Date: Year 0058 of the Firmament Era
Location: The Lower Warrens beneath Avarra
Prologue
"He was not born in darkness.
He found it.
And when he spoke, it did not devour him.
It listened."
—The Ashmarked Codex, forbidden manuscript, sealed in the Vault of Dawn
1. The Crippled Boy of the Ashlane
Malek was born in the gutters of Ashlane, the southernmost district of Avarra—a place of half-burned timber, rotten cloth, and forgotten names. He was the fifth son of a line that had once mattered. Now, the name they carried was worth less than a trade of salt.
From birth, Malek's body bore a twist: a crooked spine, a shattered gait, and one eye that looked always slightly behind him, as though haunted. His breath came shallow. His knees trembled when he walked. He spoke rarely, and when he did, it was in fragments.
Children mocked him. Adults ignored him. His mother pitied him, but died when he was seven. His father struck him only once, then never looked at him again.
They called him "Whisper-Rib."
He spent his days scavenging from refuse heaps, following street-preachers, listening to songs sung to gods he would never see.
"The gods sleep," one preacher told him once. "And they don't dream of the weak."
That night, Malek sat by the fire-pit outside the temple ruins, staring into cold coals.
"Then who dreams of us?"
The coals did not answer.
But something else did.
2. Beneath Avarra
At the age of fourteen, Malek fell through a broken sewer grate chasing a rat for food. He tumbled through slime and forgotten stone into a place not on any city map.
He found himself in the Lower Warrens—old tunnels carved during the famine wars, abandoned now to the hollow-sick, outcasts, madmen.
It was here that he found the Chamber of Chain-Root, a vault made of black-veined stone, walls slick with moisture that pulsed with something not quite alive.
He returned the next night. Then the next.
He did not understand why.
"You come," a voice said on the seventh night. "Because I remember you."
The voice was not sound. It was pressure behind the skull, like an idea so old it hurt to recall.
Malek dropped to his knees.
"You… are a god?"
"A piece of one. And you are a piece of me."
3. The Pact of Breath and Rot
Vorthar did not appear to Malek in form.
He did not need to.
His presence flowed like oil across the bones of the world, a pressure of silence between words, a flicker between memories. Malek felt his own thoughts bend, like clay softened by flame.
The voice asked nothing at first. Only questions.
"Why do you want to be strong?"
"To be seen," Malek said.
"Why do you want to be heard?"
"Because they laugh when I speak."
"Why do you want to be loved?"
"…I don't."
The voice paused.
Then offered:
"Then you are ready."
That night, Malek's back straightened. His bones realigned without pain. His stutter vanished. He dreamed of towers crumbling beneath ash. And when he awoke, his breath fogged the air—though it was summer.
He was no longer merely Malek.
He was the vessel of memory's failure.
4. The Rise of the God-Tongue
He returned to Ashlane wearing robes made of torn rags dyed in sewer dye. But he walked like a king. Spoke like a scholar. Looked into eyes without flinching.
He healed a dying woman with a touch.
He predicted the fall of a tax-lord a week before he was poisoned.
He spoke of truths long buried:
"The gods built the world. But they built it incomplete.
They feared us—because we remind them what they abandoned."
He gained followers.
Dozens, then hundreds.
They carved his symbol—a downward spiral etched with a bleeding sun—into alley walls.
He never asked them to worship him.
He only said:
"If your gods will not speak to you, then speak to me."
And the voice within him laughed.
5. The Burning of the Hall of Choice
By age twenty-four, Malek no longer lived beneath the city. He walked its streets like a prophet.
Avarra's Council demanded his arrest. The guards refused to carry out the order.
The Children of Light, zealous defenders of the old flame-god teachings, confronted him during a speech at the broken fountain.
Malek looked at their leader, a knight named Sir Denar, and whispered a word no human throat should utter.
"Naek'reth."
Sir Denar shriveled, skin cracking like paper, falling to ash in seconds.
That night, Malek's followers stormed the Hall of Choice. They lit it with blackfire—cold, devouring, silent. The runes of Edros melted. The stones cracked.
Avarra changed that day.
It was no longer the Cradle of Man.
It became the First Ashmarked City.
6. The First Ashmarked
Malek did not crown himself. He named no throne. But he gave his followers new titles.
They were not priests. Not soldiers.
They were Rememberers.
Rememberers of Pain bore sigils of loss, allowed to rewrite their bodies with glyphs of memory.
Rememberers of Flesh learned how to shape corruption into healing.
Rememberers of Fire called down ash from clear skies.
Their rituals were not bloody. Not at first.
They were peaceful. Too peaceful.
Because something was growing beneath the streets.
And Vorthar was waking.
7. The Last Dream of Malek
In the thirty-first year of his life, Malek stood alone atop the Obsidian Spire, built from the bones of the Hall he had destroyed.
He looked into the horizon, where the wind no longer blew, and the grass no longer grew.
He whispered:
"I am not a god."
"But I am what they should have been."
That night, he dreamed of a mouth opening beneath the world.
And from it came a voice, not Vorthar's—but his own.
"You were never mine," it said. "You were always what I would become."
Malek awoke in tears.
And smiled.