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Author Note:
' ' = When thinking in mind.
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"What if?"
A simple phrase.
A fleeting thought.
A curse disguised as curiosity.
.
It's a question we've all whispered—quietly, regretfully, repeatedly—at some point in our lives. But for some… it never stops echoing. It loops endlessly inside the mind like a broken prayer. A lament.
What if I had said "yes" to that one night out with friends instead of choosing solitude?
What if I hadn't taken that course? If I'd followed my instincts instead?
What if I'd stood up during the meeting, when my voice could have changed everything?
What if I hadn't ignored her pain? My daughter's tears? My conscience?
What if I had pulled the trigger?
What if I hadn't?
.
The What Ifs are infinite. They haunt the dying and plague the living.
Each one a path untaken. A fork in the road left unexplored.
But what if those paths… weren't empty?
.
What if someone did take them?
What if your parallel self acted—made the choice you didn't?
What if they lived through the consequences, while you were spared?
.
You think you're alone in your timeline.
You're not.
.
They exist.
Your other selves.
And not all of them are doing well.
.
Some of them found happiness. Some found nothing.
And some… some made decisions so vile, so irreversibly monstrous, that their entire realities twisted, cracked, and bled as a result.
.
And those realities?
.
Welcome… to the Dark Multiverse.
.
.
.
.
.
This is not your typical alternate universe.
This is not another dimension where things are slightly different, where people have blue hair instead of brown or coffee instead of tea.
.
This is a graveyard of corrupted timelines—rotting, bleeding, collapsing, and endlessly echoing the worst versions of humanity.
.
Worlds where:
Humanity was never meant to win. Mercy was never coded into the laws of nature. The gods either abandoned creation—or fed on it. Reality itself has become a joke, and suffering is the punchline.
.
These aren't just dystopias.
They are cursed existences.
Places where death is a mercy, and life is a trap.
Worlds ruled by entities that were never meant to be born.
Worlds locked in cycles of despair, where nothing truly ends, and nothing ever begins.
.
There are no prophecies here.
No Chosen Ones.
No uprising.
No light at the end of the tunnel.
.
Only—
UNENDING DECAY.
UNYIELDING DARKNESS.
UNDENIABLE TRUTH.
.
.
.
.
.
There is no escape. No saviors. No final battles to be won. No greater good to justify the suffering. No balance to restore.
.
There are no Heroes.
Only Temporary Survivors.
Each day bought with a price no soul can afford to pay.
.
This is not a story about hope.
This is not a story about fighting the odds.
.
This is a chronicle of what lies after the fall.
Of what happens when the odds fight back.
When the very fabric of reality begins to scream.
.
This is a war that cannot be won.
Because there is no war.
Only corrosion.
Only hunger.
Only rot.
.
So—
Don't fight it.
Don't pray.
Don't resist.
Just…
Accept.
.
.
.
.
.
Are you ready?
To dive headfirst into an ocean of madness?
To watch the world crumble—not just around you, but inside you?
.
To either embrace the dark...
…or be consumed by it?
.
Welcome, lost one… from this point forward, reality forgets mercy.
.
.
.
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???: HA!!
A man jolted upright with a strangled gasp, clutching at his chest as if something had just reached in and squeezed his heart. His body trembled. Cold sweat clung to his bare skin. Breathing ragged, he instinctively looked around—but there was nothing. Nothing but darkness.
Was it a nightmare? It had to be. And yet…
Welcome… to the Dark Multiverse.
That voice. It didn't vanish like most dreams. It lingered. Echoing. Reverberating inside his skull like an echo inside a tomb.
He winced and grabbed his head as if trying to physically force it out. The pain was sharp and real. Too real. Eventually, the voice faded—but the memory of its weight didn't. A shiver ran through him as he looked around again.
Nothing. Not even his own hands.
The darkness surrounding him wasn't merely a lack of light—it was absolute. A void. One that swallowed not just sight, but sound, warmth, and presence. Even the concept of distance seemed alien here.
He tried to steady his breath, blinking uselessly. Then he opened his mouth and spoke.
???: Hello...?
His voice was loud. Too loud. But the moment it left his lips, it vanished. Swallowed whole by the abyss.
???: Is anyone here?!
He called out louder this time. No echo. No response. No weight to his words. As if reality itself denied him the courtesy of acknowledgement.
He tried again. And again. Each time, more desperate than the last. But nothing. Just the eerie cold. Just the void.
Eventually, he gave up and pushed himself to his feet, shivering as a chill sliced through him like ice water.
He flinched.
Touch. He felt his own skin.
He ran his hands over himself—his arms, his legs, his chest. Bare. All of it. He was completely nude.
'???: Good thing there's no one around. That would've been... public humiliation.'
A grim joke, more for his own sanity than anything else. He forced a weak laugh that vanished into the airless dark.
'???: No point staying in one place. I need to move. Find something. Anything.'
He picked a random direction and began walking. With every step, the cold bit into his feet and crawled up his spine like fingers made of frost. Yet oddly, the ground beneath him wasn't harsh or jagged—it was cold, yes, but soft like a velvet rug chilled by death.
The paradox was unsettling. He shook his head. Keep moving.
He searched the darkness for even a glimmer, a speck of light, but found none. Time began to lose meaning. Had he been walking for minutes? Hours?
Something else began gnawing at him—the darkness never shifted. Not even the faintest adaptation of his vision. Not even the illusion of shadow.
'???: Why can't I see anything? Shouldn't my eyes start adjusting?'
He stopped for a moment and tried to focus.
His thoughts drifted into clinical clarity—strangely detached, almost encyclopedic.
When entering a dark environment, the human eye undergoes a process known as dark adaptation. Pupils dilate, cones deactivate, and rod cells regenerate rhodopsin. Vision returns, slowly, in grayscale... usually within 30 minutes.
But here, there were no photons. No shadows. No gradation. Only void.
'???: No wonder nothing's changing. My eyes aren't failing—they're useless here. This is not natural darkness. This is an absence. A black hole of perception. Biological vision doesn't work in a place that rejects light itself.'
He resumed walking. Nothing but the soundless rhythm of his own footfalls.
Time passed. How long? He didn't know. He walked. He rested. He walked again.
Eventually, exhaustion overtook him. He bent forward, resting his hands on his knees, breath ragged, sweat clinging to his skin.
Yet… nothing changed. The temperature remained the same. The silence unbroken. The terrain unchanged. It was as if he'd moved nowhere at all.
Still, he chose to believe he'd made progress.
He had to.
'???: It feels like this place is laughing at me. Watching. Waiting. Mocking.'
The thought crawled across his mind like a parasite. He could almost feel it—the darkness, looming, watching. Not with eyes. With intent. Waiting for him to snap. Not physically. Mentally.
And eventually, he would.
Time was the ally of the void. It could wait forever.
He searched his memories—looking for a tether. A person. A moment. A name.
Nothing.
There was knowledge—he understood things, many things—but not memories. No images, no feelings, no past. Like he had been born here… in this place of eternal nothing.
'???: This doesn't make sense. You don't gain knowledge just by existing. You have to live. Experience. Learn. But… I haven't. So how do I know?'
He clenched his fists. Even now, that knowledge couldn't explain why he was here. Or who he was.
'???: I need to stay sane. I need something—anything—to hold on to.'
And so, he began to count.
.
.
'???: 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… 7… 8… 9…'
He counted to stay sane. Counted to remember that time still existed—even if this place tried to deny it. Even if his mind, body, and soul cried out for release, he kept counting.
Even when he rested, the numbers continued in his head, like a mantra. Like a shield.
And time marched on.
'???: 324,732,880… 324,732,881… 324,732,882… 324,732,883…'
He didn't know what day it was. What year. Or century. The numbers passed like grains of sand through fingers. Meaningless, but necessary.
Somewhere along the way, numbers stopped being numbers. They became anchors. The only proof that he still existed.
'???: 20,031,566,472… 20,031,566,473… 20,031,566,474… 20,031,566,475…'
He walked. Rested. Counted. Again and again.
His body? It should have collapsed long ago.
Humans cannot survive without food, water, or sleep. Within a day, dehydration begins. Within three, the body fails. Muscles break down. Organs shut down. Hallucinations begin. Paranoia. Psychosis. Death.
But he didn't die.
'???: That's not survival. That's… cruelty.'
Because whenever he stopped—whenever his body threatened to fall apart—something in the darkness restored him. Not out of kindness. But to keep him going. So he could suffer more.
The void did not want him dead.
It wanted him broken.
.
.
'???: 3,??7,?9?,?6?,6?7… ?,0??,6?1,??2,?8?... ?,?1?,???,8?2,??7…'
The numbers blurred. He couldn't keep track anymore. Was he still counting? Or had he started hallucinating his own delusion of order?
He no longer remembered why he was walking. Where he was going. Or what he was searching for.
He had become a machine. A vessel of repetition. A ghost dragging itself forward with a will that wasn't even his anymore.
Until…
BAM!
???: Urg!
He collided with something. Hard. The impact knocked him off his feet and sent him sprawling onto the cold, soft ground.
Pain flared—but it was grounding. Real.
He blinked in surprise. His mind cleared, if only slightly. Something was different. He turned back, reached out, and touched the thing he had struck.
Metal. Cold. Solid.
Both hands now, tracing its edges. It was embedded in the ground, unmoving. He moved upward.
And then he stopped.
???: This is… a sword.
It was unmistakable. The blade, embedded deep in the icy terrain. The hilt… now in his grasp.
Hope flickered. A tremor of purpose.
???: Maybe this is it. Maybe this is how I get out.
He gripped the hilt tight, bracing himself.
And pulled.
Nothing.
He growled, gritting his teeth. Muscles strained, knuckles turned white. The sword refused to move. Again and again, he tried.
Still nothing.
Eventually, defeated, he collapsed beside the sword, leaning against it like an old friend who'd betrayed him.
How cruel it was—to offer a moment of hope after millennia of despair, only to snatch it away.
After a while, he stood again. The light in his eyes—brief and bright—faded. Hollow once more.
Without even glancing back, he resumed walking.
He wasn't searching for escape anymore.
He was looking for somewhere to die.
However, here, reality won't give you what you want.
The man had barely walked a few metres before coming to a stop again. Something hard hit his chest and stopped him in his tracks. The Man frowned and decided to see what he found now. As he started checking the thing, he got surprised again.
???: This is a Gun.
Yes. A Gun that was floating in the air. A few minutes ago, he found a sword, and now he has found a gun. However, like the sword, no matter how much he tried, he failed to move this gun either.
Still, compared to before, he didn't spend much time trying to move it and just walked away.
'???: Let's hope I won't encounter anything else now.'
But the void wasn't done with him yet.
TAP.
He collided with something else again.
???: ....... Are you kidding?
He reached out. Fabric.
???: What now? A cloth? Is this some twisted package deal? A sword, a gun, and now a towel?
Indeed, it was small. Just large enough to cover his shame. His lip twitched at the absurdity.
Still, he tried. Weakly. One hand on the cloth, pulling with no hope.
It stayed.
???: Of course it doesn't move. Why would it?
He sighed and turned to walk away.
But then—
SWOOSH!
The cloth moved. No—attacked.
It lunged onto his right arm, wrapping itself like a living organism.
???: !!!!!
His eyes widened in horror as he tried to shake it off.
Then—
'This will hurt. But you'll thank me.'
The voice—smooth, venomous—echoed inside his skull.
Spikes. Out of nowhere. Dozens. Hundreds.
They tore into his arm, piercing flesh, muscle, and even bone.
???: AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!
He screamed like a man being torn apart, his voice raw with agony.
More spikes burst through, tunnelling through his nerves, veins, tendons. Blood erupted—but the cloth absorbed it. Not a single drop was allowed to fall.
Then the cloth crawled upward—over his shoulder and down his back.
Spikes plunged into his spine.
???: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHH!!!
Tears streamed. Snot dripped. He convulsed. Vomit threatened. The agony was unending.
He prayed for unconsciousness.
But the cloth wouldn't allow it.
Neural spikes sent pulses to his brain, keeping him awake. Making him feel everything.
And then… the final horror.
It wasn't just his body being violated.
It was his soul.
Blood seeped from every pore, every orifice—eyes, nose, ears, mouth. It gushed like a ritual sacrifice.
And yet, he didn't die.
He couldn't.
This was his evolution.
.
.
Eventually, the pain stopped. But not before his mind shattered—over and over again.
The darkness repaired each break. Only to let it break again.
At some point, the screaming stopped.
There was only silence.
He knelt on the ground. Head bowed. Empty.
Then the voice returned—one last whisper.
'Together, we become something… final.'
He opened his eyes.
And for the first time, in this realm of nothing…
He saw.
.
.
Red.
Two glowing orbs. Blood red. Burning like twin stars in the abyss.
He stood.
Taller than before. Changed. Transformed.
He looked down at himself.
No longer naked.
He now wore a sleek black-and-red armor. Fitted for war. Stylish, yet deadly. High collars rose around his neck like a wolf's ruff. Metallic shoulder plates framed him. Leather belts and crimson-lined elements danced like veins of power.
His right arm was no longer flesh—but something fused. Organic. Muscle-like. Black with crimson grooves. Sharp ridges ran up his spine like dormant claws.
A mantle draped behind him—red-lined, split for motion.
He moved his arm. A tight fist.
Strength. Real, terrifying strength.
'???: This… isn't human.'
His thoughts were clearer now. His mind, sharpened beyond human limitation. New doors had opened. Equations he once struggled with now danced in his head like lullabies.
And yet…
He felt no panic. No grief.
Only understanding.
Only… calm.
He took a breath.
The darkness no longer bit at him. It felt… welcoming.
He looked around—and saw.
For the first time, he saw the truth.
.
.
He walked.
Now that he could see, his strides were faster, more purposeful. His breath steady. Controlled. Calculated.
But then he stopped.
Even with his evolved mind, with logic coursing through every thought, he couldn't suppress the fury now boiling inside him.
He clenched his fists.
Because now, for the first time, he understood.
He wasn't lost.
He was trapped.
A circle. A perfect, silent prison.
He could see the end of this space in every direction. It was not infinite as he once believed. It only felt infinite—because every time he reached the edge, reality folded in on itself, silently, seamlessly, returning him to the beginning.
A loop.
An eternal deception.
'???: All this time... I thought I was making progress. Even if it was something I told myself.'
His nails dug into his palms.
'???: But it seems I've been nothing but a rat in a cage. Round and round. For millennia.'
The darkness around him pulsed—mocking him. Laughing. Not with sound. But with presence. With enjoyment.
It relished his anger. His awakening.
The Man let out a slow breath, trembling with fury. He refused to scream. He had no intention of giving the void the satisfaction.
He calmed himself.
And remembered.
'???: The only reason I broke the pattern… was because I wandered off-course. Not by intention—but by exhaustion. Because I lost count. Because I stopped following a straight line.'
And that, ironically, had led him to the first anomaly—the sword.
'???: So… the key to escaping isn't found by moving forward... but by moving wrong.'
He turned.
There, in the distance—familiar now—stood the two weapons. The ones he had once failed to lift.
.
.
He approached the gun first.
It hovered slightly above the ground, motionless.
Without hesitation, the man reached out—and this time, it responded. Smoothly. Easily. It landed in his palm as if returning to a rightful owner.
He spun it once in his hand. Muscle memory took over. He examined the barrel, the chamber, the balance.
'???: Twin mag-cylinders. Angular grip. Fully stabilized. Modified recoil dampeners. Zero-point aim correction…'
His thoughts flowed like water.
'???: I know this. I've used this. Thousands of times.'
No memories. Yet complete mastery.
He holstered the gun at his side, then turned to the sword.
It still stood—buried deep, unmoved.
The Man stepped before it, resting the gun in his left hand.
He wrapped his right hand around the hilt—his new right hand. Strength surged through his arm, through his spine, through the organic armour that had fused into him.
He pulled.
SHHINNN!
The sword slid free like silk.
It was beautiful. Black steel with slightly curved edge, the jagged, saw-like notches running along the core resemble a spinal segment. It wasn't just a weapon. But executioner's blad
It hummed.
And then—the gun joined it.
HUNNN...
HUNNNN...
And finally—his right arm.
HUNNNNN...
A triad of resonance. All in sync. Sword, gun, and man.
The man stood there, breath caught in his throat, when—
BOOMF!!!
A burst of light exploded behind him—violent, searing, divine.
He turned instinctively, raising his arm to shield his eyes. But the light grew stronger. It wasn't just illumination—it was presence. Radiant. Uncontainable.
From between his fingers, he saw it.
A singularity. A mass of blinding crimson and voidlight, suspended in the air like a bleeding sun.
And somehow—he knew its name.
???: The… Hollow… Core...
The words slipped from his lips like a forgotten prayer.
And then—darkness returned.
.
.
SWOOSH!
He was falling.
Through air. Through space. Through dimensions.
The world around him blurred—pressure rushing past his ears, hair whipping in the wind. He was high. Beyond towers. Beyond clouds. Beyond comprehension.
He was falling from somewhere above the sky.
And yet...
He didn't resist.
He let it happen. The sensation of weightlessness was... peaceful.
And then—
*****It was not worthless*****
A voice.
Not like the others. Not like the hissing mockery from the darkness.
This voice—this one silenced all creation.
It was divine.
Ethereal. Timeless. Beyond gender. Beyond identity. Beyond causality.
It wasn't sound. It was the truth.
Reality itself paused to listen.
Even the laws of existence bent their knee.
*****You will soon realize that all the pain… suffering… hardship… despair… was worth it*****
The man's breath caught. The voice was… familiar. Too familiar.
But he couldn't place it.
He opened his mouth, but no words came out.
*****It's time to wake up... and begin your journey, Kaelthorn the Hollowborn*****
And then—
Black.
.
.
.
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TIK.
TIK.
TIK.
…
Rain.
It fell with a mechanical rhythm—unfeeling, precise—tapping against his skin like the arrhythmic pulse of a dying world. Each drop struck cold, as if the sky itself bled frost. They crawled down his face, mapping the contours of his cheekbones like fingers seeking life in a corpse.
And then—
A twitch.
A stir.
A breath drawn through still lungs.
Kaelthorn the Hollowborn awoke.
He lay sprawled amidst broken floorboards, limbs splayed in silent defiance of gravity's will. Overhead, through a crude, ragged hole in the roof, the heavens churned—a vortex of blackened cloud and ash-gray fury. The storm above was not natural. It writhed with sentience, as though the sky itself wept for whatever had brought him here.
Rain pierced the hole and fell in a perfect column onto his chest—through the wound in the ceiling, shaped uncannily like a human silhouette.
His silhouette.
Kaelthorn's lips curled faintly, not in surprise.
But in dry, bitter amusement.
Of course, he had fallen through the roof.
Of course, he was the wound in this place.
He sat up with the slow elegance of something not bound by pain. Dust clung to his cloak—charcoal, soot, fragments of plaster and wood. He brushed it off, not from vanity, but from ingrained discipline. A gesture from a life long past, or a persona long buried.
All around him: Ruin.
The interior was unmistakably a bar—but one frozen in the moment of disaster. Time here had not simply passed. It had fractured. Stools lay broken on their sides, tables splintered, bottles shattered into cruel teeth across the floor. Cracks in the wooden walls wept with rainwater. Blood—dark, crusted, ancient—stained every surface like forgotten hieroglyphs of suffering.
The air was thick with rot. Not of flesh alone, but memory.
Kaelthorn rose to his feet, moving with eerie stillness. His boots crunched softly over glass shards and ruined bone. He paused beside the bar's counter—scored with the violent dent of his impact—and ran a finger across a streak of dried red.
He lifted it. Observed it.
Sniffed.
His crimson eyes gleamed with an alien light.
Blood.
Old. Human. Saturated with fear.
He said nothing, already stepping forward—missing entirely how the residue on his fingertip shimmered faintly before dissolving into the sinewy black fibers of his right arm. Absorbed. Claimed.
He explored in silence, his presence disturbingly serene against the backdrop of devastation.
A light switch.
He flicked it out of habit.
Nothing.
Kaelthorn: No electricity.
His voice was gravel wrapped in silk. Calm. Dead calm.
Around him, the remains of lives long extinguished. A torn purse, its contents scattered like entrails. A shattered wristwatch, its hands frozen at 3:07. A broken high heel, snapped cleanly in half. A dented baseball bat streaked with something dark… and—
An ear.
Still wet.
Not cut, but torn. Ripped from the head with raw, feral force.
'Kaelthorn: This wasn't an accident. It was a massacre.'
He circled the bar's length, crouching to examine the cabinets. Empty—but not randomly. The destruction was methodical. Ransacked. Not once, but many times. By different hands. One had moved with panic. Another with silent efficiency. One had simply broken everything out of spite.
'Kaelthorn: Many came here. None stayed.'
His gaze drifted to the door marked "Staff Only."
It loomed like a gravestone in the shadowy rear of the bar. Its paint had blistered and peeled. And across its rusted surface—handprints. Smeared in blood. Small, adult, malformed. Clawing. Desperate.
Kaelthorn stepped closer and gripped the handle.
He twisted.
Locked.
A soft metallic resistance. He twisted harder.
CRRKK.
KCHUNK.
The inner mechanism screamed in surrender. Something inside snapped, and the lock collapsed with a metallic death rattle. The door creaked open on rusted hinges, releasing a breath of cold, stagnant air.
Darkness waited inside.
Not the absence of light.
Something deeper.
He stepped through.
At once, the stench struck him. Copper. Mold. Something burnt. Something rotten.
A trail of blood slithered along the floor like a serpent—wide, heavy. It had been dragged. Not carried. The smears were thick, winding, frantic.
The walls bore scratches. Deep. Violent.
Ceiling bulbs above had been smashed, their remains dangling like the organs of some mechanical carcass. The air was wrong here—wet, dense, acidic.
Kaelthorn followed the path.
Each footfall: deliberate.
TAP.
TAP.
TAP.
To anyone else, the silence might've felt sacred. To Kaelthorn, it was… expectant.
He entered a decimated lounge, or what once resembled one. Every piece of furniture was destroyed—gutted cushions, torn pages of books drifting in puddles, filing cabinets warped open by force, drawers bent like paper. The kitchenette in the corner bore black scorch marks—charcoal, melted plastic, ruptured pipes.
It stank of fire and finality.
But the blood… it never stopped.
It trailed behind a collapsed sofa.
Kaelthorn approached.
Inhaled.
Knelt.
And there, curled as if still hiding—
A child.
A boy, no older than ten.
His chest cavity ripped open, ribs splayed out like wings of bone. His eyes still stared, wide and vacant. Screaming silently.
Kaelthorn said nothing. He didn't blink.
He reached out.
Closed the boy's eyes with two fingers.
Then rose.
And turned.
A second door stood on the far side of the room.
Unmarked. Intact. Unopened.
He stepped toward it. Hand raised.
And stopped.
His fingers hovered just inches from the handle. The space between contact and avoidance.
And in that moment, his body went still—utterly frozen.
Every nerve, every thread of thought, every layer of instinct recoiled.
This was not fear.
It was recognition.
Behind that door, something waited. Not alive. Not undead. Something that twisted both concepts like a joke.
Kaelthorn's pupils narrowed.
'Kaelthorn: That… is not meant to be perceived.'
His mind whispered. His instincts roared. Whatever lay beyond was not merely violent—it was contaminated. Something that didn't just kill, but unmade.
And it knew he was there.
Without a sound, he stepped back.
Then again.
He turned and began to walk.
TAP.
TAP.
TAP.
Each retreating step was weighted with tension—like the final note of a hymn left unsung.
Back in the bar, Kaelthorn found what debris he could—shards of wood, steel piping, snapped legs of furniture. With methodical precision, he jammed them into the frame of the now-broken door. Wedged them deep. Pressed them tight. The barrier wouldn't hold for long.
But that wasn't the point.
It was a message.
A marker for the foolish. A final gesture for the damned.
Let the world ignore this door a little longer. Let it delay the inevitable.
Only once it was sealed did Kaelthorn walk toward the shattered entrance of the bar.
He pushed the remains of the door aside.
And stepped out—into the dying rain.
And the world…
Watched him return.
.
.
The city sprawled outward in all directions like the corpse of a titan—vast, silent, and rotting beneath a bruised and storm-ravaged sky. Above, thunderclouds churned in slow, violent spirals, thick with ash and malice. There was no sun—no trace of day or night—only a perpetual, suffocating twilight. The clouds swelled as if bearing down with the weight of judgment itself.
Rain fell with relentless cruelty. Not drops, but needles—lashing the air in diagonal fury, carving rivulets into stone, metal, and flesh alike. It did not cleanse. It eroded.
The buildings were little more than tombstones now—skeletal remnants of a forgotten era. Concrete husks, leaning like drunks, buckling inward from age and neglect. Cracked facades gaped open with shattered windows, exposing their ribcage interiors to the rain and wind. Mold and mildew festered like rot on every surface, painting walls with fungal blasphemy—black, green, and yellow. Vines had crept through the decay like parasites, clawing through stairwells, wrapping around pillars, and hanging in limp strands from broken balconies. Some bore thorns. Others bore teeth.
Smoke-blackened ruins dotted the landscape—caved-in roofs, splintered beams, collapsed archways. Old banners still clung to the rusted poles, tattered into ribbons, their messages erased by time and despair. Signboards swayed, half-detached, their letters lost to corrosion.
"CA—F—"
"DE—POT"
"-ave Your—"
Each sign a whisper from a past that no longer mattered.
The street was a graveyard of wreckage. Abandoned cars sat frozen mid-flight, crumpled against lamp posts and each other. Windshields were spiderwebbed or shattered completely, the interiors gutted or stripped bare. Bones—both human and animal—lay among the debris. Some arranged deliberately. Others scattered as if flung by something monstrous. Trash bins lay overturned, their contents petrified in sludge. A stroller, its handle broken. A child's boot, soaked and half-submerged. Streetlamps stood like sentinels—tall, dead, and crooked. Rainwater pooled around their feet like the city was slowly drowning in its own memory.
This place hadn't merely died.
It had suffered.
It had screamed.
And then it had died again.
And again.
Like a looping hallucination—trauma trapped on a broken reel, played endlessly in a theatre with no audience.
Kaelthorn stood at the center of it all.
Unmoving.
The wind tugged at his cloak, whipping the long red lining into the air behind him like a banner for a war long since lost. Rain streamed down his face—tracing paths over pale skin, dripping from his jaw, soaking into his collar. His eyes, crimson and void of expression, stared straight ahead—blank, unreadable, like a god pondering the end of creation.
He didn't blink.
Didn't shiver.
Didn't breathe.
Then—
KRATHOOM!!
Lightning tore the sky apart.
A fork of blinding, white-hot light ripped across the heavens, illuminating the world for a single, electric heartbeat. The buildings glowed in inverted clarity, all edges and angles. Shadows leapt away. The world looked flayed. For that brief instant, everything was exposed.
Kaelthorn slowly turned his head.
In the shattered pane of a nearby high-rise window, he saw himself.
A young man, late teens or perhaps early twenties. Tousled brown hair, matted by rain, trailing into lighter tips that framed a face carved in silence. His eyes—those eyes—held not youth, but weight. Crimson pools, deep and still, like something ancient looking through a mask of flesh. His cloak rippled behind him, animated by storm and gravity.
There was no expression.
No sorrow.
No hatred.
Only stillness.
The reflection stared back at him.
And blinked first.
Kaelthorn turned away.
Without a word, he stepped forward—his boots splashing through puddles and broken glass. He didn't look back. The storm swallowed his silhouette as if the world itself were reluctant to let him pass.
And just like that, he was gone.
Not vanished.
Withdrawn.
Like a memory the city itself had tried to forget—but couldn't.
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Picture below.
Kaelthorn the Hollowborn:
Face
Full Appearance
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SWOOSH!!
The rain-slicked ruins melted into a blur as Kaelthorn surged forward—less a man, more a phantom unleashed.
He moved like a rift in reality. A rupture in silence.
A shadow unbound by gravity.
His boots barely kissed the fractured concrete; each stride was a whisper, a smear of motion. Puddles erupted in his wake, sending ripples across the stagnant water like echoes of something long dead. Broken glass twitched beneath his passage. Rusted signs swung violently behind him, stirred by the wind in his wake.
There were no eyes left to see him.
No bystanders. No survivors.
But somehow, that made it worse.
For if someone had watched—just one soul—they might have mistaken him for a ghost, a spirit too fast, too precise, too seamless to be human.
But he was not a ghost.
He was the last heartbeat in a place that had forgotten the rhythm of life.
Every corner he turned, every alleyway he carved through, Kaelthorn scanned—alert, calculating.
A flicker of motion. A breath. A wingbeat.
Anything.
Nothing.
No rodents fled the sound of his approach. No birds stirred beneath the crumbling eaves. Not even the twitch of vermin in the shadows. The buildings, the gutters, the sky itself—everything was paralyzed. Motionless.
The rain fell, yes—but even it felt orchestrated.
Mechanical.
Dead.
Some would scoff. They'd argue—how could he expect to see movement in a storm like this, while moving at such speeds? But Kaelthorn was not ordinary. Not in form. Not in perception.
His vision was a weapon—sharpened past the natural, honed to pierce veils of light and shadow. He could perceive motion with surreal precision: every droplet of rain was a bead suspended in the tapestry of time. Cracks in walls, warps in glass, ghostly reflections in mirror-shards—it all rendered itself before him with haunting lucidity.
Even the dark—the absolute black he had glimpsed earlier—had not been mere absence.
It was something more profound. A living absence.
A darkness that allowed itself to be seen.
A watcher.
Yet despite these gifts, he saw nothing now. Not a flicker. Not a breath.
No insects clung to the walls.
No nests in the gutters.
No roaches skittering through rot and ruin.
The city wasn't just dead.
It was vacuumed of life.
Sterilized by something unseen.
And that silence—it pressed on him now.
A silence that breathed.
That leaned in.
That watched.
'Kaelthorn: This place... it's not just abandoned. It's devoured.'
His pace quickened.
A controlled desperation now gripped his limbs, and with it came a buried instinct—deep, primal, ancient. It surged beneath reason, screaming from marrow and nerve:
You are not supposed to be here.
It knows.
It's waking.
Run.
He obeyed.
The street buckled beneath him, fractured like old bone. Asphalt split into jagged veins of ruin. Rusted cars lay crumpled against leaning lampposts—steel vines that now resembled gallows. Lightbulbs hung shattered, some burst inward, others melted like waxen eyes.
Around him, decay spilled its artifacts.
Trash bins upturned and frozen in half-collapse.
Flyers half-melted into the pavement, their ink running like tears.
Soggy boxes of untouched food.
Stacks of unopened letters—fragile promises never read.
A toy dinosaur, buried nose-deep in a puddle.
A teddy bear, soaked to the stuffing.
A backpack, ripped open at the seams.
Notebooks within, their words smeared into ghost-writing.
It wasn't abandonment.
It was a pause.
A place mid-thought. Mid-breath. Mid-scream.
As if life had been interrupted.
Not destroyed.
Suspended.
Kaelthorn darted left.
Pivoted right.
Leapt effortlessly over debris. His movements weren't rehearsed—they were encoded, ingrained. Like a beast evolved to navigate catastrophe. The world shattered around him, and still he danced through it.
Then—
A clearing.
A wound in the maze of decay.
The buildings fell away to reveal a breach. A corridor of bent iron fences and overgrown stone. A gate. Tall. Barred. Rust-bleeding. It loomed like a sentinel, blocking the edge of the town. Beyond it—open land. Freedom?
No.
But distance.
And that, for now, was enough.
Kaelthorn didn't hesitate.
His boot twisted.
SWOOSH!!
A single bound—three meters into the air.
He soared—coat flaring like wings of blackened silk, the rain spiraling around him in streaks of silver and grey. He cleared the gate with inches to spare, landed low and rolled with the momentum. Not even a pause.
But something clawed at the base of his neck.
A tension. A sensation.
He slowed—just slightly. Turned.
And froze.
The entire town behind him was changing.
Not the buildings. Not the sky.
The space itself.
From alleys and rooftops and drains, something spilled outward.
Darkness.
Not a lack of light.
Something heavier.
It unfurled like smoke, but didn't drift. It crept.
Thick. Wet. Alive.
A curtain of shadow unspooling from every direction—reaching, coiling, seeping like a monstrous breath exhaled too slowly.
The city didn't vanish beneath it.
It was being swallowed.
Not claimed by night.
Not veiled by rain.
But pulled into a mouth too vast to name.
'Kaelthorn: It's not a town anymore. It's a grave... and something's still hungry.'
He didn't look again.
He turned.
And ran.
Vanishing into the storm—
Not as an escapee.
But as a survivor of something that hadn't finished dying.
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But back in that ruined bar—where Kaelthorn had dared not open the door—
Something watched.
Not just recently. Not just today.
It had always been watching.
From the moment Kaelthorn had crossed the bar's shattered threshold—stepped onto its blood-slick tiles, stood beneath its collapsed chandeliers—the presence behind that door had stirred.
Not in surprise.
Not in alarm.
In recognition.
It had woken.
But it had not rushed.
It had waited.
Patient.
Eager.
Starving.
If Kaelthorn had touched the knob...
If he had lingered, doubted, listened just a second longer—
Even a breath longer—
It would have opened.
Not the door.
The thing behind it.
But he hadn't hesitated.
His instincts—ancient, sharpened by something deeper than reason—had screamed just in time.
He'd turned away. He'd left.
And still…
It watched him go.
Its gaze pierced beyond plaster and steel.
Beyond shattered windows.
Beyond storm and motion.
Beyond distance.
The veil of rain? The city's ruins? The howling of the sky?
All meaningless.
No barrier could block its sight.
Not walls. Not weather. Not reality.
It could have chased him.
It could have caught him.
But it didn't.
Not from mercy.
Not from fear.
Never that.
Because inside that town…
A hundred souls still remained.
Hiding.
Cowering.
Tucked beneath collapsed ceilings, curled into broken bathtubs, pressed inside closets that no longer shut.
Clutching soaked blankets.
Mouthing silent prayers.
Staring at cracked ceilings and counting the heartbeats that hadn't stopped yet.
They wouldn't stay hidden forever.
Not when food ran out.
Not when wounds festered.
Not when thirst split their lips.
They'd step out.
One by one.
They always did.
Because hunger always wins.
And when they crawled from their hiding places—into the rain, into the wreckage, searching for water, for medicine, for hope...
The Thing would feast.
Kaelthorn was strong. Yes.
Stronger than most.
But the essence he carried—whatever fire lived inside him—was still just one life.
The others?
The forgotten hundred?
They were different.
Fear-soaked.
Ripened.
Unarmed.
Delicious.
So the Thing let him go.
Let the gate shut behind him.
Let the storm carry him away.
Its attention drifted.
It turned its gaze back toward the bar—the cracked door, the blood-soaked lounge, the dark threshold behind which its form curled and coiled and waited.
And then—
The boy's corpse in the hallway—already mangled, torn by unseen forces—crumbled into dust.
Unceremonious. Final.
The barricade Kaelthorn had jammed into the door—
Clicked.
Slid backwards.
Freed itself.
The lock unlatched.
The door creaked open.
Nothing emerged.
But now—
There was no sign Kaelthorn had ever been there.
No footsteps.
No blood.
No scent.
No memory.
The lounge fell still once more.
The rain tapped gently against the broken windows.
And inside that room…
The Thing smiled.
The bar sank back into silence.
And the town—
rotting, half-swallowed, storm-lost—
continued waiting.
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A Day Later
SWOOSH!!
Kaelthorn had been running without pause — without sleep, without nourishment, without reprieve — ever since he escaped that town. His legs were not legs anymore; they were automatons, driven not by muscle or bone, but by fear sculpted into instinct. Twelve hundred kilometers. That's how far he had fled. And still, he didn't feel far enough.
His steps now slowed.
A shudder ran through his frame as he finally stopped. Rain still fell, though gentler here, as if nature herself was whispering after screaming. His shoulders rose and fell with ragged breaths, each one misting into the cold air. Sweat clung to his body, indistinguishable from rain. The weight of water on his cloak made it stick to his frame like a funeral shroud.
Kaelthorn turned slightly, casting one last glance over the vast, empty road behind him — the direction of the town. Then, with a deep breath, he resumed walking forward.
The landscape had changed. Not dramatically, but with the subtle melancholy of a place long forgotten. The road stretched endlessly, slicing through barren stretches of farmland. Dying lands. The fields on either side looked starved of care — their crops withered mid-growth, their soil cracked and thirsty, untouched by even the generous rain now soaking them.
He stopped beside a wooden fence — old, grey, splintering — and vaulted over it into the heart of a dead field. His boots squelched in the mud, and he knelt, examining a shriveled cabbage that disintegrated slightly at his touch. He moved across the rows, brushing his fingers across wilted wheat, yellowed lettuce, dry pods of peas.
His expression darkened.
'Kaelthorn: These crops… they didn't die because of disease. They weren't abandoned after the rain. They died before the rains came.'
That was odd. More than odd. Farmers don't forget. Not all of them. Not across thousands of kilometers. This wasn't carelessness. This was a disappearance.
Not one or two. Not a village. Everyone.
His gaze sharpened. Around him, the silence was unnatural — not just absence, but a vacuum. The kind that follows after something's been removed.
He scanned for signs of habitation. Soon, he spotted a farmhouse — weather-worn, partially collapsed in one corner, yet standing.
He approached it slowly. The same eerie nothingness greeted him. No voices. No flickers of light. But then—
THUG!
THUG!
THUG!
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The sound came rhythmically, heavy and dull — as if something were banging against wood, again and again.
Kaelthorn stilled.
The sound came from the back. He moved like a shadow, feet silent even in the slush. When he reached the rear corner of the house, he pressed his body flat against the wall, then carefully peered around.
There, before an old stable, stood a horse.
Or what was left of one.
Its body was half-decayed, its ribcage visible beneath patches of tattered flesh and matted fur. Torn leather straps still clung to its form — remnants of a saddle. Its flanks bore deep bite marks, some still wriggling with maggots. Dried blood traced a map of agony down its sides. Its eyes — once proud, once full of fire — were now milky and blank.
Yet, it moved. Its head repeatedly nudged at the stable door, gently, almost ritualistically. As if trying to return home.
Kaelthorn crept closer. The horse did not react. Not to his scent. Not to his sound. It simply kept pawing at the door, driven by an unknown compulsion.
Then—
WHISH!!
A sudden gust of wind tore across the yard.
THING!
A metal feeding bucket clattered to the ground from a hook, its fall echoing unnaturally loud.
Instantly, the horse reacted.
NEIGHHH!!
It screamed — a terrible, broken sound — and reared back, its hooves slashing at the air. Then, like a released arrow, it charged at the fallen bucket… and beyond it.
BANG!!
CRACK!!
It collided headfirst with the farmhouse wall.
The impact was sickening. But it didn't stop.
BANG!!
CRACK!!
BANG!!
CRACK!!
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Over and over again, the undead animal bashed itself against the wood, splintering the planks with mindless aggression. Kaelthorn stood back, eyes narrowed, studying. Blood — dark and old — flung from its flanks. Some maggots fell. Some didn't.
Finally—
CRACK!!
CRACK!!
CRASH!!
The wall gave way.
The horse burst inside.
Kaelthorn followed.
The interior of the house was chaos — already ruined by time, but now reduced to kindling by the horse's rampage. Furniture shattered. Glass crunched beneath its hooves. Paintings fell. Dust danced in the air, disturbed from years of stillness.
And still, no one lived here.
The front door exploded outward. The horse bolted again — straight through.
Kaelthorn followed it out the front. He was ready now — to capture it, to examine it, to understand what it was.
But he froze.
The horse, now calm, now strangely poised, was galloping again. Not in circles. Not in madness. But in a perfect straight line — down the road.
Back the way Kaelthorn had come.
Back… to the Town.
His eyes narrowed, dread crawling up his spine like ice.
'Kaelthorn: It's being called.'
He watched as the horse became a speck on the horizon. He didn't chase it.
He turned away.
He didn't need to.
The answer he'd been searching for was already clear.
Kaelthorn: So that's where they all went… All the farmers. All the missing.
His voice was low. Bitter. Resigned.
Kaelthorn: Just how far does the influence of that Town reach?
He didn't want to know.
He moved on.
The road led forward. The land around him grew more industrial. Soon, a battered, moss-covered billboard greeted him with rust-streaked words:
"Welcome to Tokyo"
'Kaelthorn: Tokyo… so this is Japan.'
He quickened his pace.
The city came into view.
And it wasn't welcoming.
Not anymore.
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Tokyo didn't rise like a metropolis. It loomed — a jagged skeleton of black towers, malformed and still. The skyline was broken, like something half-digested by the Earth and vomited back up. There were no lights. No signs. Not even the faint hum of electricity clinging to life. Just monolithic silence.
This wasn't nightfall.
This was abandonment incarnate.
The six-lane highway that had once carried a million voices now lay cracked and split, overrun with weeds that clawed up from the pavement like fingers eager to escape their graves. The faded white lane markings were ghostly veins beneath a skin of rot. A rusted highway sign had fallen, its face buried in the dirt like a corpse ashamed of its name.
Kaelthorn passed convenience stores — their glass shattered, their shelves half-stocked and layered in dust. The kind of dust that takes years to settle. A bottle of water still stood on one counter, label peeling, untouched for eternity.
Wires drooped from above like dead serpents. Poles leaned sideways. Many had snapped entirely. He stepped over the fallen cords, and for a moment, his mind imagined them twitching.
Beside the road, a vending machine had been torn open — not by human hands, but by something stronger. Cans littered the ground. Some exploded. Some untouched. A smear of blood… or rust… or something worse… trailed away from the scene and abruptly ended.
And then came the edge of the city proper.
It didn't begin with life.
It began with absence.
An entire city frozen in the middle of death. Alleys like wounds. Windows like open mouths. Buildings standing not with pride, but as husks — hollow-eyed, patient, decaying.
No wind here. No animals. No sounds.
Far inside the city, something metal clanged against something metal.
Once.
Then silence again.
Kaelthorn didn't move.
He didn't speak.
He only felt.
'Kaelthorn: Let's see, what else this world has to offer.'
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*A/N: Please throw some power stones.
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