Death was not darkness. That was the first lie.
Death was noise.
It was a cacophony of grinding iron, a thousand chains rattling in a void that had no floor and no ceiling. It was the sound of screaming—not from a single throat, but a choral symphony of agony that seemed to echo from the marrow of his own bones. Kairav felt his consciousness stretching, pulling taut like a rubber band made of raw nerve endings, until it was thin enough to snap.
He felt the physical sensation of his soul being flayed. It wasn't just pain; it was a fundamental deconstruction. Memories were torn away like pages from a burning book—faces he loved, the sound of rain on pavement, the taste of his last meal—all incinerated in a flash of white-hot pressure. He was being unmade. Crushed under an unseen weight that felt like the gravity of a dying star.
Is this Hell? he thought, though the thought held no language, only pure, distilled concept.
Then—the snap.
The pressure vanished, replaced instantaneously by a sensation that was arguably worse: the violent intrusion of life.
He gasped.
It wasn't a breath; it was a desperate, starving heave. Air rushed into lungs that felt stiff and unused, burning the alveoli like acid. The oxygen tasted metallic, heavy with the scent of sulfur and old, dried blood.
Kairav collapsed. His knees struck rough, unforgiving stone, shredding the skin. He retched, his body convulsing as it tried to reject the very air he was forcing into it. He coughed violently, saliva and bile hitting the ground, his vision swimming in a chaotic blur of greys and sickening reds.
"Get up," his mind screamed, a primal instinct firing from a brain he didn't quite recognize as his own. "Move."
He forced his head up, the muscles in his neck screaming in protest. His vision slowly sharpened, the blur coalescing into shapes.
He was not in a hospital. He was not in a morgue.
He was kneeling in the center of a graveyard of giants.
Around him stood ancient ruins, colossal structures of obsidian stone that had been shattered by some cataclysmic force eons ago. Pillars the width of houses lay toppled, half-buried under a carpet of thick, crimson moss that pulsed faintly, as if breathing. The architecture was alien—sharp angles, jagged spires, and carvings of faces that seemed to weep dust.
Kairav scrambled backward, his boots skidding on the moss. He looked up, seeking the sky, seeking something familiar to anchor his sanity.
What he saw broke him.
The sky was wrong. It wasn't blue, nor was it the black of night. It was a bruised purple, a canvas of twilight that looked infected. And dominating this alien expanse were three moons. They hung motionless, arranged in a grotesque triangle. They were not the serene white orb of Earth; these celestial bodies were cracked, fissured like broken glass. One wept a stream of debris into the void; another glowed with a sick, green luminescence.
This isn't Earth.
The realization hit him harder than the death he had just experienced. The air was too thin. The gravity felt slightly heavier, pulling at his shoulders. The silence of the ruins was heavy, oppressive, like the held breath of a predator waiting for the right moment to strike.
And then, the silence broke.
A low, vibrating growl echoed from the shadows of a collapsed archway to his left.
Kairav froze. Every hair on his arms stood up. It was a sound that bypassed the logic centers of the human brain and spoke directly to the lizard hindbrain—the part that knew it was prey.
From the deepest shadows, the darkness seemed to detach itself. It flowed forward, liquid and erratic, before solidifying into a nightmare.
It was a beast, but nature had played no part in its creation. It stood on four legs, but the limbs were disjointed, bending at sickening angles. It was made of bleached bone and swirling black smoke. There was no skin, no fur—only a ribcage that held a burning blue flame where a heart should be, and a skull that was elongated, wolf-like, but stripped of all flesh.
Its hollow eye sockets locked onto him. There were no eyes, only two pinpricks of malevolent abyssal light.
Kairav's heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Run, his mind screamed. Run and don't look back.
But his legs didn't move. They felt leaden, anchored to the spot by sheer terror. The creature took a step forward, its bone-claws clicking against the stone floor. Click. Click. Click. The sound was rhythmic, almost hypnotic.
It opened its jaws, and a sound like tearing metal emerged—a hiss that promised not just death, but consumption.
Kairav scrambled back, his hand scrabbling blindly against the ground. His fingers brushed against something cold and hard. Metal.
He looked down. Half-buried in the crimson moss was a sword.
It was a rusted, shattered thing. The blade was broken a foot from the tip, the metal pitted and scarred from centuries of neglect. The leather wrapping on the hilt had long since rotted away, leaving bare iron. It looked useless. A piece of scrap.
Yet, as the beast coiled its muscles, preparing to spring, Kairav's hand closed around the hilt.
Zap.
The moment his skin touched the cold iron, a shockwave traveled up his arm. It wasn't painful; it was electric, vitalizing. It felt like plugging a dead battery into a high-voltage line. His vision flickered, white static overlaying the purple sky.
Something deep inside him—something dormant, buried beneath layers of amnesia and trauma—woke up. It was like a sleeping dragon opening one eye.
A mechanical chime rang out, not in the air, but directly inside his skull. It reverberated through his teeth.
[Sin Detected: Mass Slaughter]
The text floated in his peripheral vision, burning in translucent red letters.
[Analyzing Host Compatibility...]
[...Error.]
[Power Sealed — Memory Locked.]
[Combat Protocol: Forced Activation.]
Kairav didn't have time to process the hallucinations. The beast lunged.
It moved with terrifying speed, a blur of bone and smoke covering the thirty feet between them in a heartbeat. The jaws snapped open, aiming for Kairav's throat.
Kairav didn't think. He didn't plan. His body moved before his mind could even register the threat.
He rolled to the right, a fluid, practiced motion that felt entirely alien to him. The beast's claws slammed into the stone where he had been a fraction of a second ago, sending sparks and stone chips flying.
Kairav came up out of the roll, the broken sword held low in a reverse grip.
Why am I holding it like this? The thought flashed through his mind, confusion warring with adrenaline. He had been a student, an office worker, a nobody—he had never held a weapon in his life. Yet, the weight of the sword felt familiar. It felt like an extension of his arm.
The beast snarled, twisting its unnatural body with impossible flexibility to face him again. It swiped a massive claw at him, a backhand blow meant to disembowel.
Kairav stepped inside the guard.
He didn't retreat; he advanced. He ducked under the sweeping claw, feeling the wind of its passage ruffle his hair. He drove the broken tip of the sword upward, aiming for the gap in the creature's ribcage.
Steel clashed against bone.
The impact jarred his arm to the shoulder, pain exploding through his elbow. The creature was as hard as granite. But Kairav didn't stop. He gritted his teeth, a feral snarl escaping his own throat.
Instead of fear, a strange, intoxicating heat began to rise in his chest. Excitement. The thrill of the dance. The proximity of death made the blood sing in his veins.
More, a dark corner of his mind whispered. Kill it.
The beast howled, a sound of frustration and rage. It reared up on its hind legs, exposing its underbelly, preparing to crush him with its full weight.
Kairav saw the opening. It wasn't a visual cue; it was an instinctual understanding of geometry and timing. He saw the vector of the attack before it happened.
He pivoted on his left foot, using the momentum to swing the heavy, broken blade in a tight arc.
"Die," he whispered.
With a brutal twist of his hips, he drove the blade into the creature's skull, right between the hollow eye sockets.
There was resistance—the crunch of ancient, magically hardened bone—and then the blade punched through.
The beast stiffened. The blue flame in its chest flickered violently.
Kairav didn't let go. He twisted the blade, widening the wound.
Black mist erupted from the creature, spraying over Kairav like pressurized steam. It was cold, freezing his skin, smelling of ozone and rotting flowers. The beast dissolved, its bones turning to dust, its form unraveling into shadows that were quickly swallowed by the wind.
Kairav stumbled forward, the resistance of the body suddenly gone. He nearly fell, catching himself on the hilt of the sword, which was now driven into the ground.
Silence returned to the ruins.
But it was different now. It wasn't the silence of waiting; it was the silence of the aftermath.
Kairav stood there, breathing hard, his chest heaving. His knuckles were white, gripping the hilt so hard his hand shook. Black ichor—the blood of the beast—dripped from his fingers.
He stared at his hands. They were covered in scars he didn't remember having. Calluses on the palms that spoke of years of wielding weapons.
Who am I?
The question swirled in the chaos of his mind. He remembered his name—Kairav. He remembered Earth. He remembered a life of mundanity. But his body… his body remembered war. His body remembered how to kill monsters made of smoke.
[Combat Encounter Resolved.]
[Experience: Null.]
[Soul Fragment: Rejected.]
The red text flickered and vanished.
Kairav wiped the sweat and black dust from his forehead. He needed water. He needed to find shelter. He needed to figure out why the moon was broken.
That was when he felt it.
A sensation like a needle pricking the back of his neck.
Someone was watching him.
Slowly, carefully, Kairav turned around, keeping the sword raised.
High above him, standing atop the crumbling remains of a massive archway, was a figure.
Silhouetted against the bruised purple sky, she looked like a deity of the old world. A woman. She wore a long white cloak that fluttered violently in the wind, snapping like a banner of war. Beneath the cloak, she wore armor—intricate, silver plating that caught the sickly light of the moons and threw it back with a defiance that hurt to look at.
A long, slender sword rested at her side, sheathed in white scabbard.
She was beautiful, with a beauty that was sharp and dangerous, like a diamond edge. Her hair was dark, cascading around her shoulders in the wind. But it was her eyes that pinned Kairav to the spot.
They were wide. Not in fear. Not in surprise.
They were wide with hatred.
It was a hatred so pure, so concentrated, that Kairav could feel it radiating off her like heat from a furnace. It was the look one gave to the murderer of their family, the destroyer of their world.
Her hand trembled as it moved toward the hilt of her sword. The knuckles were white.
Kairav stared at her, mesmerized. He should be raising his guard. He should be running. This woman radiated a power far greater than the bone-beast he had just slain.
But he couldn't move.
"I don't know who you are," she said. Her voice carried over the wind, cold and clear as ice water. It wasn't shouted; it was projected with a terrifying calmness.
She took a step to the edge of the ruin, looking down at him as if he were a disease.
"But the moment I saw you," she continued, her voice cracking slightly, a fissure of raw emotion breaking through the ice, "I wanted you dead."
Kairav met her gaze. He saw the tears welling in her eyes—tears of rage, tears of a grief so ancient it felt like the dust of these ruins.
And for reasons he couldn't explain—
For reasons that defied the logic of his amnesia, defied the separation of their worlds, and defied the fact that they were total strangers—
His heart shattered.
A physical pain lanced through his chest, sharper than the beast's claws, heavier than the gravity of this alien world. It was a grief that wasn't his, a sorrow that belonged to a ghost living in his blood. He felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness for sins he didn't remember committing.
He opened his mouth to speak, to ask who she was, to ask why looking at her hurt so much.
But all that came out was a whispered breath, lost to the howling wind of the world that should not exist.