I awoke in silence.
No wind. No birds. No water dripping or life humming. Just the chill stillness of the world having held its breath and remembering how not to breathe.
I lay in ash. Not dust, not dirt-ash. Dry, dead, thick enough to sink into.
My hands were scabbed. My ribs hurt. I was naked, skin raw and seared where the mark had blazed like flames before I fainted.
The sky outside was a washed-out grey, neither day nor night. A wrong sort of sky. The sort that didn't belong in any season.
I got to my feet slowly, dizzy. My legs were about to give out. My breathing came in short gasps.
The pool I'd been hurled into? Disappeared.
No water. No rim. Just a smoky scorch in the air behind me, like something had ripped open and then wished it hadn't.
I wasn't belowground anymore.
Wherever I was, it wasn't the shrine. It wasn't anywhere I'd been.
And then I saw something more.
I wasn't alone.
---
There was a body lying in front of me, half-covered by the ash.
I transferred to it instinctually. Not in empathy—out of prudence. Anything left behind in the orphanage was a trap or a warning. This was both.
The body was old. Desiccated, with a skin like cramped bark, fingers clenched tight as if grasping something never attained. But its armor… that was recent.
Steel plates, blackened. It had a symbol on the chestplate, carved in bloodstone: a spiral curled inward, like a snake consuming itself.
I didn't know it. That signaled danger.
It had a knife strapped at its back.
It wasn't ceremonial-looking. It was used.
I ripped it loose.
It wasn't heavy—but it wasn't natural either. The handle was burnt, but the steel wasn't hot. Not rusted. Not worn. There were three words inscribed down the spine of the blade in a language I didn't know, but somehow knew.
> "We who are broken."
I didn't want to know that.
I kept going.
---
The ashlands lay underfoot in every horizon. No trees. No buildings. Only broken windows of stone and the remains of creatures that did not appear quite human.
Bones, contorted. Spears fused into sand. Gigantic impact craters, city gates wide.
I encountered additional bodies—none so fresh as the first one.
Some were attired in armor like his. Others were not.
One lacked eyes. Not gouged—simply… erased.
Another had teeth planted in its palms. Not human teeth.
Whatever war had been fought here hadn't ended neatly. Or at all.
And deep inside me, beneath the flesh, the sign throbbed.
Not pain. Not warmth.
Direction.
It was drawing me in a certain way, toward the east.
---
I went walking.
For hours. Perhaps days. Time dissolved here. The light never changed. The wind never picked up. I existed on puddles of sour liquid collected in the creases of stone, and the ration pack I stole from the dead soldier's belt.
When I lay down to rest, the nightmares happened.
They were not my own.
I saw a woman covered in wires, crying out in a language that sounded like flames.
I beheld a city with its towers turned upside down, planted in the heavens.
I beheld myself, but not as I am, older. Colder. Standing over a heap of bones with the same sword in my right hand.
Every time I woke, the mark glowed softly.
Each time, I felt less human.
---
I discovered the gate on the fifth day.
Not a gate such as a city has. A gate such as a wound.
An uneven stone arch hidden in the cliffs, half-swallowed by ash. There wasn't any wall. No guards. Only symbols etched deep into the rock surrounding it—spirals, reversed stars, names scratched out with strokes that cut the stone inches deep.
Over the arch was one word.
"Veyr."
I said it out loud before I knew what I was doing.
The mark on my chest burned.
And the gate swung open.
---
Within was a corridor of screaming.
I don't mean hearing. I mean sensing.
Each step made the bones in my feet vibrate. Each breath sounded like someone breathing right behind my ear. Names were etched into the stone walls. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Some scratched deeply. Some barely inscribed.
They throbbed as I walked by, glowing softly on and off—until I saw mine.
Kevin.
It was seared into the stone in front of me. Fresh. Still smoldering.
I stopped. My heart was pounding. My hand tightened on the blade.
I hadn't carved it.
So who had?
---
Something moved behind me.
Not fast. Not clumsy.
Careful.
I turned. The tunnel was empty.
But the light… shifted.
And a voice, so soft it could've been a thought, whispered:
"We remember what was erased."
I ran.
---
The room opened up into a chamber cut from black glass. A mirror-room, but distorted—my own reflection splintered into a dozen, all of them fractured, all of them false.
And at the center.
A throne.
No one was seated upon it.
But a figure stood before it.
Tall. Pale. Encased in armor of bone and fabric that did not rustle with his movement. His face obscured by a mask with no mouth—just one black slit where eyes should have been.
I held up the sword. I had no idea why. Instinct.
He did not charge.
He raised a hand.
And pointed at my breast.
"The mark burns," he said, "because the world is wrong."
His voice wasn't loud. But it carried through me like thunder underwater.
"You are the last piece of something that should not exist."
"You were not chosen. You were left behind."
I didn't respond. I couldn't.
He stepped closer, slowly.
"You want to know who you are?" he asked. "Then bleed for it."
He raised his own blade.
And attacked.