The first thing he saw was blood.Warm, fresh, dripping across his fingers—yet it was not his own.
"Save him!"The voice was a scream, yet it reached him muffled, as if echoing from beneath water.
On the table lay the body of a child.His chest split open, his heart silent.The scalpel rested in Nathan's hand.
And every eye in the room stared at him—not with hope, but with horror.
Then, beneath the hum of fluorescent lights, another voice slithered into his mind.A whisper that did not belong to this room, nor even to this world:
"You chose this path… long before you were born."
***
Once, he had been known as Nathan—a man collapsing under the weight of a life that had slipped beyond his grasp.
At forty-two, Nathan was a ghost of a man, exiled from the only thing that had given his existence meaning. A surgeon by title, once praised in the quiet corners of operating theaters, now adrift in gray days and sleepless nights, clinging like a specter to a rusted chain of memories. He lived in a crumbling apartment on the outskirts of a city too fast for the broken, his world reduced to the low hum of an old refrigerator and the occasional wail of a siren reminding him he had not yet died.
They had called him Dr. Nathan Ashford—miracle worker, precision incarnate, the man who whispered to dying hearts and coaxed them back to life. In the hushed halls of St. Amelia's Medical Center, nurses spoke his name like a prayer. Families clung to every word he uttered, their eyes wide with desperate hope. His success was clinical. Cold. Immaculate.
But in the end, it had taken only a single moment.One mistake.One child who never woke.
No alarms, no shouts—only the silence of a flat line and the sterile sting of iodine. Nathan stood frozen in the operating room, his gloved hands hovering above the chest of an eight-year-old boy, lungs still pried open, heart caught in his grasp. A thousand hours of training, a thousand more of experience—rendered meaningless—one miscalculation. One cut too deep. Too swift.
The silence devoured him.
He could still hear the phantom beeping long after the monitors were shut off—ghostly echoes pulsing inside his skull, throbbing behind his eyes. They told him it wasn't entirely his fault. Complications happen. Some cases spiral out of control. But Nathan knew better. He had seen the blade in his hand. Felt the tremor that wasn't supposed to be there.
He had killed the boy.And that knowledge—quiet, slow, corrosive—unraveled him from the inside.
He did not resist the inquiry, nor hire a lawyer, nor defend himself when the court stripped away his license.
He packed what remained of his pride and walked into obscurity. His apartment shrank around him. His phone stopped ringing. His friends fell silent. His name was scrubbed from hospital records like mold scraped from a wall.
He became a ghost in his own life.
Months passed in a haze of sleeplessness and half-eaten meals. He returned to the decaying home at the city's edge, where his grandmother still lived—the only person who had not turned her back on him. The building was a ruin of peeling wallpaper, creaking floors, and forgotten clocks, but it was the only place that did not spit him out.
She never asked about the trial.Never mentioned the boy.She simply brewed tea and told stories—of faded heirlooms, old paintings, and a strange cellar that had been locked for decades.
He nodded. Listened. Pretended to care.
But inside, Nathan was hollow—a wound in the shape of a man.
It wasn't grief. Not exactly. He did not cry. Did not scream into pillows or drink himself to oblivion. Instead, silence clung to him, as though sorrow had worn away all its sharp edges, leaving only dust. He moved as if underwater. Spoke as though his lungs were weary of words.
He saw the boy's face everywhere.In mirrors.In dreams.In passing glimpses of children crossing the street.
His grandmother noticed, of course. Her eyes remained sharp even as her body surrendered to age. But she said nothing. She knew how grief lurked, how it decayed in silence. She let him collapse in peace.
Until the coughing began.
At first, a dry rasp. Harmless. Irritating.
But when she noticed blood on her handkerchief, it was already too late.
***
Nathan sat at her bedside in her final days. Hospital rooms, this time from the other side. Fluorescent lights buzzed like flies. The irony was suffocating—the man who once cradled life in his hands was now watching it slip from the grasp of the only person who still loved him.
She held his hand and whispered through cracked lips:
"The door in the basement… It's yours now."
He didn't understand. Thought the fever was speaking. But her eyes were far too clear. They gleamed with something else… not fear. Not delirium. Something beyond.
She died soon after.Silence claimed the house.
Nathan buried her alone. The church was nearly empty—just him, a priest who asked no questions, and the distant patter of rain on headstones. When he returned home, the emptiness gnawed at him. Every floorboard groaned louder. Every shadow seemed deeper.
Grief had grown teeth.
He avoided the basement for weeks. But the thought festered—the locked door, her strange words, that gaze that had pierced through him.
Finally, he descended the stairs.
They groaned beneath his weight. Dust clung to every surface like ash. The cellar was a mausoleum of forgotten heirlooms, broken chairs, and yellowed books. But in the far corner—behind a rusted trunk and a cracked mirror—stood the door.
Wooden. Black. Unmarked.
Sealed with five iron nails.
His hands trembled as he undid each latch. The air thickened—as if reality itself did not want the door to open.
Behind it: darkness.
Not absence of light, but a presence waiting.
Stairs carved into stone led downward. Far deeper than the foundation should have allowed. The walls shimmered like obsidian laced with frost.
At the bottom stood another door. Not wood this time.
It pulsed. It breathed. And above its arch, in silver flame, words burned in a tongue he had never seen—yet somehow understood:
"I am LUNA, daughter of the unwanted. Heir to what was lost. If you dare wager destiny… step forward."
Nathan stood at the threshold, a thousand memories tearing at him—the boy, the hospital, the silence.
He stepped.
And the world ended.
The moment Nathan crossed the gate, the world shuddered around him.
It was not like falling, nor like flight. It was something his senses could not define. Light folded in on itself. Sound melted into color. Weight froze. He felt himself rewritten—not carried, not dragged—but dismantled, scattered, then rewritten.
A scream caught in his throat, but he could not hear it.
For an eternity that might have lasted a single heartbeat, there was nothing.Nobody. No voice. No thought.
Then—earth.
Soil. Cold, damp, coarse. The taste of moss, bitter and earthen, burned on his tongue as icy wind stung his bare neck. Nathan coughed, breath choking as if his body was learning to breathe anew. His fingers clawed at the ground, desperate for something real.
When he opened his eyes, the world was dark.
Twilight.
But the sky above was not the sky of Earth. No stars—only a vast shroud of clouds swirling like smoke in slow motion. A pale moon hung unnaturally close, carved with shifting runes that changed whenever he blinked.
He tried to stand, but stumbled.
His limbs felt wrong.
Smaller. Lighter. Younger.
His breath caught—this time in terror.
He raised his hands to his face—and froze.
They were not his.
Not Nathan's.
Slender fingers. Flawless skin. No surgical scars. No calloused joints. His flesh was pale, as though it had never seen sunlight.
He staggered toward a pool, its surface reflecting the moonlight. What stared back at him made his heart stutter.
A child.
A boy.
Hair—blond, wet, tangled.
And eyes.
Red. Deep, unsettling crimson, glowing faintly even in the dark.
He stumbled back, tripping over his own feet, the forest looming around him—trees twisted, bark black, leaves like withered hands. No birds. No wind. Only silence.
"What… is this place?" he whispered, his voice now smaller, unfamiliar.
A name echoed in his mind.
Elias.
He did not know why, but it resounded like a memory—someone else's memory. Or perhaps it had always been there, waiting beneath Nathan's skin.
From deep within the trees, a howl carried—neither beast nor man. Something in between.
He turned back to the gate, but it was gone.
The stone archway that had led him here no longer stood behind him. Only more forest. More darkness. As though it had never existed.
Nathan—Elias—stood alone beneath a cursed moon, in a body that was not his own, in a world that whispered madness through the trees.