The sky bled crimson.
Thunder rolled like the drums of war, and the heavens split open as nine silhouettes descended upon a single figure. They were gods—resplendent, merciless, united.
At the center, Aion stood defiant. His aura shook the stars themselves, a presence too vast for mortals to comprehend. His voice roared, shaking both heaven and earth.
"You fear me not because I have betrayed you, but because I stand above you. You bind me not for justice, but for envy."
The nine gods answered in one voice, their words like burning chains.
"Balance must be broken."
From their hands, luminous shackles formed—chains of fire, chains of ice, chains of shadow, chains of light. They pierced Aion's body, his soul, his very concept. He screamed—not in pain, but in fury, as his power was torn apart.
With a final roar, Aion split fragments of himself into countless shards and scattered them across the mortal world.
"If I cannot break these chains… then one born under their weight shall rise to do so in my stead."
The world went silent. The gods stood victorious. Aion was no more.
Three thousand years later.
Rain fell over a remote village tucked deep within the forest, far from the kingdoms of men. A small house stood isolated at the edge of the settlement. Inside, a woman screamed in labor.
The midwives whispered frantically. Something was wrong. The child's cry did not sound like a newborn—it carried weight, like a tremor in the air.
When the baby opened his eyes, the room dimmed. Invisible chains shimmered faintly around his small body, binding his limbs, coiling around his chest. The midwives gasped and crossed themselves.
"Cursed…" one whispered.
The father, a broad man with scars from years of hunting, clenched his fists. "What do you mean cursed?!"
But then the storm outside roared, lightning cracking directly above the house, and everyone saw them: nine faint outlines of chains glowing for just an instant before vanishing again.
The priest of the village barged into the room, robes drenched. His eyes widened as he saw the child. "Nine chains…" he whispered. His voice grew louder, panicked. "The mark of the Betrayer! That child carries the curse of Aion!"
The mother weakly held the boy to her chest. "He's just a baby… my baby…"
The priest's voice thundered. "This is no child. This is a vessel of ruin. Kill him before the curse spreads!"
But before anyone could move, the storm crashed again. One of the chains around the child shimmered faintly, and a wave of unseen force knocked the priest against the wall. He screamed in agony, his skin blistering as though touched by fire.
The villagers, terrified, fled into the rain. By the time dawn came, the child's parents were dead—murdered by blades in the night, their bodies discarded in the mud. Only the baby remained, wrapped in bloodstained cloth, his tiny hands reaching for a sky that seemed determined to crush him.
His name was whispered only once, by his dying mother:
"Aruto…"
Ten years later.
The river whispered quietly as rain pattered against the forest canopy. A boy sat on the riverbank, his feet dangling in the water. His hair was dark, with faint crimson tips that glimmered when the light caught them. His eyes were a deep, burning red—eyes that had earned him nothing but fear.
Everywhere he went, people whispered. Cursed child. Demon spawn. Chainbearer.
No one played with him. No one spoke to him, except with threats or warnings. He had grown up in silence, alone, watching the other children from a distance as they trained, laughed, and belonged.
He dipped his hand into the water. For just a moment, he felt it—the faint, oppressive pull of the chains binding his soul. He could never see them fully, but sometimes, when he strained hard enough, he could hear them.
A faint click, like iron straining.
Each sound came with a rush of pain, as though his veins were fire.
Aruto clenched his jaw. He had no magic, no strength like the others. But he had one thing: stubbornness.
He remembered the day the villagers cornered him, calling him a curse, throwing stones. He had fought back, fists bloody, teeth clenched. Even beaten half to death, he hadn't cried.
He had sworn that day:
"If I can't have magic, I'll make this cursed body into a weapon."
So he trained. Alone. He copied hunters, imitated soldiers, shadowboxed in the mud until he collapsed. Every scar on his body was self-made.
The river's calm broke as footsteps approached.
"Aruto."
He turned. A girl stood there—Sachi, the healer's daughter. She was the only one who dared approach him. Her eyes were sharp, her hair tied neatly, a basket of herbs in hand.
"You skipped again," she said.
Aruto smirked faintly. "What's the point of attending classes when everyone wants me gone?"
She frowned, kneeling to check his pulse. Her hand lingered, brow furrowing. "Fever. You're burning up."
Aruto shrugged. "Perfect timing."
"Perfect timing?!" She glared. "You'll die if you keep pushing like this."
"Then I die training." His tone was flat, cold.
Sachi's eyes softened. "You're impossible."
From the shadows of the trees, another figure watched. Yori—the wolf-eyed boy, quiet and loyal. He didn't speak much, but his gaze told Aruto everything: I'll fight beside you, even if the world calls you cursed.
The rain grew heavier.
Aruto stood, fists clenched, breath ragged. Deep inside, the chains rattled again—just faintly.
And for the first time, he swore he heard a voice.
A whisper in the storm.
"…Break them."
The whisper faded with the rain.
Aruto stood, breathing through the ache in his ribs. He'd learned to count his breaths the way hunters do when they stalk deer—four counts in, hold, six counts out—until the body obeys and the mind stops screaming. He didn't know why the rhythm soothed the pain in his chest, only that it did.
Sachi watched him for a moment longer, then set her basket down with a sigh. "There was… another notice," she said. "At the shrine. The priest wants you gone by the next full moon."
Aruto's mouth twitched. "He'll have to kill me to make that happen."
"That's exactly what I'm afraid of."
Yori shifted his weight in the bushes and finally stepped out. He was taller than Aruto now, lean muscle under a patched tunic, hair falling over eyes that glowed faintly amber in low light. He didn't say hello. He never wasted words.
"We move tonight," Yori said.
Aruto's gaze sharpened. "Move?"
Yori nodded toward the village. "Cellar of the old shrine. I watched the priest lock it himself after sunset. He took something down there last week wrapped in belltwine and prayers. Scent of ash. Old ash."
Sachi's eyes widened. "You can't—"
"We can," Aruto said quietly. "And we will."
Sachi pressed her lips together. She knew better than to argue when Aruto's eyes went that particular shade of dark.
"Then I'm coming," she said.
Aruto almost told her no. The word rose to his tongue, then died. Sachi had stitched his cuts shut in silence more times than he could count. She had watched him cough blood and hadn't flinched. And she was the only person in the village who talked to him like he was human.
"Stay behind me," he said instead.
Night swallowed the village in wet velvet. Lamps guttered along the main street. The shrine sat at the eastern edge, half-swallowed by moss and ivy, a row of stone guardians squinting through rain. Bells hung from the eaves—small, iron, and dull—meant to ward off evil spirits. They chimed anyway as the wind worried them, a soft, tinny heartbeat.
Yori led them along the outer wall, where the ground dropped to a drainage channel. He moved like a wolf through reeds—silent, precise. Aruto followed, memorizing each footfall.
They reached a half-buried door behind the shrine, its hinges welded by rust. Yori produced a sliver of bone—gods knew where he had learned to shape bone into tools—and worked the latch with a patience Aruto never possessed. The lock surrendered with a soft clack.
Cold air swelled up from the dark. It smelled of old paper and something else, something metallic and bitter that wasn't quite blood.
Sachi swallowed. "If we get caught—"
"We won't," Yori said.
They descended. Steps slick with damp led into a narrow corridor. There were shelves on either side stuffed with cracked bowls, prayer ropes, dust-choked scrolls. Rats skittered. The corridor opened into a low room with a stone slab in the center, a bronze basin at one end, and a sealed chest at the other.
Aruto's skin prickled. The chains around his core tightened, then loosened, as if breathing on their own.
"There," Yori murmured, tilting his head at the chest.
Aruto crossed the room. The chest was bound in belltwine knotted in seven places and sealed with a pressed bead of dark wax. He touched the knot. It stung, like touching a nettle. Not a normal ward. The wax bore a sigil: a circle with nine spokes. His breath shortened.
"It's not their symbol," Sachi whispered. "Not the Church's."
"No," Aruto said, palm hovering above the seal. "Older."
He didn't ask permission. He gripped the belltwine and pulled until the fibers bit his skin. The knots resisted, then loosened under steady force. He slid a thumbnail under the wax. It burned cold. He forced it anyway until the seal popped like a blister.
Inside lay a book bound in something that might have been leather once and might not have come from anything human. Its cover was cracked, its spine repaired with threads of black reed. The title, if it was one, had been scraped away. A pattern of scorched circles wove the front, nine small and one larger, lines connecting them like a map of planets or shackles.
Aruto reached out. The moment his fingertips brushed the cover, something opened inside his skull—like a door he hadn't known existed.
He didn't see the cellar anymore.
He saw—stone. A hall of stone, towering and dark, lit from within by veins of molten light. Chains crisscrossed the air from pillar to pillar, taut and singing. In the center, something huge lay coiled, breathing. Each exhale rippled through the chains. With each inhale the light dimmed.
A voice fell through him like a bell struck at the bottom of the sea.
This is not where I sleep, the voice said, echoing inside bone. This is where I wait.
"Who are you?" Aruto tried to ask, but his mouth didn't move in the vision.
The question is not who I am, child of chains, the voice said. The question is who you will become when they break.
The vision snapped. He was back in the cellar, kneeling, hands on the book, Sachi's fingers on his shoulder, Yori poised like a coiled spring, listening for footsteps.
"What did you see?" Sachi whispered.
"Nothing," Aruto lied. He could not explain it—not when the image was still burned into his eyes. Not when saying it aloud might make it less real.
He opened the book.
The first page was a mess of lines that refused to be lines until he didn't look directly at them. Then they became letters—but not like any script he had seen. The letters were built from hooks and thorns, each one pulling at the breath in his chest. The second page was a diagram: a body, muscles mapped with thin black thread, nine points marked along the spine and beneath the sternum, each connected by a path of small circles. The third page—breath cycles. Inhale count. Holds. Exhale count. The exact rhythm his body had stumbled toward at the river, written out as if the book had been watching him.
"It's wrong," Sachi said behind him, voice barely sound. "It feels wrong."
"It feels true," Aruto said.
Yori grunted. "Both can be true."
Aruto read until his eyes throbbed. Some sections blurred when he tried to focus, then snapped crisp when he stopped trying. Some diagrams only resolved when he held his breath until his vision sparkled. The book taught without kindness. It demanded without apology. The body is the gate. Pain is the key. Breath is the hand that turns it.
A section near the end was stitched shut with black thread. Someone had literally sewn the pages together. Sachi's hand hovered. "Don't."
"I won't," Aruto said. Not yet.
He copied the first cycle into memory. He closed the book and rewrapped it with the belltwine, not the way it had been, but close. Enough that a casual glance would not scream stolen.
As they turned to leave, a floorboard above groaned. Feet. Slow. Old. The priest.
Yori's head snapped toward the sound. Sachi's breath caught.
Aruto slid the book under his shirt. It seared his skin, cold and hot at once.
They retreated the way they came—steps swallowed by damp air, backs pressed to stone when a candle's glow swept the corridor above. The priest muttered a prayer. Bells rattled. At the rear door, Yori waited until the light moved away, then eased it open with the same care he had used to enter.
They ran through the rain until the shrine was a smear behind them and the river's whisper swallowed their heartbeats. Only then did Aruto let himself exhale.
Sachi grabbed his sleeve. "Swear to me," she said, voice shaking, "that you won't do anything stupid with that."
Aruto looked at her. Sachi's hair was plastered to her cheeks, eyes hard and bright. She was the closest thing he had to conscience.
He lied again. "I swear."
Yori gave him a look that said he knew exactly what Aruto planned to do.
He did it that night.
Not at home—if the priest came knocking, Aruto didn't want the floor to smell of salt and blood. Not in the old barn either—too many rats, too many listening floors. He picked the riverbank instead, down where the fog pooled and the reeds threw shadows like fingers.
He stripped to the waist. Rain traced the ridges of old scars. He set the book on a flat stone with the diagram facing up and kneeled until his knees found cold mud.
He began the first cycle.
Inhale for four counts through the nose. Hold for four. Exhale for six through clenched teeth. Again. Again. The rhythm built a box around his mind. Thoughts rattled against it and fell quiet.
The second pattern added a swallow at the top of the breath—a tiny act that somehow folded the air in his chest so it sat heavier, denser. The third pattern asked for a squeeze low in the belly on the exhale, like wringing water from a cloth.
By the fourth pattern, his lungs burned. By the fifth, his ears roared like surf. By the sixth, he began to hear the chains.
Not clicks now. Not whispers. A low, patient hum, coming not from around him, but inside him—as if someone plucked a wire that ran from his heart to his spine to the base of his skull.
He followed the diagram's path with his breath—up the spine, bead by bead, into a point beneath the sternum, then down, then across, then up again. The path made no sense as anatomy. It made perfect sense as a map of the pain.
A drop of blood slid from his nose to his lip. He tasted iron. Good. The book had said there would be blood if he did it right.
When the seventh pattern asked for a hold until something changed, he saw blackness creep at the edges of his vision. He held anyway. Something did change.
One of the chains deep in his chest went from hum to strain.
It didn't snap. It didn't fracture. It shifted, like a boulder moving a fraction of an inch on a mountain path.
The world responded as if a seal under the river had loosened. The wind pinwheeled. A low ripple moved through the reeds. The rain around him coagulated for a heartbeat into a silver net and then was only rain again.
And then came the pain.
It wasn't the biting scream of a cut or the dull ache of a bruise. It was heat and ice braided together, forcing itself through every nerve like a bright wire. It turned his spine into a furnace rod and his chest into a pair of hammers. He folded around it, teeth clamped, breath gone feral.
He didn't cry out.
He let the pain run.
When it passed, he was shaking. The breath cycle had dissolved into ragged gasps. He tasted mud. His hands had sunk into the riverbank up to his knuckles. He pulled them free. They trembled.
Something stood at the edge of the reeds.
It was not a person.
It was not a beast.
It was a shape, taller than a man, thin as a spear, darkness folded into darkness, head crowned in something like antlers and something like knives. It did not stand on the ground. It stood inside the space where ground and air tried to agree they were separate.
Aruto didn't reach for a weapon. He'd brought none. He stared instead, and the shape stared back. He had the insane impression that if he asked, it would take a step forward. He had the even more insane impression that if it took that step, it would not be able to go back.
The book's stitched pages rustled though no wind touched them.
"Not yet," Aruto whispered, to himself as much as to the thing. "Not yet."
The shape tilted its head. Then the reeds swayed, and it wasn't there.
He wiped his face with a shaking hand and laughed once, short and ugly. He had expected failure or death. He hadn't expected… this. A chain had moved. The world had noticed. Something had leaned toward him from whatever threshold the book pointed to.
He felt twelve years old and a thousand years old at the same time.
"You're going to die," he told his reflection in the black river. "But not tonight."
He closed the book, rewrapped it in the cloth he'd brought, and pressed it against his chest. The cold-hot burn returned, less cruel now. Almost familiar.
Above the treeline, the cloud cover thinned. For a moment the moon's rim showed, a pale nail paring back the dark. Bells at the shrine chimed once. Just once. As if a listening god had nodded.
Aruto stood. His legs held. Barely.
He walked home through rain that finally felt like rain and not a verdict.
He dreamed of the stone hall again.
Chains crossed the air, singing. The coiled presence in the center had lifted its head now. It had no face he could name. It was lion and storm and ash and ocean, and none of those things. Where its eyes should have been, there were only depths where stars struggled and drowned.
The first moved, the voice said, neither pleased nor disapproving—merely true. Pain is the toll paid by those who cross between gates. Will you pay again?
Aruto wanted to say yes and no in the same breath. He went with truth.
"I don't know."
Then learn, the voice said. When you are ready to ask the shadow to stand, it will. But everything you call will leave a debt in you, and debts are always collected.
The floor shuddered. Not an earthquake. Footsteps.
Not his.
The chains around the coiled presence trembled as if remembering something old and bitter. The voice sharpened.
They are listening. Be small until you must be large, child of chains. Be silent until the bell must ring.
The vision tore.
Aruto woke in darkness, throbbing with heat and cold. Rain drummed the roof. The smell of wet earth filled the tiny room that had been his since he could stand. He lay still, counting breaths until the pain's edges dulled enough to move.
A faint scrape at the window made him turn his head.
Yori's eyes peered in over the sill, wolf-bright. "You lived," Yori said, voice a whisper.
"Barely," Aruto said.
Yori considered this. "Good."
He scanned the street behind him, then slid a small wrapped bundle through the gap. "Bread. Sachi said to bring water too. She told me to tell you not to do anything stupid."
Aruto took the bundle. "Too late."
Yori's mouth twitched—his version of a smile. "Good."
He was almost gone when he paused. "The priest sent a runner to the capital at dawn."
"For me?"
"For the problem," Yori said flatly. "For a hunter, maybe. Or an inquisitor who knows how to make problems look like solutions."
Aruto stared at the ceiling for a heartbeat. Then he pushed himself to sitting, every muscle complaining. "Then I need to move faster."
Yori nodded once. "I'll watch."
He vanished back into rain.
Aruto ate like a starving animal, not because the bread was good, but because chewing forced his jaw to work and reminded him he had a body anchored to the world. He drank until the metal taste faded.
He looked at his hands. Mud still lived under his nails. The tremor had lessened. He flexed his fingers into a fist and let it go.
"Be small until you must be large," he murmured. "Be silent until the bell must ring."
He lay back, the book under his pillow like a forbidden heartbeat, and forced himself to sleep again. Not to flee the pain. To process it. To file it in his bones the way one files a blade against stone, slow and precise.
When he woke the second time, the rain had passed. The morning air felt rinsed.
He rose, washed, bound his ribs with a strip of cloth, and stepped outside. Villagers pretended not to see him. A woman drew her children close. The butcher's boy, who had once thrown a rock at his head, looked down when Aruto looked back.
Aruto let them. He didn't need their eyes.
At the edge of the village, posted crooked on the notice board, a new paper flapped in the river wind. He pulled it free and read the priest's neat script.
BY DECREE OF THE SHRINE:
Any child found practicing forbidden rites shall be turned to the Church for cleansing.
Any who aid such child shall be considered similarly cursed.
Aruto folded the paper once, twice, again, until it hid itself in the palm of his hand. He didn't throw it away. He kept it. He wanted to remember exactly how they spelled cleansing.
He turned toward the road that led to the training fields beyond the mill—muddy, rutted, quiet this early. A raven watched him from the fencepost, head tilted, eyes like beads of black amber.
"Watch all you want," Aruto told it. "I'm done hiding."
He walked until the village was behind him and the only sounds were water and wind. He set the book on the stump where he had broken his knuckles learning to throw a proper straight. He opened to the breath cycles and began again.
Inhale four. Hold four. Exhale six.
A bell far away chimed once.
He didn't look back.
He had a chain to move again before anyone arrived to fasten a noose around his neck and call it mercy.
End of Chapter 1