His blood ran cold.
The beast he had killed to escape—Verdant Harrowfang—was waking up.
He couldn't scream. Not like this. Not again.
Silias shook himself loose from the grip of numb terror, stumbling to his feet. He watched in horror as the creature writhed, its monstrous roots twitching back to life. He didn't wait. There was no preparation. No plan. No hands.
He just ran.
Not east, not west—there was no direction, only away. Blind, desperate, broken. His lungs burned, his legs barely responded, but he didn't stop.
He had touched hope—and been hurled back into damnation.
He ran until the trees thinned and the wind bit deeper. Until he saw it, looming like a forgotten god:
The Nameless Temple, perched atop the jagged black mountain.
He knew it. Somehow. Somewhere. Maybe from stories. Maybe from dreams. It didn't matter.
He climbed.
The cold tore at him. His blood froze in his veins. His one good hand bled from jagged ice. He had no food. No water. No sanity left to preserve. But he climbed.
Spite pushed him forward.
Spite—and the Harrowfang behind.
He risked a glance down. The beast was slow, sluggish, as if weakened by its death.
But alive. Why?
It should be dead. It was dead. How?
The black ice snapped as he climbed—he slipped, slid, clawed, rose again. He forced his way up the impossible slope. The Harrowfang didn't follow the path—it rode the roots. It twisted through the landscape with unnatural grace, riding frozen slopes like waves.
A landslide came next.
Preordained. Like everything here.
But there was no slave caravan. No Sunny. No companions.
He was early.
Too early.
That terrified him more than anything.
Still—he pushed. Not because he could. Because he had to. The temple awaited. The cold whispered. The world wanted him to fall.
But he wouldn't.
Not now.
Not when vengeance still burned in his chest.
He reached the ancient road.
Worn stone half-buried beneath snow. A road once walked by pilgrims of the old world. Them.
They were supposed to come. But not yet.
The Mountain King had not been birthed.
Sunny had not slept—yet.
So, he stopped.
And for the first time in what felt like eternity…
Silias looked down.
No movement. No Harrowfang.
A jagged veil of snow-covered rock masked the mouth of the road—a hidden passage most would miss.
But not him.
He knew this path.
Because once, it had been fiction. A story in an old book. A whisper in a world not his.
Now? It was as real as the blood soaking through the rags he wore.
He dropped to his knees. Slept. For hours. Maybe days.
But even still, his scent wouldn't fade. Not fully. Not with glow-fruit long gone. The wind carried it—human, faint, cursed.
So, he moved again.
He deviated.
Crossing the mountain might lead somewhere… good.
But Silias didn't want good.
He wanted waking.
So instead, he took the forbidden path—toward the black peak of the Harrowing Mountain.
He bled as he climbed. Scraped frozen flesh against obsidian ice.
He ran with desperation, leaking essence like a punctured soul.
And at last, he stood before it:
The Nameless Temple.
Carved into the stone like a wound.
Silent. Eternal.
But he couldn't go in.
Not yet.
He wasn't marked by divinity.
Not born of shadow.
Not chosen.
Even if he somehow fooled the guardian that watched the entrance—
Even if he forced his way past the dormant seals—
The temple's inner dark would unmake him.
Cold shadows waited inside.
Ancient. Hungry.
They would strip his soul from his bones and scatter his memory across the void.
He stood there, swaying in the wind, staring into the abyss carved into the mountain.
He needed another way.
One only he could find.
Then it came.
A harrowing shriek—not of a dying beast, but of something wrong refusing to die.
The Harrowfang.
It was tailing him. Slowly. Diligently. Maybe it had followed his scent for days, drawn to him not by hunger, but by some twisted thread of vengeance or fate.
Silias didn't scream.
He simply moved—slipping between the black pillars that bordered the path, until he found the Stairway of Silence: the ancient black stone steps leading to the Nameless Temple's sealed gate.
He fell to his knees at the lowest stair.
Not in reverence.
But in resignation.
Hands trembling. One gone. Bleeding had long become background noise.
He knelt, eyes hollow, as the shrieks grew distant for a moment, then closer.
He whispered.
Not to gods.
Not to Weaver.
But to the void.
"…let me live," he rasped. "Let me matter."
And then—
A flicker.
The black air around him rippled. The stairs pulsed faintly beneath him like a slumbering heart.
Then came the runes.
The Spell answered.
In eerie silence, a golden-blue light shimmered before his eyes. A string of Dream Runes unfurled from the ether, twirling gently, as if hesitating. Then they blazed into clarity.
[Attribute Unlocked: Divine Marrow]
His breath caught.
It wasn't an Aspect.
It wasn't a Skill.
It wasn't even a reward he'd earned.
It was something inside him, buried deep, cracked open by despair, survival, and kneeling on the lowest stair of a temple not meant for mortals.
He felt it burn in his bones.
A marrow not entirely his.
Not human.
Not divine either.
Something in-between.
Maybe a memory.
Maybe a mistake.
But it pulsed once, and the air grew colder.
Even the Harrowfang hesitated.
A pause. A silence. A beat of fear.
From a Terror.
Silias looked up, eyes bloodshot and wide.
He didn't smile.
But he knew.
For the first time since entering this cursed forest—
He wasn't entirely prey anymore.
The moment he accepted, everything broke.
His bones shifted.
Then they snapped.
Then they screamed.
It wasn't just pain—it was unmaking.
His spine twisted, vertebrae grinding like millstones.
His ribs bent outward, cracked apart, then folded back in, dripping with pale ichor that wasn't blood—but wasn't not blood either.
From deep within him, something seeped out.
An essence. Heavy. Alien. Ancient.
It smelled of rusted divinity, of bone-marrow sorrow left too long in forgotten tombs.
Then the runes appeared again, flickering across his vision:
[Divine Marrow: One may be forgotten by death, and the world itself, yet there remains a way to leave marks—marks more domineering than others.]
His body stilled.
It didn't heal.
The wounds remained.
The fractures stayed.
But somehow, he endured.
Silias breathed—ragged, shallow, alive.
The spell didn't say he would be whole.
It said he would be marked.
He blinked tears and saw something else—new words, not chosen, but given:
[Divine Marrow] → [Divineborn]
[Divineborn: You are not clean. You are not holy. You are not light. But you are Pure,
Purity, in the eyes of Divinity, means singularity. You are one thing—and nothing else.
You are the Pure Longing to Live.]
[New Passive Awakened: Deathfree]
[Deathfree: Forgotten by Death. You may pass its threshold, and yet be cast back. Once.]
Silias fell forward, blood bubbling from his lips.
He laughed.
Then he sobbed.
"Not holy… not divine…"
He was still broken. Still afraid. Still lost.
But now?
Now Death had to remember him.
Because he'd been forgotten once.
And from the shadows of the temple stairs, something unseen recoiled—not in disgust, but in acknowledgment.
Silias didn't belong to life.
He didn't belong to death.
He was outside.
And now the gate would open.
The Guardian stirred.
Its head—a stone helm carved from ancient black glass—twisted with a sickening crack.
Two hollow eye pits turned to Silias, who still lay kneeling on the stair where he had bled and begged.
Then it moved.
The ancient figure descended the stairs in a single stride, its long, midnight limbs bending wrong at every joint, like shadow puppets pulled by invisible strings.
It reached for Silias.
He didn't scream.
Didn't flinch.
Didn't resist.
He couldn't.
The Guardian's hands, wrapped in coiling obsidian threads, cradled him—not like prey, but like a fragile child.
Something to be carried.
Something to be let in.
With reverent silence, it turned, stepped to the monolithic gates of the temple as they creaked open, shuddering at the weight of centuries, and laid him gently at their threshold.
Behind them... only blackness.
No floor. No walls.
Only an endless invitation into shadow.
Then came the sound.
Shriek. Snarl. Shudder.
The Verdant Harrowfang, enraged and wild, came bursting through the snow trail Silias had climbed—its many limbs twitching, its face already split open in a death-howl.
The Guardian turned.
Where Silias had once run, once hidden, now he watched.
The Guardian and the Harrowfang met in silence.
There was no clash of titans.
No shaking of the earth.
Only silence, and then... a soundless rend.
One blink.
The Harrowfang was in pieces.
Its bones split into perfect spirals.
Its essence flared, then vanished—devoured.
The snow was dyed green and black.
And Silias knew…
What waited inside was worse.
What waited inside didn't fight like that.
It didn't need to.
Still, he did not move.
Not out of courage.
Not out of faith.
But because he could no longer run.
Not from death.
Not from gods.
Not from the truth waiting inside that temple.
He crossed the threshold.
Then he died.
Not metaphorically. Not in spirit.
His body was torn asunder, piece by piece, consumed by divine shadows that howled in silence. Every nerve screamed, then went still. His thoughts cracked open. His soul—if it had form—was unraveled thread by thread, like a puppet's strings snapped by unseen hands.
Silias ceased.
Yet… he existed.
Somewhere beyond pain, past death, deeper than even despair, something stirred.
And then he stood again.
No fanfare. No triumphant return. Just existence. Silent, shivering, his form half-there, soaked in his own blood and something far darker. The shadows whispered but did not touch him now. Not again. He was marked. Something had claimed him—or he had claimed it.
He staggered forward, toward the black altar, footsteps shallow and sticky in the void-light.
He didn't know why.
He just did.
No strength. No system prompt. No grand vision.
Only desperation, spite, and some twisted reverence.
He climbed the steps again. His feet cracked with frostbite. The wounds hadn't healed. They never would.
The altar was colder than the mountain.
He stared down at its jagged obsidian surface.
No one told him to do it.
Not a whisper, not a dream, not even the spell.
But he raised his single hand and tore open the veins of his forearm with his own broken teeth. The blood didn't fall—it crawled—down his skin, sizzling against the altar like ink against ancient parchment.
He slumped forward, vision dimming, but this time…
He didn't scream.
Just one thought echoed through his breaking mind:
"If I die again… let it be for a Titan."