On a day unmarked by any ledger, in a year the world had chosen to forget, a short, gaunt boy—his bones counting the hours beneath thin skin—slipped through Hellen's western gate. The city wore its safety like armor: the land itself kept it from being swallowed. To the north an unscalable ridge rose, peaks lost above the clouds. To the east the Endless Sea waited, a patient throat full of nameless things. To the west and south, two sister-cities stood sentinel: Bellin to the west, stout and mercantile, and Aeden to the south, keeper of lore and faith. Together the three were Arnor — the last kingdom of humanity, brittle and defiant.
The Western Gate was less an entrance than a proclamation. Twin towers bored into the earth like iron mountains; runes and mana-orbs pulsed along their flanks, and watchmen and warders kept long vigil. Between Hellen and Bellin lay lands the first generation of the Awakened had cleared: grasslands, fields, rivers and basins that fed both cities. Beyond Bellin's western rim the soil had folded into tombs—old kingdoms and a darkness from which no rider returned. Approaching the gate, its silhouette shredded the skyline: two towers rising like driven stakes, bulwarks bristling with spellwork and steel.
The walls themselves were hewn from black basalt. Their faces were not smooth: each stone looked as if a hand had scorched, gouged, and left it bleeding—scars from sieges remembered in mortar and black glass. A long bridge and a dry, yawning ditch funneled any attacker into a slaughter. Tonight, however, the siege was of another sort: people poured through like a slow, endless tide—refugees from Bellin, ragged, hollow-eyed, carrying what they could in trembling hands.
Lines formed under torchlight. The Knights' Order and the Mages' Guild cordoned the flow, their presence quiet and efficient. Volunteers and clergy — thin-faced and furious with fatigue — shepherded the fleeing into the city, handing out bread, blankets, and scraps of shelter. Officials not present at the gate scrambled to learn what had happened; Bellin had been erased with such suddenness and force that rumor outran the facts. Fires that ran faster than men, towers that collapsed in an hour, a contagion that crept without sound—no report agreed on the cause. What could be agreed upon were the little absences: a child's missing hand where a small sleeve hung, a toy stained and mute, a husband's name left unspoken.
Within Hellen's walls, a provisional quarter had been thrown up beside the western ramparts. Tents and makeshift huts leaned into each other like bruised ribs; pathways ran thin and muddied between crammed stalls where people traded memory for bread. The Mages' Guild rushed wards and mana-cloth; the shelters were cobbled from earth, timber, and scraps of enchantment.
Beside the camp a small, old church stood: stone and timber fashioned in a simpler age. It was a one-storey hall that drank in light and returned little warmth. Ten rows of benches reached forward from the door, splitting for an aisle that led to the far recess where a marble statue sat—a woman kneeling in prayer, carved so finely she might have breathed. Candlelight clung to her face and made the stone look almost alive.
Most of the clergy had gone outward to tend to exiles; only one priest remained to direct those who came seeking aid. Late into the night, while the camp still sighed and the candles guttered low, the wooden door creaked. Someone had come.
He was a small figure in the frame: thin, dust-ruined hair, rags that hung where fabric could still hang, eyes old as winters. He moved with a slow, deliberate gait toward the statue and began to murmur. His voice was at first a private thing, breath against stone.
The priest rose, each movement practiced from a life of tending loss. He stepped forward with the soft words of habit. "Child—come. You are safe here. Eat. Rest. God watches. Let me bring you something warm."
The boy did not move. His lips continued to form the murmurs; his gaze never left the marble's crown. When the priest put a hand to the child's shoulder, the boy turned—too quick—and a flash of old dusty steel met the candlelight.
The blade slid beneath the priest's armpit, swift and deliberate. The man doubled, stunned, clutching his side as blood stained his sleeve. Their faces met: one pinched with pain, the other hued with an awful, patient intent.
"I have words for your god," the boy said quietly. "Stay silent if you would live."
The priest, bleeding and shocked, could only nod.
The boy returned his eyes to the statue. His voice sank to a whisper—low and almost prayerlike. "Why did you not help us?" he breathed. "I asked for so little. Not strength. Not vengeance. Just—aid."
The church seemed to grow tighter; the hush let every scrap of sound stand stark. "I did not curse you when we starved. I did not cry when the strong stole what little we had. When they beat me, when they throw us to streets, I prayed. But the last thing they did was the last drop of my patience and faith."
The whisper hardened. It carried the patient cruelty of one who had measured cause and consequence for too many nights.
"I begged your heroes," he said, voice small and steady. "I went to their halls and to their taverns. I begged merchants and captains. I found the so-called legendary hero who subjugated the blue dungeon and I asked him to stand. He did not come."
Silence fell like ash. The priest pressed his hand to the wound and listened, the boy's grief knitting into something colder.
"Do you wish to know what came next?" the child said, and his voice was flat, terrible in its clarity. "You ignored us. So I gave them the punishment they deserve.Because of me all the Bellin has fallen burned to the ground."
The priest stared, incomprehension taking up the space where questions should have sat. How could a gaunt child with a small blade unmake a city of ten million? The boy's next breath was a laugh like a blade being drawn.
"I do not expect you to forgive me," he went on, voice rising now, not into madness but into terrible resolve. "I don't ask for your help, your pity, or your gods' absolution. I will finish what neglect began. I will topple the great clans in the capital, gather what is needed and I will unmake what you call order. I will hunt the great clans who sleep in their big castles. I will cut down the greedy and the complacent. I will burn the rot you have grown, and when the heap is ash, I will come for you."
He bent and drove the knife into the priest's ankle, hard enough that the blade lodged into the wooden floor. The priest cried out, a sound that left an echo across the benches. The boy turned, collar shadowing his face.
At the threshold he paused and looked back once, the corridor swallowing some pale light behind him. His voice dropped to a whisper again—soft as a promise and colder than the blade.
"Keep this knife," he said. "Do not die before I return. I will need it when I cut the throat of the god you worship."
Then he left, and the church filled with the iron smell of blood and oil, with the small, stunned sounds of a city that had been taught to fear a child's rage. The doors closed. Outside, the refugees shuffled on, and Hellen inhaled, slow and uneasy, beneath a sky the color of old bruises.