The woods were cloaked in a suffocating darkness, the kind that swallowed light whole and bent sound into whispers. Only one noise defied the silence the frantic rhythm of footfalls crashing through the undergrowth. Each step echoed like a desperate drumbeat in the wilderness, heralding both flight and impending doom.
Something followed.
A shadow broke from the treeline, darting between gnarled trunks with inhuman speed. Its glowing red eyes carved through the blackness like twin beacons of malice. The creature or perhaps man moved as though gravity itself bent to its will, gliding with unnatural agility down the mountainside. And it was hunting him.
Balthazar Raven stumbled into a clearing, breath ragged, his chest burning with the effort to keep moving. The earth betrayed him with loose gravel, and he skidded to a halt at the jagged lip of a cliff. Below yawned an abyss of rock and mist, a death sentence waiting for a single misstep.
The night wind pressed cold fingers through his hair, carrying with it the faint scent of pine, earth, and iron. He dared a glance over his shoulder, heart pounding against his ribs like a war drum. The forest behind him remained deceptively still, but he knew better his pursuer was close. Too close.
His features, stark against the shadowed landscape, betrayed his heritage. Pale as bone and sharp as carved marble, his face was both grotesque and mesmerizing, the haunting beauty of the Dishonored Void clan etched into his very skin. Once, he had tried to hide it. Once, he had believed he could carve a path separate from them.
How had it come to this?
Only a handful of years ago, Balthazar had been no more than a boy a nameless orphan with questions he could not silence. His life had been stitched together by the invisible hand of a benefactor who provided for him, yet remained a mystery. His ambitions then had been simple, almost painfully ordinary. He dreamed of becoming a lab scientist like his late mother, of stepping into the sterile brilliance of laboratories where answers might finally replace grief.
But the past does not rest.
His mother's mutilated corpse still haunted him, eyes wide with secrets untold. His father's death had been no less violent, swallowed by circumstances no one explained. The only tangible relic of their lives dangled cold and heavy against his chest a black raven pendant, obsidian wings spread as if frozen in flight. It was more than jewelry. It was memory. It was promise.
Now, that same past had risen like a phantom, sending after him a hunter born of the very clan he had abandoned. They had found him. His blood, his betrayal, had summoned judgment.
The weight of his parents' absence had long been enough to crush him, but tonight it was joined by something far more immediate the predator stalking the dark. His lungs screamed, his muscles trembled, but he stood firm at the cliff's edge. The raven at his chest felt colder than ever, as though urging him to choose.
With the hunter at his back and the void yawning before him, Balthazar Raven was no longer a boy fleeing his fate. He was a fugitive standing at the threshold of war, ready or doomed to confront the darkness that awaited.