The chant had no mercy for small things. It crept up from somewhere below, hearing a low, ropey sound that braided through his skull. Autumn Aragon felt it first as pressure behind his eyes. He opened his mouth to scream, and the chant swallowed the sound as if it had never been his to begin with.
Around him, the cultists pressed closer, a semicircle of ragged hoods and paint-streaked faces, hands moving in a slow, practiced geometry.
Their voices were the same three notes turned over and over, nothing like speech and everything like accusation. Autumn's fingers curled into the mattress; his orange hair clung to his forehead with sleep-sweat. His orange eyes. bright enough to startle someone into looking twice in the market. searched frantically for a way out that wasn't there.
The world narrowed to the pattern of the chant. He saw, in flashes that had no business belonging to him, cracked stone and a symbol like a mouth with too many teeth. He saw a darkness with a weight, a mother of mouths, a thing called Draven with a name that made the tavern storytellers clench their teeth and the heroes of ballads lift their voices like prayer. The chant pushed those images into the back of his head until his temples throbbed.
Then Aunt April burst through the door. slippers slapping, hair in a bun that threatened mutiny, voice like a bell in a storm.
"Autumn! If you don't get up this instant, your toast will graduate from bread to charcoal and I will mourn it!" She pointed an accusing, floury finger that showered judgment upon autumn, struggling to wake up.
He lunged out of bed, clutching his head, the lingering pressure receding into the kind of ache that always followed a bad dream.
The window let in a strip of pale morning that turned the dust in the air into a slow rain. He was sixteen and carried himself like an answer that didn't quite fit the question.
Aunt April fussed with the blanket as if she could physically tuck the world into better order. She wore her humor like armor to hold their family together. "You look like you wrestled a tomato and lost," she said, handing him a slice of toast. "Eat. The world needs you at school today. Your grades are the mortgage on this roof."
The joke landed with a hollow clink. Autumn smiled because she expected it and because sometimes smiling made the weight less likely to crush the people he loved. The pizzeria below their rooms was the ground floor of a taller house, oven heat bleeding up through the floorboards.
He jammed the toast in his mouth and tucked his satchel over his shoulder, and after catching some distance, Autumn decided to change his route after taking a quick glance at his watch. The alternate route he took to school was deliberate, narrow alleys where the teacher's patrols were thinner and the walk would be a minute quicker, but it also took him past the old temple, the ruin that looked like a wound where the world had been torn open.
The broken temple stood on the side of the hill, its fractured pillars jutting upward like the ribs of a dead god. Once, it had been a place of prayer and protection, but now it only reminded Autumn how fragile humanity truly was before demonic attack.
It was this very temple that had been destroyed by the demon Draven. the one they called the Mother of All Demons. From him, every demon had drawn strength. Centuries ago, Draven's army. Their purpose was simple, almost tragically pure: to exterminate humanity. Their rampage had nearly erased the continent until a single hero rose to oppose them: Glasius, the Hero of Lightning. Glasius had sealed Draven into a pocket dimension with a blade forged of stormlight, ending the war that almost consumed the world.
But even sealed, Draven's curse lingered.
When Draven fell, the remaining demons' power was reduced because they became wild beasts without Draven's power. Lesser but countless had fled to the outskirts of the country, carving out dark caverns and breeding there in secret, which we call dungeons.
That was why heroes still existed. to fight, to hunt, to hold the line. and protect the cities when needed. and raid dungeons to loot the treasures of those places. The residue of demonic energy makes invaluable gold and useful metals over time.
Yet even the demons that roamed the earth were but a lesser menace compared to those born beyond it. spawned in the outer dimension, where Draven's corruption had taken root. Within that sealed pocket of existence, Draven had reproduced endlessly, filling the void with his offspring until the space itself strained to contain their combined demonic energy. The pressure of that darkness was so immense that it began to fracture the boundary of the pocket dimension, resulting in leakage of demonic energy.
Through these leakages. thin wounds in reality. forming portals which became an entryway for demons to welcome themselves into the human world. Humans later named these portals, gates. Demons poured into the world in recurring cycles. Each cycle brings wars between heroes and demons.
But those rifts, as terrifying as they were, remained too small, too unstable, for Draven himself to emerge.
What if one day… one of those gates grew wide enough for him to step through?
Autumn had read about it in history books. Standing there before the temple, he whispered to himself, "I'll be like him someday."
Like Glasius, the man who faced down the storm of darkness and sealed it with lightning.
"I, Autumn Aragon," he murmured, almost like an oath, "will become the greatest hero under the sun. Even greater than Glasius."
He remembered the time. He was already late.
And so, he ran.
At school, the bell rang like a verdict. Autumn had made it through the teacher's corridor without being late. wins counted in his head like small coins, but the relief evaporated the second the bell ended and the corridors filled. The students moved in clusters, sharp as schools of fish. Their humor at each other's expense was a practiced, social economy.
"Pizza boy!" someone hollered from a row of lockers, a voice threaded with the cruel glee of people eager to make an example. Laughter brightened around him.
Autumn had been given a label; forty percent of the people in his province could not access higher-level magic. They had to pass a brutal, top-end exam to move into a higher tier. Without it, their lives twisted into narrower paths: menial jobs, lower social standing, the kind of life that had no clean heroic arcs.
The taunts were a drumbeat. "How much for a slice, Autumn? Two coins for a tragedy!" another called, and a girl with ink-black hair snorted. The barbs were sharp with sarcasm but often funny in the way practiced cruelty can be, and that made them sting more because the laughter was real, clever, communal. Autumn, however, had learned the particular humor of reply: he folded a joke around his shame like a coat and wore it out.
He took his seat beside Michael Relan, whose back was an architecture of easy confidence. Michael wore fine cloth but not the stiffness of a person convinced of his own superiority. He smiled at Autumn in a way that seemed like a choice rather than a habit.
"Morning, Autumn," Michael said, as if he had not heard the jeers and as if the world were the sort of place a person could repair by mentioning footnotes. "Did you read the latest about the siege of Karran? They left out the eastern flank movement in the new appendix."
Autumn blinked. "I thought the appendix covered logistics, Sir. The cavalry's accounts were in the ledger footnote." He enjoyed history in a way he kept secret with pride. The pleasure of detail steadied him.
Michael's grin was soft around the edges. "You always catch things other people don't. It's reckless, your precision."
Autumn's mind kept a ledger of what kindness might cost him. He suspected nobles of many things: of inherited arrogance, of convenience. Michael had the look of a young man who was being trained for a legacy, someone who would one day carry his father's ambitions like a banner. There was something in Michael's eyes that suggested he planned for a life that would be written into the same plaques that made Glasius a household name.
"Come by the Relan archive tomorrow," Michael said quietly, lowering his voice in a way that made the offer feel private and important. "My father's tutor trunk has diagrams on defensive weave you've never seen. It might help with the top-end."
Autumn's chest darted. An invitation like that came with expectations, with unspoken strings. "I—thank you," he said, because politeness was currency and he could not waste a single coin.
Michael's hand tapped the desk, a small, casual signal, but intent hummed under it. "Bring your notes. We'll go through them." He turned then to climb into the polished chariot waiting at the gate. A broad-shouldered man named Andy folded Michael into the carriage like a practiced guardian folding a flag into a casket. The chariot rode away like a small island leaving the shore.