I ran.
The alley spat me out into the rain and swallowed my breath. My lungs burned and my legs shook, but I kept going. Behind me, the thieves shouted. Three of them. Older, faster, meaner. I clutched the pouch at my waist until the strings chewed into my fingers. It held a handful of Lumenite shards and nothing else that mattered.
"Get back here, rat," one of them yelled.
Their footsteps pounded the cobblestones like a clock counting down. I dove under a broken pipe, scraped my shoulder on rusted metal, and pushed through a fence that should have stopped me. The slums of Spirehold blurred past. Cracked stone, windowless doors, lanterns that flickered more with memory than flame. No one reached out a hand. No one ever did.
I collapsed behind a dumpster, the rain masking whatever sound my chest could make. The pouch was still in my palm. It was not enough. It would never be enough.
I hated it. I hated the hunger that made my belly ache and the cold that gnawed at my bones. I hated the way people looked at me like I was already a debt unpaid. I hated being nothing.
So I begged. Not out loud. Not to the alley or to the cracked statues in the square. I begged to the Abyssal Spire itself, because the Spire listened to those who had nothing left to lose.
Please. I want more. I want a life that is mine.
I left the alley at dawn. No goodbyes. No plan beyond the Spire. I took an old rusted blade my father left me and a cloak that was a few years past shame. I walked through the city gates and signed up as a solo delver. The guild clerk laughed, but the badge in my hand meant I could step into the dark.
Floor One chewed me up and spat me out. Floor Two showed its teeth. I bled, I learned, and I kept going because surviving was a skill I had refined in the gutters. The third floor was supposed to be routine, a place mid-tier delvers used to test themselves and the knife of fate.
They lied.
The fight started as expectation and turned into panic. Crystal-backed hounds struck like shadows given teeth. Vine-stranglers dropped from the rafters and wrapped around ankles and throats. I killed one hound, managed to drop a strangler, and then a second hound hit me from the side. My blade nicked. My shoulder opened.
I ran because the alternative was getting torn open where I lay. I ran blind through corridors I should have known. Then the ground shifted, and the world narrowed to intake of breath and a single point of light ahead.
I found the crack by accident. A hairline gap in the wall, partly hidden by a collapsed pillar and a curtain of fungal growth. No torch. No marker. My map confirmed it. This corridor had no place in any chart. I slipped through, bleeding and shaking, and came into a chamber that did not belong to the maps of Floor Three.
It was circular and silent in a way that made my teeth ache. The walls pulsed faintly with veins of red light, as if the stone itself breathed. At the center, a pedestal rose from the floor. Runes coiled along its surface like sleeping snakes. Above the pedestal hung a sword, suspended as if waiting for a hand to reach for it.
I felt it before I saw it. A weight in the air. A pressure behind my eyes. The sword was black as a night without stars, veins of red light like trapped embers running along the blade. Even wrapped in the dimness, it looked alive.
I stepped closer because curiosity is hunger and hunger is a liar that promises salvation. The sword answered that curiosity in a way that did not belong to this world. Not out loud, not with speech. Not yet. It screamed into my bones in a language that found my fear and turned it into hunger.
I turned. I should have run then. I knew the rule of doors that are not on the map. I knew the stories about cursed relics and the men who walked into silence and never came out. I knew, and yet my feet betrayed me.
The sword struck first.
It shot forward like a living thought. I did not see it coming. It pierced me through the stomach with a sharpness that took away my voice and my balance at the same time. I felt my life lift and hang like a loose thread. The blade twisted. For a moment I floated above the ground like a puppet whose string had been pulled, and then it slammed me down on the pedestal.
Warm blood fed the runes. The symbols flared with light, and the floor below answered with a low moan as if waking from a long sleep. Sound collapsed into black.
I expected pain when I woke. I expected to feel broken and empty and ruined. Instead I opened my eyes to silence that was ordinary. My stomach did not burn with the wound that had split it. My hands were steady. The sword lay on the stone beside me, humming softly as if it has simply been waiting for the right moment to tell me things.
A voice slipped into my head. Cold and old. Not spoken. Not a whisper. A certainty like an oath.
You are chosen. You are cursed. Wield me, and descend.
I stared at the blade and felt a laugh rise in my chest. It was a small laugh. It was the laugh of a thing that had almost lost everything and discovered that the world could be reshaped with its hands.
Fine. I said nothing back aloud. I did not need to. The grin was enough.
I wrapped the sword in cloth and slid it beneath my cloak. The cloth left a smell of smoke that did not belong to the dungeon. The blade pulsed once, slow and patient, as if amused that it had been chosen by a boy with nothing to lose.
The voice in my head had told the truth about one thing. There were relics older than memory. Seven of them, said the rumor the voice fed me. Holy. Dangerous. Sealed away because men could not be trusted to hold them. Floorwalkers chased those relics. Floorwalkers were the ones who had reached deeper, who had seen more, who had climbed until the world behind them looked small and brittle. They sought power and hymns and trophies, and if they found the relics they wanted, they did not hesitate to take.
I could not tell anyone. Not the guild. Not the beggars in the alley. Not even myself in the mirror. A rumor like mine was a curse someone else could steal. I would not risk it. I would not let the sword be taken while I slept.
I left the chamber by the same hidden crack and backtracked until the floor felt ordinary again. The usual beasts of Floor Three nipped at my heels. The usual fights came and were brief because I had something new in my hand. I did not push the sword to change. I used it as I needed to, careful and slow and steady. The blade felt like an extension of my hands, precise and unforgiving.
When I reached the surface, the sun felt like a lie. People moved in unhurried patterns. Peddlers traded pieces of enchantment for coins. A child cried over a broken toy. I walked through the market with my head down and found the guild hall without thinking.
The desk clerk glanced at my badge. He gave nothing away when I told him I was back. I kept my cloak wrapped and let the world assume I was just another rookie who had been lucky this month. I owed the world nothing and it owed me nothing.
I did not spend what I had. I did not buy food beyond the small piece of bread I ate while sitting on the steps. I kept the Lumenite shards tucked away because coin is a kind of prayer and I planned to pray carefully.
That night as the city lights dimmed and the Spire loomed like a dark tooth against the sky, I laid the sword on the floor and stared at its black edge. The voice was patient. The runes reminded me of the taste of my own blood. I felt both fear and a new kind of promise.
If this is the price for power, I told the darkness, I will pay it in blood.
The city slept and I did not. I listened to the Spire as if it were a living thing, and I decided that at dawn I would return. I would learn the reach of that blade. I would learn the rules of the thing that had chosen me. I would do it alone and in secret.
Outside my window, the slums breathed, and somewhere among their dead roofs a thief found another small bit of coin. Inside me something bowed to a hunger that had teeth now. I put my hand on the hilt beneath the cloth and felt the sword thrum like a heartbeat. The word chosen sat in my chest like a stone I could throw, and for the first time since the alley, I let myself think of more than survival.
I would not ask for mercy. I would not accept pity. I would make my life worth something, even if that worth was carved from the walls of the dungeon itself.