The sky was bleeding again.
Crimson light spilled through the cracks of the dying horizon, brushing against rusted towers that pierced the heavens like spears aimed at forgotten gods. The city below breathed in static and smoke — a mechanical heartbeat echoing through hollow streets. Somewhere above, trains roared along elevated tracks, their steel screams echoing against glass towers, and somewhere below, the hollow pulse of the subway shivered through the ground, shaking dust from broken ceilings.
In the ruins of an old subway tunnel, a man awoke.
He didn't know his name. Only pain. His body ached with cold and hunger. His skin, pale and smeared with dust, prickled as if it remembered wounds he could not place. Around him lay shattered glass, broken signs in dead languages, and whispers that were not quite human. Each sound crawled along his nerves like fire and ice together.
Something throbbed in his mind — a memory not his own.
A throne made of obsidian.
A sea of kneeling figures.
A crown of fire that burned without consuming.
A sword plunged into the earth, black smoke curling from the blade as a dozen eyes watched, wide and unblinking.
Then darkness.
The vision ended as suddenly as it had begun, leaving him with the echo of a name he could not pronounce. His heart pounded violently in his chest. His reflection stared back from a pool of black water — a stranger's face, regal yet unfamiliar, carved with lines of authority he could not remember earning. The eyes staring back were his, but not entirely — there was a fire in them that belonged to someone else, someone older, someone who had commanded worlds.
Above, the city thundered with lights and noise. People hurried through neon streets, blind to the ancient power sleeping beneath their feet. Magic, once the breath of creation, was now a forgotten myth — buried by time and greed. Only the highborn still whispered its secrets.
The old families — nobles hidden behind glass towers and ancient sigils — hoarded fragments of the arcane like relics of a forbidden age. To the common people, "magic" was a word used in old tales to frighten children. The streets themselves were alive with its absence, a world that had turned its back on the divine, reshaping everything into iron, concrete, and electricity.
He didn't know it yet, but the blood of that old world still pulsed within him.
A tremor ran through the floor beneath his bare feet. Dust rained from the cracked ceiling. Shadows stretched along the walls, whispering in voices he could almost understand. Something ancient stirred below, sensing the pulse of one it had not felt in millennia. His vision flashed again — faces, betrayals, armies burning, a throne reduced to ash. The memory burned in him like a wound.
When he staggered to his feet, the world seemed impossibly vast and suffocating all at once. Every neon sign flickered like a dying star, each shadow moved with a life of its own, and the air smelled of metal and rot. His gaze fell on a flickering sign: "New Seraphis."
The letters burned in his vision. And deep within him, something answered.
A faint voice — feminine, distant, trembling with centuries of longing — whispered through the static of his thoughts.
> "You were not meant to sleep this long, my emperor…"
The words reverberated in his chest like a drum of warning. He gasped, clutching his head as flashes of battle and betrayal cascaded through his mind. Faces. Flames. Shadows bowing before him. The sound of breaking chains and screams. A crown slipping from his head into the ashes. The feeling of falling — of being sealed away, abandoned by those he trusted most. He wanted to scream, but no sound came, only a pulsing pressure behind his eyes.
And then, silence.
When the pain faded, the voice was gone. Only emptiness remained. But in that emptiness, a pulse endured — faint, stubborn, alive. It called to something deep within him, something he had long forgotten: a throne, a kingdom, a world that had crumbled and yet waited in the shadows for its return.
He moved instinctively, staggering through the tunnel until the first light of the city struck his eyes. The neon glow reflected off puddles of oily water and shattered glass, bathing the streets in fractured color. Above, the towers stretched impossibly high, their windows glinting like watchful eyes. The hum of machinery, the distant roar of vehicles, the muttered prayers of the desperate — all of it pressed against him, and he realized the city itself had an awareness, a pulse, as if it remembered someone it had long forgotten.
The world had moved on without him, reshaping itself, discarding the old ways. The knowledge of magic, once the breath of the gods, had been buried, and only a select few retained its fragments, jealously hoarded behind sigils and bloodlines. Yet even in this new age, the old laws persisted, bending and twisting beneath the surface.
Kael — for that was the name that rose from somewhere inside, even if he did not know why — felt it. A faint fire ignited in his chest, tiny and fragile, yet undeniable. He was alive. He had awoken. And though he did not yet understand the weight of what that meant, instinct told him he would not be alone for long. Something, or someone, was already watching.
A cold wind swept through the city, carrying with it whispers of the past. He shivered, not from the air but from recognition. Somewhere, buried beneath the ash of ages, his empire had fallen. Faces that should have been allies had turned into shadows of betrayal. And yet, in the heartbeat of this fractured city, he felt a promise: a chance to rise, to reclaim, to remember.
Above, the red sun sank into the mist, casting the world in ash and silver. Neon reflections danced across puddles, distorted and fractured like shattered mirrors of time itself. The city's pulse thrummed beneath his feet, synchronized with the awakening of something within him.
He did not yet know who he was, or what had made him this way. He did not know what powers had slumbered beneath his blood, waiting. He did not know what dangers the world would throw at him, nor the enemies who had survived the fall of an empire to watch and wait.
But one truth was clear, as undeniable as the heartbeat in his chest: he was here. He had returned. And the world had forgotten him.
Yet it would not remain forgotten for long.
Somewhere in the shadows, eyes that had endured centuries narrowed. Hands that had built empires in secret tightened. And a faint, impossible warmth stirred in the ruins — a calling across time, a signal to those who still remembered the name that once ruled all.
In the ruins below, a forgotten emperor breathed his first breath in a thousand years.
And the world… began to tremble.