In the heart of the forsaken wood,
Darkness had not merely fallen—it had taken root, thick and ancient, threading itself into bark and bone, into the sinew of twisted trees and the breathless hush of the mist. For so long had silence ruled that it no longer felt like absence, but presence—an entity of its own, vast and watching. Towering arboreal colossi, their limbs warped by time and madness, clawed toward the unseen sky, their crooked branches forming a lattice so dense that even moonlight had forgotten the path.
The air was heavy with rot, steeped in the metallic tang of old rain and older blood. Mist hung low, a silver ocean surrounded by mysteries, curling around trunks like serpents and swallowing sound with greedy patience. No birds called. No insects hummed. What dwelled here did so beneath the veil of stillness—a place outside of seasons, outside of time.
It was not simply lifeless. It had been cast away. Deliberately severed from the rhythm of the world beyond. A land cursed and discarded, left to ferment into legend. Tales passed through trembling lips warned of it—not with hope of rescue or redemption, but with the finality of graves. This was no fairytale glade with faeries and wonder. This was a warning etched in bloodied bark, whispered in the nightmares of dying men.
And yet—the forest lived.
It pulsed with a grim vitality, a throbbing undercurrent of presence just beneath perception. Life did not blossom here—it twisted. Creatures slithered and skittered through the fog, born of solitude and starvation, shaped by aeons of abandonment. They bore no name. No taxonomy. The laws of nature had long ceased to matter here. What crawled beneath those boughs had teeth where no mouths should be, eyes that blinked in sideways rhythms, limbs too many or not enough. Even demons, in the whispers of the old priests, were more merciful than the aberrations birthed by these woods.
Few approached willingly.
Empires had once sent scouts, then soldiers, then entire legions, drawn by the seduction of the unknown. Promises of ancient power, forgotten relics, hidden truths. None returned. Not as themselves. The forest did not consume them—it unmade them. Turned their bones to dust, their ambitions to silence. No maps could hold its shape. No path stayed open. It endured, untamed and untouchable.
They said only the mad dared step here now. Or the broken. Those hollowed by loss, with nothing left worth clinging to. No one that crossed into this forsaken terrain had ever returned. And now, at the very threshold where shadow bled into mist, stood one who was both.
A lone silhouette, woven into the gloom itself, his form was draped in a black cloak, light yet unyielding, molding to him as though tailored by the hand of some forgotten age—garb of a warrior erased from memory, or a priest cast out from the grace of his gods. Layer upon layer, each frayed and thinned by wind, rain, and relentless years. Only his eyes remained to defy the concealment—two molten embers smoldering in the dark, their heat banked yet unextinguished beneath the mask that guarded the secrets of his face.
He did not belong here. And yet, the forest had not cast him out.
He had lingered long enough to be tolerated—like a scar that no longer bled. He was not the fiercest thing among the trees. Nor the fastest. But he endured. He learned. He bled, and he adapted. A shadow among shadows. A whisper that refused to be silenced.
How many days had passed since he first crossed the veil? He no longer knew. Time here unraveled. A thread pulled loose from the tapestry of the world until all sense of beginning and end dissolved. Days bled into nights without border, without breath. Years, perhaps, had vanished like smoke. And still, he remained.
He had come to Sanscriptum not seeking answers, but oblivion.
To erase the weight of memory. To drown the noise of cities, the betrayals that festered in their stone hearts, the endless demands of eyes that expected too much. No more oaths. No more failure. No more names. Here, there was only the rhythm of breath, the ache of muscle, the necessity of movement. Here, the past could not follow.
Here, he could disappear without dying.
But silence has teeth.
And solitude, if consumed for too long, becomes a hunger of its own—a hollow ache that gnaws at the marrow. He told himself he felt nothing. That he had been emptied of all things human.
He lied.
And the forest, ever watchful, knew it.
The sound came on a day that might have been dusk, or dawn, or neither. A faint disturbance, barely audible—yet it cleaved through the stillness like a dagger through cloth.
A whisper.
Soft. Uneven. Alien.
He froze.
His every muscle drew taut, a bowstring ready to sing. In this place, the sound was a sign of death. The predators here did not roar or screech. They slid. They slithered. Even their kills were muffled, violence swallowed before the scream. For a sound to break the silence—it could not be native. It must have come from beyond. Or from something that had never truly belonged.
The whisper came again. Thread-thin. Wet with strangeness. Pulling.
He moved, slow as drifting smoke, a predator shaped by patience and repetition. Each step fell with unnatural grace, leaving the mist undisturbed, the earth unmarked. Not even the brittle branches dared to crack beneath him.
The forest leaned inward, curious. Or perhaps jealous.
His golden eyes cut through the murk, scanning for the source. The fog brushed against his legs like fingers from a dream half-remembered. Trees loomed above, hunched and suspicious. Watching.
And then—he saw it.
His eyes narrowed, a flicker of surprise betraying itself—though the mask concealed it from sight.
There, not twenty paces ahead, nestled among twisted roots and curling mist, stood an object—knee-high, ovular, cloaked in tattered black cloth. It pulsed with silence, like it had been waiting to be seen.
He surged forward, a ghost in motion. One heartbeat he stood behind the veil of branches, the next he was above it, crouched, blade drawn, the point of steel trembling above the shape like a verdict.
He could see the energy that wrapped around the object. At first glance, it seemed ordinary, fashioned from fine, masterful craftsmanship. Yet what unsettled him was the pulse within—something alive, imprisoned at its core. And the energy it radiated was unlike anything he had ever encountered. At most, it bore the faintest resemblance to something he had only read about, never witnessed.
The presence emanating from that imprisoned being was… wrong. A chilling weight clung to it—dense and black as pitch, yet threaded with light, as though holiness itself had been tangled in shadow. It whispered a language of conflicting sensations, too layered for his unfocused gaze to fully grasp. This was not the essence of any living creature he had known, nor any cultivated power he had studied. It bore no kinship to the forces of the beings in Sanscriptum. It was… sacred, and yet, somehow, profane.
Driven by the uncertainty, he forced his vision to sharpen. The eyes that usually glimmered a muted, smoldering gold through the mask's slits now blazed, as if their very irises had been spun from threads of molten gold, each strand embedded with countless distant stars.
The moment his sight deepened, activating the full power of his eyes, dizziness crashed through him. His balance faltered, his body swaying under the weight of it. He could not discern a true form—only fragments, a glimpse of something beyond shape. The source of the energy remained hidden, its nature unfathomable. At best, he thought he caught the ghost of runes, scattered like shards of a forgotten language, but whenever he tried to recall them, they dissolved into nothing.
His eyes flew wide, terror glinting within them—and from their edges, a single bead of blood slid down his cheek.
'A trap? But set for whom? Who else would be mad enough to walk this cursed soil?'
No answer came. Only questions coiled tighter.
His breath was measured. His muscles coiled. One stroke, and it would be gone.
But the blade did not fall.
He hesitated.
Not out of fear. But recognition—of something that did not belong. The wrongness of it was too complete. Too deliberate.
It breathed with a life unlike any he had ever known—ancient, yet newly born; sacred, yet stripped of sanctity. A living paradox, draped in impossibility. And still, it endured, cradled in the hollow where only madness dared to wander, kept like a secret the sane were never meant to unearth.
Caution screamed, but curiosity had sharper claws.
With the tip of his dagger, he prodded the cloth aside. The motion was precise, reverent, as though peeling back a shroud from a corpse.
Beneath, the darkness shifted.
His breath hitched. Just once.
His heart stuttered, missing a beat—a warning.
Golden eyes widened, flaring with light not entirely his own. Something within them fractured and reformed, as if the world had tilted, and the axis of his reality had changed.
"This…" the words were breath, not voice. Cracked and uncertain.
"This is a—"