapons before they struck.

  Since that day, the Chinese-Greco alliance had remained… professional. Nothing more.

  The Fourth Accord shimmered last. Held in silence, it flickered like a dying flame. Nigeria’s absence left a hole in the ritual. Their shrines had been razed in South America. Their symbols erased from treaty documentation. The Orisha did not protest. They did not retaliate. They simply… vanished.

  Now, the Fifth Accord shimmered into being.

  As the echoes dissolved, silence reclaimed the platform.

  The summit’s ceremonial gong had long faded, but its echo still reverberated through every divine core present. Each pantheon stood—or hovered—at their designated platforms circling the Seat of Accord: a colossal obsidian table carved from a single meteorite fragment, floating above an inverted torii gate suspended in space and spirit.

  Miko Reina stood at its center, arms outstretched, as shimmering sigils activated beneath her feet.

  "Let the Summit of Accord commence."

  Each Disciple heard her words translated in their own divine tongue, not through sound, but through spirit.

  Immediately, tensions crackled.

  Th?r Helgrimsson of the Norse pantheon rose. “Let us not begin with pleasantries. The balance is breaking. Portals are opening where they shouldn’t. Ajogun sightings are increasing in lands not their own.”

  Cuāuhtli of the Aztec realm leaned forward, grinning. “Perhaps the balance isn’t breaking. Perhaps it’s shifting... to where it rightfully belongs.”

  Pollux Casta stood, his aura sharp as sculpted marble. “Enough.” He gestured to the Nigerian delegation. “Your Orisha have remained silent. But silence doesn’t absolve. What is your stance on these… disruptions?”

  The Igbo Disciple lifted her head slowly, eyes glowing faintly. “We do not speak to interrupt. We speak when the world has finished lying to itself.”

  A young Disciple from the Slavic pantheon whispered to his neighbor, clearly unsettled. “Is that supposed to be an answer?”

  But even his own elder silenced him with a look. Some truths did not require volume.

  Reina looked to her left, where Elder Yagami now stood. Then, just before turning back, her gaze briefly met that of the Igbo Disciple. It was not a challenge, nor an invitation—just recognition. A knowing, quiet acknowledgment between those who felt more than they could say aloud.

  “History remembers what pride forgets,” Yagami said, voice brittle but firm. “Speak carefully. The gods may be listening again.”

  And then the sky shimmered.

  A blind Oracle, her face veiled in starlight and wrapped in scrolls, walked unannounced to the edge of the platform. The summit stilled.

  Her arrival felt more than ceremonial. As she stepped onto the platform, her scrolls trembled faintly—as though reacting not to what had just been seen, but to something yet to come. The divine energies in the air shifted around her, as if recognizing an alignment not bound by time. Beneath her steps, the obsidian tile glowed faintly, etching ancient constellations with each footfall.

  Lan Zhi inhaled sharply. “The Starbound Seer,” she murmured under her breath. “She hasn’t walked among us since the Second Accord.”

  The Oracle paused at the center, hands raised, sensing the fragile equilibrium. The temperature dropped two degrees. Even the air grew heavier—thicker with unspoken knowledge. Around her, a halo of quiet particles shimmered like cosmic dust, as though the universe itself were paying attention.

  Then, without fanfare, she knelt. Not in submission, but in reverence for a moment none of them yet understood.

  “Balance reborn… memory rising,” she whispered, audible only to those attuned to prophecy. “The silence has chosen its voice.”

  She spoke in a voice that was not her own:

  "He walks unseen. He carries four echoes shaped not by flesh, but memory. The Ajogun bled, but he did not. The world tilts because he remembers what it has chosen to forget."

  Gasps. Eyes widened. For a heartbeat, even the gods looked unsure of themselves. Lan Zhi’s gaze narrowed, her fingers subtly tracing a ward in midair—just in case. Cuāuhtli leaned back in his obsidian-lined chair, grinning wider. Pollux Casta said nothing, but his eyes flicked toward his Roman aides, already recalculating possible alignments.

  And from the Nigerian delegation—nothing.

  Not denial. Not surprise.

  Only stillness. Yet in that stillness, power gathered like a storm cloud. The floor beneath their feet vibrated—not with sound, but with resonance, like the bass of a drum too sacred to be heard by ears alone. The Oracle’s scrolls curled slightly in their bindings, as though recognizing kinship—or warning. Somewhere, high in the chamber’s arches, a divine observer—unseen, unnamed—watched through a mirrored veil, noting every tremor in the room’s spiritual pressure. Some delegates felt it—not in sight or sound, but in the tightening of the air, the old instinct that warned of gods rising.

  A storm not yet called by name.