There were days when the shadow lounged patiently over a crumbling world.
Morgana dwelt in an underground hideaway, disguised as an abandoned apartment in a sector where industry had died along with the people who once populated it.
Officially, Morgana did not exist. She was a void in the narrowing fabric of reality. A presence that fed on light carved from the silence of centuries.
One evening, in an underground canteen where information was bartered for ration coupons like in ancient slave markets, two men entered. They were not simple customers. They wore civilian clothes, but their gestures betrayed training from secret military academies. One showed the bartender an identification photo. Even from a distance, Morgana recognized one of her former faces, which she believed she had buried in the tomb of dead identities.
Morgana had a single purpose. To survive.
Her peace had been shattered. The Order she had once been part of and had abandoned had found her.
The flight was instinctive. What followed was an episode where she was captured. That memory remained her greatest nightmare, for it was not a dream. It was a recording from the Central Unit called "The White Room," a laboratory for the wandering of the soul.
There she found a note. "You are the only living person."
She knew, on an instinctive level beyond reason, that it was not true. It was a trap, a challenge to her mental balance, an initiatory test meant to crush her will. But each time, a part of her had to verify it, like a pilgrim determined to reach the last temple raised in the shadow of the world's end.
She wandered days, weeks, months, without meeting anyone else. In the end, she collapsed, and in that moment of surrender, as she melted slowly, she found the exit. It was a lesson about death and rebirth, about how only by fighting can one find salvation.
The next morning, Morgana felt the burn on her ankle. A red mark, incandescent, pulsing in the shape of a broken spiral. The Mark of the Lost, a symbol that should never have returned. The spiral was the path to the center, but being broken, it symbolized the road to something else.
On that morning, Morgana transformed.
At the edge of Quarantine Zone 7, the Sign appeared.
Morgana was guided toward the signal. She headed to an industrial sector known on old maps as "The Sleeping Colossus." It was a network of abandoned factories and warehouses, now a labyrinth of rusted metal, a temple of industrial decay.
Three hundred meters away, in a square surrounded by the skeletons of cranes like giant crucifixes, a survival ritual was unfolding.
Four armed people with metal pipes and crowbars had formed a defensive circle. They were surrounded by seven mutants, beings that had once been human until chemical waste and the devouring disease had transformed them into something belonging to the world beyond. They had asymmetrical limbs and skin that seemed perpetually wet with putrefaction secretions. They moved in spasmodic leaps, driven by a blind hunger, a demonic instinct to destroy anything still human.
The four fought with the desperation of those on the threshold between life and death. One of them, a tall man, was grabbed by a mutant and thrown to the ground. Morgana did not hesitate.
The mutants did not see her coming. She was a shadow among shadows. The first mutant collapsed with a short sound, a thin white blade emerging from its nape like the tongue of an invisible snake. Another stopped abruptly, staring blankly as Morgana crushed its trachea with an invisible force. She moved among them like a dancer of divinity, each motion a choreography of death. Every strike was precise, lethal. In less than a minute, all seven mutants lay motionless.
The four survivors gazed at her in astonishment, a mix of fear and admiration, as if beholding a warrior goddess from ancient legends.
Morgana withdrew her blade, forged from esoteric metals that existed only as long as it was invoked through her will.
During the fight, the fabric of her pants had caught and torn at the ankle. Now, the mark of the broken spiral was visible, pulsing with a faint reddish light.
The woman in the group, with an injured arm, was the first to notice.
"The Mark," she whispered. "You're one of us. You're a Lost One."
Morgana did not respond, but her gaze tacitly confirmed it.
If you've forgotten your name or see a shadow in the room, close this page now. Morgana is not a simple character. She lives in the space between words, and each time you understand her motivations, you could become a potential ingredient in her magic. Search for your name in old notes, in the journal you lost. If you find it written in ink you don't recognize, it's already too late. Morgana knows who you are. And now, she's searching for you.
Search for your name. Then search for the exit. They are the first steps to becoming an urban legend yourself.