The first thing Rin remembered was screaming.Not his own—but the world's.
A rupture tore through the night like a mouth forced open. Thunder bled across the blackened sky, splitting stars like glass. In the center of the ritual circle, surrounded by corpses still holding torches, a child was born. Not cried. Not gasped.Born.
He did not cry.He simply opened his eyes—and the fire around him died.
The midwife dropped her knife. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. She stumbled back, eyes wide with a horror that surpassed words. The others—cloaked figures, zealots, madmen—looked upon the child and began to weep.
Not for joy.For what they had done.
The High Priest knelt, shaking, blood running from his ears.
"We sought divinity," he whispered, "and we brought forth... the Unnamed."
Seventeen Years Later
The slums of Velhallow reeked of wet ash and rotting stone. Rain dripped from a collapsed cathedral spire, running red with rust into the gutters. The air stank of half-burned incense and piss.
Rin sat on a rooftop, watching.
Below, a crime boss screamed as his own men turned on him—throats slit with surgical precision. Each move timed. Precise. Like notes in a score only Rin could hear.
"They'll blame the others," he muttered. "And the rest will fall in two nights."
Another pawn sacrificed. Another brick in the road to control.
Rin was seventeen, but his eyes were older—wrong. Not weary, but contemptuous, like someone who had once held galaxies in his palm and now had to beg for food.
His fingers burned constantly. Not from fire—but from something deeper. The cosmic script etched in his veins—symbols that flickered just beneath his skin. He couldn't read them yet. But he would. In time.
He didn't know why he was here.He didn't remember before—only that he once stood higher.
That night, a woman in silk robes tried to assassinate him.
She got close. Closer than most. Her blade brushed his neck—and then stopped. Not by force, but by something else. Something wrong.
She saw it in his eyes—something watching her through him, something ancient.
She screamed. Her body split into five symmetrical pieces. There was no movement. No flash of power.
"You came to end me," Rin whispered, rising. "But I have not yet begun."
Elsewhere…
A priest in golden chains awoke from his vision, sobbing.
"He speaks in dreams now. The child lives. The Law… is cracking."