"I AM ELIOSA LASTON."
"WHAT?! LASTON?! WHO ARE YOU?!" Elios yelled, the shock of hearing his own name and the name of his family so far from home overwhelming every other thought. The coincidence was too profound to be random; it felt like a deliberate act of fate.
Eliosa smiled, a devastatingly sad, reflective curve of his lips—a smile that carried the forty years of separation and futile searching. "Yes. I am Eliosa Laston. And I came to this forsaken land a very long time ago." He looked down at the young man, his eyes shimmering with the accrued grief of decades. The irony—the dramatic irony—was sharp: he was detailing the source of his family's tragedy to the young Elios.
He began the slow, painful excavation of their past, explaining how their peaceful, isolated world was brutally colonized by a terrifying, inexplicable supernatural force they had no name for and no means to fight.
THE LASTON CLAN: THE ANATOMY OF PEACE
"Nearly forty years ago," Eliosa began, his voice dropping into the resonant tone of a man who has seen his stable reality dissolve, "my younger brother, Deliosa Laston, and I ruled our ancestral village. We were the Laston Clan, a small, sovereign community far from the rumored lands of Mynthara or any foreign magic. Our world was defined by the laws of nature and man, not by external, esoteric forces."
"We were masters of our own forests, focused on commerce and community. Life was tranquil, filled with simple prosperity. I, the clan leader, was happily married to a beautiful woman, and we soon welcomed a young boy into our home. Our peace was not a grand political victory; it was a quiet, philosophical equilibrium—a stability rooted in our isolation and the mundane certainty of the known world."
"But peace," he concluded, his voice turning raw with memory, "I learned, is merely the brief absence of active conflict. And external chaos, when it strikes, often chooses the most vulnerable internal fissures."
THE FRACTURE: EMOTIONAL ANARCHY
The equilibrium was shattered in the deep middle of the night. That is the hour of pure potentiality—where anxieties feel most real and the mind is most exposed. I awoke to a sound—a terrible, screeching, disturbing sound—a grating noise that seemed to defy physical dimension. It was a cacophony of emotional dissonance that tore at the silence.
I followed the noise, realizing it was coming directly from my brother Deliosa's room. A paralyzing, existential fear seized me. I couldn't bring myself to open the door—the horror felt sealed inside, protected by an unseen, malevolent force. Instead, driven by a primal need for knowledge, I climbed a stool and peered through a small hole in the wall.
What I saw inside was horrifying. Deliosa was on his knees, howling and weeping, his body convulsing violently. He was beyond rational thought; he was a vessel of raw, tormented anguish. Then, amidst the cries, Deliosa screamed a question that cut through the noise, a cry of frustrated will: "Why can't I get what I want?!"
I instantly understood the human, tragic source of the chaos. Deliosa had always loved my wife silently. He never had the chance to express his affection, and then she married me, the clan leader. That unexpressed, festering pain had not simply led to grief; it had made him susceptible. The collapse of his free will had opened him to an unknown, external corruption—a curse that weaponized his own regret.
As rage—hot, protective, and immediate—began to boil inside me, I moved to tear the door open. But before I could engage in confrontation, another sound came from the hallway.
My small son—a boy of perhaps five years—had woken up. The child, innocent and utterly unaware of the metaphysical danger trapped inside that room, simply reached out and turned the knob. He breached the fragile barrier between the known world and the cursed unknown.
Deliosa's tormented, bloodshot eyes—eyes filled with the raw chaos of self-loathing—met the pure, searching eyes of the child.
In the next moment, the boy was violently flung across the room by an invisible, crushing force—a surge of power that defied the known physics of our world. The child crashed hard against the stone wall, severely injured, and lay limp and unconscious. Deliosa inside the room collapsed too, finally silenced by the sheer, devastating output of that power.
THE DILEMMA OF THE HEALER
I rushed to my son, the instinct of the father consuming all else. Seeing the severity of the child's injury, my initial rage against Deliosa vanished, replaced by a cold, desperate sorrow. We were cursed, not by external enemies, but by the inexplicable contamination of our home.
I carried both my son and my brother on each shoulder, running through the midnight streets toward the hospital. The local doctors treated their external wounds, but they were utterly baffled. They had no framework, no vocabulary for the energy that had damaged them.
The doctors noted that my son was recovering well externally. But they warned that a shadow lingered internally—a psychic scar that defied all conventional medicine.
Needing answers, I later returned to Deliosa's room. I found something terrifying tucked beneath his pillow: "THE DIARY." With hands shaking from dread, I opened it, bracing for a confession of jealousy or madness.
The diary was empty, save for one terrifying, final entry: a strange, intricate, Mysterious Symbol drawn not in ink, but in what appeared to be my brother's own dried, self-sacrificing blood. This was not a simple drawing; it was a physical manifestation of his final thought.
Shaken to the core, I rushed back to the hospital. The truth, no matter how monstrous, had to be exposed.
This was the pivotal moment—the horrifying convergence of the personal and the supernatural. When Deliosa saw me, his eyes snapped open, wide with residual terror. He reached out, grabbing my wrist with shocking, unnatural strength, and uttered a single, desperate, clarifying plea that was both an answer and a new question: "HELP ME, BROTHER… SAVIOR IS COMING!!!"
I immediately demanded to know who this "Savior" was, sensing a malignancy beyond Deliosa's personal woes. But my brother's voice failed him again. He was only able to frantically draw the Mysterious Symbol in the air with his trembling fingers.
THE CURSE OF LINEAGE
But that was not the end of the terror.
My young son, lying nearby, began to stir. His small hand rose, and he began to draw the exact same symbol on his own stomach, perfectly synchronized with Deliosa's frantic, air-drawn gestures. The event was not imitation; it was a terrible, sympathetic resonance—a shared, dark lineage manifesting through blood ties.
The Symbol was now imprinted on my son's pale skin—a deep, permanent scar, a mark of the same curse that had claimed his uncle.
My wife and I were reduced to stunned, terrified observers. Then, as suddenly as the episode began, Deliosa went mute—catatonic, unable to speak another word or express another thought. The doctors called it unexplained trauma; I knew it was the completion of the curse.
The doctors had no diagnosis: "We can't cure this because we don't even know what it is. It operates outside the laws of physics. But your son is stable and appears to be recovering, with no immediate danger."
I knelt by my family's bedside, the weight of the clan leader's burden crushing me. The existential question hammered at my mind: "Why are we cursed? Why has the peace we sought so diligently resulted in this ultimate, unseen terror?"
THE DICHOTOMY OF ELIOSA'S CHOICE
I finally left the hospital, a new, singular purpose overriding all others. The tranquil life of the Laston Clan was irrevocably over. The curse had found us, and it had a name: Savior.
I faced an impossible Dichotomy of Choice: remain with my wife and son and risk the spread of the unknown force, or abandon them to pursue the source of the plague.
I chose the latter. I resolved to wage war against the entity that corrupted my brother and marked my son. "If Savior is the one who caused this terror," I thought, clenching my fists until my knuckles cracked, "then I will sacrifice everything to find him, and I'll show him hell."
I made a vow. I went out, searching for the mysterious Savior and also the antidote that could break my brother's crippling mutism and erase the terrifying symbol on my son's skin. I left my wife and my son behind, entrusting their care to the village healers, sacrificing my own life, comfort, and sanity for the sake of reversing the calamity that had struck my lineage.
That was forty years ago. My search took me from our isolated village, across the ocean, and finally to the edges of Mynthara. His face filled with the profound grief that had brought him to Wonderfaa.
His eyes, fixed on some unseen horror in the distance, refused to meet Elios's gaze.
He took a slow, deep breath, his eyes darkening as he prepared to deliver the final, most terrible part of his tale—what happened when he finally reached the edge of Mynthara and what he learned about the Savior's true power.