A claw tore through my chest.
My heart pierced by its sharp claw. Anger built into my chest.
My sword lay on the ground.
I reached for it. My hand shook. Blood spilled.
Too far.
In seconds, I would be dead.
I wanted to fight.
I wanted to kill it, the damned wraith.
But all I could do—
Was watch, as my life came to an end.
…How did it come to this?.
---
Night stared into the abyss. Bottomless. Endless.
His silver hair fell over his shoulders, framing a face carved by grief itself.
His eyes—once alive, once burning—were now nothing but dim silver glass. Hollow. Empty. Shadows clung inside them like ghosts, the fragments of a soul already gone.
Tears slid down his cheeks. Silent. Bitter. They carved lines through the dirt and ash that clung to his torn clothes.
A laugh escaped his lips. Hollow. Shattered. Cruel.
It gave nothing back.
No relief. No peace.
Only more pain—the kind that festers, the kind that never heals.
He kept sinking.
Deeper into himself.
The numbness creeping, filling, taking everything.
His head ached. His thoughts dragged like chains. Every breath was a burden.
The world around him felt weightless, unreal.
As if time itself had cracked—and left him stranded in the fracture.
Where nothing lived.
Not even memory.
He had lost everything.
His parents.
His sister.
His friends.
The one he swore to protect.
The promise he made to her clawed at him, heavy, cruel, echoing like a curse. He was tired. Tired of failing. Tired of breaking promises.
What was left?
No hope.
No meaning.
No strength.
His hand shook as it pressed into the dirt. Fingers brushed something cold.
A key, one that felt cold and held the aura that brought people to their end.
He should have thrown it away.
Should have left it to rot like everything else.
But he didn't.
He only stared.
Then, without a word—
Without a thought—
He stepped forward.
And jumped.
---
The air screamed around him as he fell.
Faster.
Colder.
Deeper.
Until—
Stillness.
He wasn't falling anymore.
He drifted. Suspended in a dark without end.
Weightless. Empty. Drowned in silence.
And then—
They came.
Two presences stirred the void.
One—shadow. Formless. Still. Its eyes carried no judgment. Only pity. It did not speak. But its silence thundered in his mind.
The other—light. A figure wrapped in pale glow. No warmth in it, only a fragile calm that dulled the edges of his pain.
"Who are you?" Night whispered.
Her eyes were stars buried behind clouds. Her hair shimmered faintly, the edge of dawn against nothingness.
"You seek the end," she said, soft as a wound, "but your fate was sealed long before this. You cannot stop it."
"I didn't ask for this," his voice cracked. "I just wanted it to end…"
The shadow leaned close. Pressure pressed into him—like the Void itself listening. Waiting.
The girl didn't move back. She only stepped closer.
"Even in despair, you chose," she said. "Your heart longs for truth. But truth cannot be given. It must be earned."
"I have no reason to try," he whispered. Barely breathing.
"I just want to know why. Why I suffer. Why I exist like this."
Her gaze did not falter.
"Then earn it. The truth is within you. But it will not reveal itself unless you face it."
A door appeared beside her. Not summoned. Not built. Just torn into existence—silent, wrong. Its surface shimmered between black and white. Oil and starlight.
"Face your Trial," she said.
Night's jaw locked. His fists trembled. He gave no answer.
He stepped forward.
Toward the door.
Toward the unknown.
Toward the Trial.
Her voice followed him, low, almost fading.
"What you seek… always returns."
A pause.
Her tone softened.
"I'll stay with you until the end, Master.
My name… is Solenne."
The door swallowed him whole.
And the Trial began.
---
The Hex
It came after the wars. After the skies split open. After the earth turned inside out, swallowing whole cities. After the world stopped breathing.
After the fire.
After the screams.
After the silence.
People vanished. Without reason. Without warning. Their absence was so absolute it felt like a dream that had been stolen, ripped from the hearts that remembered them.
When they returned—broken, scarred—they were not the same.
Marks covered their skin. Tattoos etched in lines too delicate, too intricate. Beautiful in a way that unsettled, wrong in ways that could not be named. Proof of where they had gone. Proof they had survived.
Some glowed faint.
Some pulsed—alive, as if something inside still moved.
No one knew where the marked had been.
No one knew why they came back like this.
But one truth lingered.
The Trials.
Every Mark was a key. A door that led to something worse than death. And once opened, that door never closed.
The Trials shredded the soul. Broke it. Remade it.
Those who endured came back changed.
Those who didn't… became Gates.
Gates that vomited nightmares. Fears given form. Memories that never belonged. Wounds that refused to close.
They split the world open.
Hells carved into the earth.
Through them came horrors outside of time. Twisted lives. Things that should never exist. Ghosts of choices never made.
This was the Dread Hex. A living curse.
It scarred flesh, yes—but also sky, stone, thought.
Like death, it was eternal.
Like death, it never left.
And yet—
From its ashes, Seekers rose.
The marked who endured. Who clawed their way back with purpose. They had faced the Trials. They had seen the Gates. They had lived.
They returned with scraps of what was lost—fragments of magic buried for centuries, technologies thought dead, methods to survive a broken realm.
And the world shifted.
Cities stirred.
Nations rose again.
Hope flickered, fragile but alive.
But power does not rest.
Some sought to bind the Marks.
Others built walls against the Abyss.
Whispers spread—factions rising, pacts breaking, war thickening in the dark.
Seekers became symbols. Revered. Feared.
More than human.
Bound to the Hex.
But even they—
Even they could not stop the eyes that had already turned toward the wounded world.