Winter had come early to Baelkaar, and it had come without mercy.
Snow fell without pause, thick and heavy, piling over old paths and half-burying trees that had stood unmoved for decades. The wind screamed through the forests like a living thing, sharp enough to sting bare skin and strong enough to bend even hardened trunks. This was not an ordinary winter. The elders said the land itself felt tense, as though something beneath Baelkaar was shifting.
"Fuck me," a voice muttered through chattering teeth. "Why am I always the one stuck getting firewood in times like this?"
Jhan stood knee-deep in snow, his breath fogging the air in short, irritated bursts. He was young, barely grown, but already broad-shouldered and hard-muscled from years of labor and training. As the eldest of four siblings, he had long since accepted his role as the family's errand runner, though acceptance didn't mean silence.
"Hah… whatever," he said, rolling his shoulders. "Let's just get this over with."
He planted his feet and raised his rusty axe.
As he focused, something stirred beneath his skin. His arms tensed, veins standing out as his muscles swelled unnaturally. A faint gray light seeped from his flesh, thin at first, then steadier, wrapping around his forearms like mist pulled tight. This was Force—the invisible, oppressive power said to exist everywhere, the same energy that drove the stars and stretched the heavens apart. In Baelkaar, people did not question its existence. They trained to survive it.
Jhan exhaled and brought the axe down.
BOOM.
The sound cracked through the forest. The tree didn't fall—it shattered. Wood exploded outward as if struck by a siege weapon, the trunk reduced to broken chunks that scattered across the snow. The gray light faded from Jhan's arms as quickly as it had appeared.
"Phew…" He wiped his nose with his sleeve and glanced at his hands. "My Force control's getting better."
He bent down, gathering splintered logs with practiced efficiency.
"At this rate, I should hit the third level of the Rudimentary Realm soon."
As he worked, his gaze drifted—again and again—toward the heart of the forest.
There, where the trees thinned and the ground abruptly ended, yawned an impossible void.
A vast, lightless abyss carved into the world itself.
The Sunless Reach.
No one in Baelkaar remembered a time before it existed. It was said to descend endlessly, swallowing sound, light, and sanity alike. Even old monsters—immortals that ruled entire regions and bent lesser beings through fear alone—refused to approach its edge. The Force there was wrong. Too dense. Too violent. Too alive.
Jhan swallowed and turned away.
Far below, beyond all depth ever measured, the Sunless Reach burned.
Blue flames roared through the abyss like oceans turned upside down, casting warped shadows against jagged stone. The Force there was no longer passive. It crushed, suffocated, tore apart anything foolish enough to enter. No living being—human or otherwise—should have survived even a heartbeat in that place.
Yet a cry echoed through the depths.
The sound was small. Fragile.
An infant's wail.
At the deepest known layer of the Sunless Reach, where Force condensed into something closer to a law than an energy, a human child lay upon scorched stone, untouched by flame or pressure. The blue fire bent around its body as though afraid to draw near.
No one knew where the child came from.
No ritual, no summoning, no lineage could explain its presence. By all understanding of Force and common sense, its existence was supposed to be impossible.
Its eyes opened.
Purple pupils reflected the raging abyss, deep and vast, as though the universe itself stared back through them. Pale white skin glowed faintly against the darkness, unmarred by heat or cold. Sparse strands of white hair clung to its smooth head, stirred by winds that could pulverize mountains.
Above, far beyond the abyss, birds took flight in sudden panic. Wolves lifted their heads and howled toward the blood-red moon, their instincts screaming of something newly born.
In the depths of the Sunless Reach, where nothing should live—
Innominatus was born.