After their breakfast, Ash was carried in his mother's arms through the quiet palace corridors. His small hands gripped her robes loosely, but his eyes—black as the Abyss— held a depth far beyond his years. Distant, as if glimpsing shadows from a forgotten time.
What was that... he wondered in silence.Something had stirred during the meal — a flicker of pressure, a faint presence — like a whisper from a life long left behind. It slipped away as quickly as it came, like breath fading on a mirror.
They reached the garden.
Beneath the silver-blue starlight, a stone pavilion stood wrapped in shadow-laced vines and ghostly white blossoms that bloomed only under the night's cloak. Inside, a table waited, surrounded by tall-backed chairs.
His mother settled with practiced grace and glanced toward the maid who followed behind.
"Prepare the tea," she said softly.
The maid bowed without a word and vanished.
Nearby, Ash's older sister Lyseria stood with arms folded behind her back, her posture regal but touched by quiet weariness.
"My daughter," Elaenora said gently, turning to her, "how is your study progressing?"
Lyseria tilted her head slightly, sighing. "It was... okay."
Ash heard none of it.His gaze was fixed upon the sky.
Why are we out here? he thought, his Abyss-black eyes searching the stars. It's still night…
He did not yet understand that in the Abyss Realm, night was not simply the absence of sun. It was a sacred time. A living current. The palace never truly slept. Here, the darkest hours were when the highest nobles stirred—when deals were forged, when secrets moved, when children were shaped.
But Ash was still a child.For now.
And so, the nights slipped by — one after another — like ink bleeding across parchment.
As Ash turned one year old, the palace granted him a chamber of his own — quiet, stone-walled, and bathed in the soft shimmer of darklight. Along with the room came a personal maid, chosen to tend to him alone.
That evening, his mother knelt beside his bed, the folds of her gown brushing the floor, her golden-ashen eyes filled with gentle resolve.
"Ash," she said softly, "I must give much of my time to the affairs of the empire. You will have this room, and a maid to care for you while I am away. Just like your sister, who studies in her own chamber."
His small hands reached toward her robes, but within him stirred a deeper understanding.The words weren't just sounds. They were truth.
A promise. A distance.
He looked into her eyes — and for the first time, truly heard her.
She is busy… with matters greater than me.
I must learn to stand apart.
Though he was only one year old, his thoughts moved with frightening clarity. He understood: his life would not be coddled. It would be tempered.
Responsibility. Expectation. A legacy carved from shadow and silence.
The maid arrived then — quiet, poised, unshakable — and bowed.
She would tend his body. But Ash sensed that no one would tend his soul, nor guard the mystery stirring within him.
That night, as his mother's footsteps faded into the marble distance, Ash lay in bed alone.
Not as a child.
But as someone who remembered.
The dark whispered softly around him.The past and future blurred like mist.
And Ashteron Vael'Abyss, reborn into a world of endless night, waited.
As he lay in bed, the gentle darklight cast muted shadows across the stone walls. His small frame rested beneath silk sheets dyed violet, but his thoughts were far from sleep.
His Abyss-black eyes stared upward — unblinking. Quiet. Searching.
The silence welcomed thought. Memory.
Why is there no daylight here?
In the world I came from… the sun would rise. Gold would bleed through windows. Life followed its rhythm.
But here?
The moon does not move. The stars do not blink. There is no dawn. Only endless night.
He turned his head toward the arched window. Outside, the moon hung still in a sky drowned in darkness — a silver sentinel untouched by time.
This place... obeys no sun.
Here, darkness is not absence. It is presence. It breathes. It waits.
And in that darkness…Ash felt at home.
He blinked slowly. His Abyss-black eyes shimmered faintly in the stillness.
This world doesn't sleep like the one before.
It whispers. It remembers.
And he did not fear it.
No—he belonged to it.
If light was clarity... then darkness was depth.
And I... I have drowned before.
He sat up.
The silk sheets whispered as he shifted, then slipped from the edge of the bed. His small feet touched the cold stone floor with barely a sound.
Drawn by thought more than instinct, Ash padded quietly across the chamber toward the standing mirror — a tall obsidian-framed thing carved with runes that shimmered faintly in the darklight.
He stood before it.
A child stared back.
Barefoot, clad in a deep-gray sleeping robe of fine weave, the boy in the mirror looked delicate — his limbs slender, his form small. But his eyes… those eyes were wrong.
They did not belong to a child.
Black as the Abyss.Endless.Depthless.Alive.
He tilted his head slightly, as if studying a creature from another world.
This is the body I was given…
Soft skin, pale as moonlight. A faint silver sheen lined his collarbones and shoulders — some trait of his mother's angelic blood, no doubt. Yet it contrasted sharply with the deeper shadows that clung to his limbs — a quiet darkness that never truly left his skin, as though ink had soaked into him before birth.
He raised one hand, watching the fingers move. Tiny, yes — but not weak. There was control. Precision.
He opened and closed his fist slowly.
I feel… contained.
Like a storm locked in a jar.
He stepped closer to the mirror, placing his palm against the glass.
This body is young… but I am not.
The Abyss within him stirred.
It was not violent. It was not loud.
But it was awake.
And it remembered.
Not names, not places — not yet — but sensations. Fragments. Echoes of a power long buried, like the memory of fire lingering in ash.
He lowered his hand, staring once more at his reflection.
"I am Ashteron," he whispered aloud — testing the weight of the name. "Vael'Abyss."
And the darkness around him... listened.