Pact of the Broken Sun
Chapter 1 - First Echo (1)
Location: Earth - The Undercity
Year: Y.P. 100
Designation: The Collapsed Realm
That was the grim reality of the world. A cosmic rupture, the Great Rift, had torn through the very fabric of existence, twisting everything it touched.
Humans, once the proud inheritors of the planet, were now mere chattel, their dominion a forgotten whisper in the winds of ruin.
The cataclysm struck a century ago, yet to those condemned to endure its aftermath, it felt like a fresh wound.
It had been an ordinary day, a mundane Tuesday filled with the hum of global commerce and the chatter of everyday lives, until 'it' happened.
Without warning, the Great Rift tore open in the sky a jagged, pulsating scar of cosmic energy that bled mutagenic radiation across the globe.
No one fully understood its origin, merely its devastating effect. Those exposed changed.
And the Rift changed most people almost 70% of humanity, to be precise.
However, the transformation wasn't uniform; it was a horrifying tapestry of biological and magical perversion.
In the shattered remnants of what was once known as North America, a vast population mutated into the Thralls, the chilling bedrock of the Silent Rot.
Unlike the mindless shamblers of ancient pop culture tales, these were no brain-hungry, shuffling corpses.
They were terrifyingly agile, imbued with a chilling, collective intelligence, and possessed an unsettling, unnatural strength that could shatter reinforced concrete.
Their numbers swelled with terrifying speed, spreading like a plague of locusts. The desperate remnants of global leadership, paralyzed by a threat they couldn't comprehend, were forced to abandon their nations.
The very idea that a superpower would resort to such desperate measures—activating nuclear arsenals against their own former populace spoke volumes of the horror unleashed.
Yet, the devastation of atomic fire only seemed to accelerate the Thralls' twisted evolution, bathing them in radiation that fueled grotesque new adaptations.
The screams of the innocent, caught between the two horrors, were merely a prelude to the new world's symphony of despair.
Meanwhile, in the devastated lands of Eurasia, the Crimson Eidolons—predators who fed on Aether-Essence rather than mere blood emerged from their ancient slumber, their long-dormant hunger now fully awakened.
They swept through the mortal lands with aristocratic disdain, seizing control from the human remnants they deemed lesser beings, their rise driven by a millennia-old thirst for dominion.
A similar, terrifying awakening occurred in the East, where the Lunar Strikers came into being.
These were beings of savage might, their forms grotesquely twisted by the mutated lunar cycles, evolving with each full exposure to the Great Rift's cosmic influence on the moon's energy.
Soon, the world ruled by humanity had become a nightmare realm utterly dominated by these monstrous factions, leaving mankind no choice but to construct desperate Sky-Arks and flee the planet, abandoning their ancestral home.
But not everyone could board the escaping vessels. More than 85% of the remaining human population was left behind, condemned to a living hell.
A century had passed since the Great Rift tore through the sky, and now, under the perpetual twilight cast by the ruptured cosmos, humans were slowly multiplying again, but under strict, brutal surveillance. Their sole purpose in this new world was grim: livestock.
The new rulers of this Collapsed Realm had an insatiable, horrifying appetite. While the Silent Rot didn't strictly require sustenance to live their very existence was a form of decaying perpetuity the most powerful among them, the high-caste Thralls, considered consuming human flesh a luxury, a symbol of their absolute dominance.
They frequently organized brutal 'hunts' in the decaying ruins, not for survival, but to secure their macabre feasts, their cold, intelligent eyes gleaming with perverse delight.
The Vitae Dominion (the Crimson Eidolons) were not much different in their predatory nature.
They too enjoyed the thrill of the hunt as much as the Thralls, their swift, silent movements a terrifying dance of death. But for them, it was a necessity rather than a pastime; they needed to consume human Aether-Essence regularly.
Without the vital life force, their elegant forms would wither, their speed would falter, and their ancient power would drain away, leaving them weak and vulnerable.
The Feral Collective (the Lunar Strikers) were the closest thing to an exception to this grim, human-consuming rule, though their existence was no less brutal.
While some indulged in the raw, gamey taste of human flesh during their frenzied hunts, most sustained themselves on the flesh of other mutated animals—the mutated elk of the poisoned forests, the monstrous boar of the shattered plains.
Those Lunar Strikers who abstained from human flesh were, in a twisted irony, known as "herbivores" in their savage community, a term often spat with a mixture of disdain and grudging respect.
"We should be thankful we were born in an area belonging to the Feral Collective," an old man rasped, his voice a dry, papery whisper, his eyes cloudy with age but sharp with the wisdom of survival. "Otherwise, our fate could have been far worse than it is now. We'd be... meals."
A small gathering of youngsters huddled around the old man, their eyes wide and unblinking as they listened to his familiar tale.
It was a story of grim comfort, a fable of their relatively 'better' suffering, as they waited for the others to finish cooking the meager rations of mutated roots. There wasn't much else to do in their confinement, trapped within the walls of this precarious 'shelter.'
The Lunar Strikers, in theirtwisted, predatory way, were 'kind' enough to provide them shelter from the greater horrors outside, along with meager food scraps and basic utilities from the pre-Rift era.
They were certainly better off, the old man insisted, than those trapped in the nearby zones governed by the Silent Rot and the Vitae Dominion, where life was a constant, agonizing hunt.
"If this area belongs to the Feral Collective, then why do we have other factions here?" one of the kids, a skinny boy with bright, curious eyes, asked with eager curiosity, oblivious to the grim implications.
"You have a sharp head, young one," the old man offered a wan, tired smile, a network of wrinkles crinkling around his eyes. He leaned closer, lowering his voice conspiratorially.
"About fifty cycles ago, the three Great Lords of each faction—the Rot, the Dominion, and the Collective—met in the ruins of the old world's capital. They forged a Pact, a fragile accord to avoid endless, destructive bloodshed amongst themselves
According to that accord, each region had to establish two enclaves, called 'Embassies,' for the other two factions. That way, they could supposedly coexist in 'peace,' or at least a tense truce, while being under each other's watchful eye.
It was their way of ensuring their own survival, even if it meant consolidating human misery."
In the distance, Kaelen Vance watched them, a dismissive sneer tugging at his lips, a bitter taste rising in his throat.
He'd heard this 'tale of mercy' countless times. They laughed and smiled, feigning ignorance, as if they couldn't see the towering, crumbling walls that caged them, or the hulking Lunar Striker guards perched atop those thick barricades, their forms silhouetted against the bruised, eternal twilight sky, ready to annihilate anyone who dared to misstep.
The hypocrisy gnawed at him.
Kaelen stood 5'6" tall, his brown skin lightly speckled with faint freckles that dusted his high cheekbones, giving him a perpetually youthful, yet defiant, look.
His distinctive white hair reached his elbows, often unbound, a stark contrast to the grime that clung to everything in the Undercity.
A fresh, livid bruise pulsed on his left foot, a deep purple blossom against his pale skin, and he carried it with a strange, almost manic sense of pride.
He was proud of the pain, a testament to his defiance against those beasts. He'd smashed a glass pane in a fit of rage after a Lunar Striker guard had 'ordered' him to clean their den a den littered with half-eaten carcasses and the stench of decay.
The guard had merely chuckled, stomped on Kaelen's foot, and assigned him a new 'punishment.'
His long, lean arms now cradled an empty earthen bowl, a symbol of his current penance: no rations for the rest of the day. Kaelen was accustomed to the gnawing hunger that constantly twisted his gut; he preferred the emptiness in his stomach to the soul-crushing emptiness of obedience to the monsters who had brutally stolen his parents four years ago.
His short torso and bony hips were stark, undeniable proof of his long, defiant fasts, a testament to his unwavering rebellion. The others in the encampment, desperate to appease their 'masters' and avoid their cruel gaze, consistently ostracized him.
They feared him, feared his defiance, because they knew that any sign of rebellion could lead to their 'master' gifting them away as macabre presents to the Vitae Dominion for their essence, or, even worse, to the Silent Rot for their gruesome feasts.
"Keep sucking their paws, you fools," Kaelen spat, his voice a low, guttural growl of pure, unadulterated anger, the sound barely audible over the old man's droning. The earthen bowl felt like a symbol of his oppression.
With a sudden surge of raw fury, he smashed it on the ground, sending coarse ceramic shards scattering across the dirt, a tiny, defiant explosion in the suffocating silence.
"A few more hours, and I'll leave this place to join The Aetherium Collective. That's when you'll realize it was me you all should have sided with! That's when you'll see who the real fools are!"
His eyes, sharp and blazing with a dangerous light, scanned the indifferent faces of the Lunar Striker guards on the wall, a silent promise of defiance forming in his heart.