The night air felt like blades against his skin.
Raen stood on the cracked stones of an abandoned shrine, where the air was heavy with rotting incense and forgotten prayers. A ring of dead trees surrounded the ruin like twisted sentinels. His black sword, Mournfang, pulsed faintly in his grasp—its core responding to the scent of corrupted blood.
The Remnant was near.
This one was different. Not mindless. Not entirely.
He crouched, fingertips grazing the dirt. A single drop of silver blood still shimmered in the moonlight, unspoiled.
"Still fresh," he muttered. "It's feeding."
A low growl answered him.
Then silence.
Then—
A shriek—like metal dragged across bone—erupted from the treetops. The Remnant burst forward, its sinewed body sewn from limbs that didn't belong, faces stitched to its chest, muttering in endless agony. It wielded memory like a weapon, lashing it toward him—
And Raen froze.
Not his body. His mind.
"Brother… why did you leave me to die?"
A voice. Familiar.
His older brother's voice.
He hadn't heard it in three hundred years.
"Shut up," Raen hissed, grabbing at his skull, as if that could silence the phantom.
"You killed me."
He swung his sword, blindly, screaming into the cold. The blade carved through the illusion—and the Remnant's face split open in ecstasy. It fed on regret. On guilt. On the agony he refused to name.
But Raen wasn't that boy anymore.
He narrowed his eyes. Breathed deep.
Let the darkness in.
Power bloomed beneath his skin, and the tattooed seal the Demon God had carved into his spine lit with infernal runes.
"Remember this," Raen whispered, voice cold. "I'm the one who eats memory. Not you."
He dashed forward, slicing low, then spinning upward into a brutal uppercut with Mournfang. The blade tore through flesh and bone—but instead of dying, the Remnant laughed.
It grabbed Raen by the throat.
And whispered her name.
"Lyra…"
Raen froze. His pupils narrowed. The creature smiled with teeth that didn't belong to it.
"Do you think she remembers what she did?"
Raen roared and drove the sword through its jaw, channeling the God-Eater's curse, turning its blood into black fire. The Remnant burned from within, screaming in a hundred voices—some of which were his own.
When it collapsed, all that remained was smoke—and a shattered face Raen didn't recognize, but felt like he should.
---
Back at the village—
Lyra sat beneath the shattered moonlight, staring into the pages of a book older than her soul.
The Codex of Nameless Fire.
She had stolen it. From the ruins. From her past.
The deeper she read, the less she understood—and the more she remembered.
Blood on marble floors. A crown breaking in two. Her own voice chanting ancient curses in a temple that was never supposed to exist.
Her hands trembled.
"You betrayed him," a voice said.
It came from the book.
No—from within her.
Visions crashed into her.
She stood atop a mountain of corpses, smiling as Raen bled beneath her blade.
"I'm sorry—Raen, I'm sorry!" she cried aloud.
She didn't understand.
Why had she killed him?
Why had she—loved him?
And why did the Demon God let her come back?
---
Raen arrived at dawn, face bloodied, eyes dim.
He found Lyra curled beside the fire, whispering to herself, her eyes wide with the shadows of the past.
He didn't speak.
He simply sat beside her, not asking what she'd seen.
She didn't ask where he'd been.
After a long silence, she whispered, "I killed you. Didn't I?"
Raen didn't flinch.
"Yes," he said. "But I deserved it."
The fire cracked.
And the world, for once, stood still.
To be continued....