Rain fell like needles through the ash-choked sky.
The quarantine zone writhed beneath the rotting towers of Blackreach's western district, a maze of crumbling stone and rusted iron gates sealed with tar and prayer-blood. Here the dying were caged—not for healing, but to rot in unseen silence. To be forgotten.
Zevrak Kain stepped through the rain, his cloak drawn tight, eyes fixed on the massive gate scrawled with divine glyphs now half-melted by plague and time.
He walked alone.
Behind the gate: a city of fever and madness.
And he would make it his.
The guards didn't challenge him. Most were drunk, masked in wax-slick plague helms and indifferent to who entered—no one ever came back. The few that stirred at his passing felt something in his gaze. Something wrong.
He moved deeper, past barricades of piled corpses and makeshift altars. Fires burned in rusted barrels. Eyes peered from shattered windows. Not human eyes—hollow, pale, reflective like glass under moonlight.
The infected whispered. Not to each other.
To something.
To him.
"Kaaaain…"
A chorus of broken voices drifted from the alleys. Moans. Weeping. Unseen laughter.
Zevrak reached into the pouch beneath his coat and removed the shard—a broken vertebra of a forgotten saint, still humming with pain and memory.
He crushed it between his fingers and let the dust drift into the wind.
And then he spoke.
Not aloud.
Not in this tongue.
He whispered.
The words slithered between walls. Down bones. Into lungs.
The Wyrm Tongue, ancient language of the fallen pantheon—not magic, but memory twisted into sound. Power born of belief turned septic.
Within moments, the zone began to stir.
Rats screamed and fled. The fog thickened into blood-stained mist. And from the shattered tenements, the gang known as the Graven Fangs emerged—dozens of plague-bitten killers in mismatched armor, wielding spiked clubs and serrated blades. Their leader, a towering brute with a ribcage tattooed across his face, stepped forward.
He wore a crown of teeth.
"You here to die slow, priest?" the man growled.
Zevrak didn't blink.
"I'm here to offer you salvation."
The gang laughed.
Zevrak opened his mouth.
And did not stop whispering.
They dropped one by one.
Not from blades.
But from memories not their own.
Visions of fire. Of chained gods. Of cities strangled by roots and light. Of Zevrak, standing on a hill of bones with a blade that bled starlight.
One man screamed and clawed out his eyes. Another turned and gutted his comrade, shouting "Forgive me, King Kain!"
The leader stepped back, shivering.
"What are you?" he croaked.
Zevrak smiled.
"I am your last choice."
And then, he gripped the man's name—not the one on his lips, but the one buried in his soul—and shattered it with a word.
The man knelt. Silent. Empty.
The others followed.
From the rooftop above, Serana watched with narrowed eyes. Her blade was unsheathed, but unmoving.
She had followed him. Not because of promises.
Because of fear.
Because in her dreams, his voice had called to her.
And now she saw the proof.
Zevrak turned, gaze rising to meet hers.
He didn't speak.
He didn't need to.
She descended the building like a shadow, landing in the red-mud street without a sound.
"You dominated them," she said.
"I freed them," Zevrak replied. "From ignorance. From the illusion of self."
"That's not salvation."
"It is purpose. And purpose can be wielded like a blade."
Serana stared at the kneeling gang.
"You're not just another reborn. You remember… things no one should."
Zevrak stepped close. Rain hissed against his skin like acid. "You remember them too. The taste of battle in dying gods. The sound of swords against heaven."
"I don't want to remember," she snapped.
"You will. Because I need you to."
Her jaw clenched. Her blade didn't lower.
Zevrak looked over the infected gang, then pointed toward the chapel ruins deeper in the zone.
"There is something there. Something watching. I need this gang because the wards have failed, and we are not the only ones who remember."
She didn't answer.
But she followed.
The chapel had collapsed inward. The crucifix lay shattered, stone angels broken, their faces peeled off as if in pain.
The infected here were silent. Too silent.
Zevrak's breath steamed in the cold.
He stepped over a corpse, then into the altar's ruin.
There, carved into the ground, was a glyph of black iron—a Cycle Mark. Crude. Ancient. Still bleeding.
Serana stared. "What is it?"
"A brand," Zevrak whispered. "One used to mark chosen vessels during the First Culling. A divine tool—twisted to catch souls for a purpose."
"And you know this how?"
"Because in one of my lifetimes, I was one."
He reached down, pressed his palm to the mark.
It burned.
Visions ripped through him:
—A tower of bone, rising through the stars.
—A god screaming from behind chains of gold.
—A name missing from the Book of Rebirth.
—His own reflection, smiling back with a stranger's face.
Zevrak stood slowly.
"They're preparing something," he said. "Someone is building a Cathedrarch. A living temple made of dreamers and dead saints. And this is just the first hook."
Serana swallowed. "You plan to stop it?"
"I plan to steal it."
He turned to her. "You wanted truth. You're standing in it. You can walk away now. But if you stay, there's no turning back."
She looked at the blood. The silence. The kneeling gang. The whisper still curling in her spine.
Then nodded.
"I'll follow you. But not because I trust you."
"I wouldn't trust me either," Zevrak said, and smiled.
That night, the zone sang with unseen voices.
Infected children whispered his name in sleep. Dreamers woke weeping, painting his sigil in blood on the walls. A blind woman stood on the chapel roof and screamed prophecy into the night:
"The Chainbreaker walks. The memory eats. A god in every death. And a throne in every scream."
Zevrak Kain stood at the heart of the ruin, eyes closed, listening.
"Soon," he whispered. "Soon I will find it."
Above, the black sun pulsed once behind the clouds.
And far, far below, something ancient opened its eyes.
To be continued…