Late Autumn, 1282.
Dusk in Cinder Town was a sensory assault, a perpetual signature of decay. It carried the fermented, metallic-sweet tang of rust perpetually soaked in rain, overlaid by an unnameable, deeper corruption—the stench of something vast putrefying beneath the cobbled streets, slowly, perpetually. A viscous shroud, a mix of coal smoke and damp industrial fog, pressed low against the rust-pocked tin roofs and crooked brick chimneys, completely devouring the feeble daylight.
Elara Thorne curled herself into the smallest possible knot, pressing her sixteen-year-old, slender frame against the icy stone foundation of the Grammar School's rear wall. The coarse, roughspun burlap was no defense against the industrial-waste-laced dampness that permeated everything. Hunger was a frantic, living thing gnawing in her hollow stomach, but a greater, almost reckless need rooted her to this dangerous shadow—the fragmented words leaking from the window crack above.
"...the Stellar Core is the absolute root of our Aether-Adepts, the very manifestation of innate Talent and the King's blessing..."
Inside the thick, leaded glass was another, unattainable world. The hearth fire cast the expansive shadow of Lecturer Oliver onto a warm, clean rug. His voice, seeping through the cold stone, carried the weight of a certainty and superiority Elara, the 'Cinder-Dreg,' could never touch. She was a pauper, a piece of detritus, forbidden even to brush against the school's front door, condemned to pilfer scraps of knowledge like a rat in the gutter.
"...and to fail to ignite one's Core is to be a Soulless husk for a lifetime, merely Fuel for the Kingdom's engines..."
"Fuel..." Elara mouthed silently, her lips numb and purplish with cold. The word was an ice-shard to her heart. She looked down at her hands, raw with frostbite and caked with grime, unremovable furnace ash perpetually lodged beneath her nails. Was this the mechanical, iron-bound destiny of her class? To be a lump of Fuel-Stone, thrown into the insatiable national forge, burnt to nothing, and then swept away as slag?
The lecture concluded with a final, resonant pronouncement. The light inside dimmed, the sounds of polite chatter and confident footsteps faded into silence, leaving only the monotonous tat-tat-tat of rain on the tin roof, and a renewed, profound cold. Elara braced against the wall, stiffly rising to her feet, her legs a symphony of pins and needles from the long crouch. She had to leave before the sky fully blackened and the Town Guard patrols, efficient and brutal as clockwork, began their rounds.
Just as she prepared to make her escape, her gaze snagged on a pile of waterlogged, discarded papers and damaged books in the corner—a small, pathetic graveyard of knowledge awaiting the refuse cart. Driven by an instinct that bordered on the absurd, she stumbled toward it, seeking even the most trivial fragment of worth in the abandoned remnants.
She dug through the cold, slick paper with bare, aching hands, barely registering the sting as sharp paper edges sliced her fingertips. Most of it was useless bureaucratic trash or brittle, commonplace texts. Just as her desperate search neared failure, her fingers encountered something of abnormal resilience, a cover with a texture that was neither processed leather nor treated metal.
She yanked it free. The book was compact, its cover a dull, near-black dark brown, utterly devoid of title or ornamentation save for scuff marks. But what truly made her heart skip was the spine and cover, etched with symbols rendered in a deep, dried-blood crimson. They resembled no script she had ever seen, twisting and coiling in a nauseating helix, giving the unsettling illusion that they were subtly breathing, challenging the very sanity of her visual perception. On the flyleaf, four similarly structured, yet more complex, symbols were branded, their meaning an absolute void to her.
By a dark whim, she tucked the strange notebook—which smelled of stale earth and a faint, sweet rot—into the innermost fold of her clothing, clinging to it as though the cold object might offer a phantom warmth. Then, pulling her tattered hood tighter, she hunched her shoulders and hurried toward 'The Ash House,' the crumbling shack that served as the orphanage at the end of the foul Sewage Lane on the town's periphery.
The fever arrived with a brutal force in the latter half of the night. Perhaps it was the hours of cold and starvation, or perhaps the strange volume pressed against her chest was exerting an influence she couldn't comprehend. Elara was curled up in the dampest, coldest corner of The Ash House's shared pallet, the thin, mildewed blanket useless against the chill. Her body was volcanic, her teeth rattling a frantic rhythm, her consciousness swinging wildly between the extremes of scorching heat and paralyzing ice.
But what came with the fever was far more terrifying.
Alien memory fragments, a surging psychic flood, violently breached the walls of her mind.
She "saw"... not Cinder Town, not any place defined by the known laws of the Iron Anvil Kingdom. It was a boundless, desolate moor, swirling with dark violet mist beneath two sickly-hued moons, like bruised, rotting fruit hanging in a polluted sky. A figure, vague and shrouded in tattered black robes, knelt, using fingers like dried branches to etch twisted symbols—identical to those on her book—into the scorched earth. The air was thick with Whispers, not heard by the ear, but resonating directly in the deep chambers of her consciousness. The language was ancient, profane, and every syllable carried a spine-tingling power, as if invoking the name of an Unspeakable Thing from beyond the star-sea.
The vision fractured, then reassembled. She saw vast, grotesque constructs of pulsating flesh and rusted metal, slowly moving under the coil of slick tentacles; she smelled the acrid mix of sulfur and decaying roses; she felt an icy, bone-deep fanaticism toward the Eldritch entity, a blend of utter reverence and unendurable dread...
These memory shards were vast, chaotic, filled with incomprehensible lore and imagery. They did not belong to this reality; they hailed from an unimaginably distant alternate plane. They were a soul's brand—the psychic residue of an extra-dimensional Witch—now violently surging into the fragile mind of a sixteen-year-old orphan through some tenuous, temporary rift.
"No... Stop... Get out..." Elara thrashed on the thin mattress, clutching her skull, which felt ready to be torn apart. Her identity was being overwritten, corrupted. Her selfhood was a fragile skiff in a psychic hurricane, moments away from being scattered and devoured by the extra-dimensional torrent. She was sliding toward the precipice of madness, on the verge of becoming a hollow, possessed vessel. The Whispers grew louder, clearer, right beside her ear...
Just as her consciousness was about to be submerged, the last flicker of 'Elara Thorne' fading, her right hand unconsciously fell to the side of the bed. Her fingertip abruptly touched a small patch of moss stubbornly creeping out from the damp corner's brickwork—the Shadow Ember Moss that emitted an eerie, pale-blue light in the suffocating darkness.
Dissonance.
In that instant, a gentle, yet unyielding warmth surged upward from the point of contact! This current did not merely banish the fever; instead, it acted as a solid, internal Dike, slamming shut against the psychic flood. Where the warmth passed, the soul-tearing agony rapidly receded. The frantic whispers and horrific visions blurred and receded, as if viewed through frosted glass. Her consciousness, at last, found a moment's respite.
And in this brief interval of clarity, a portion of the alien lore, like sediment settling, became sharp and intelligible. She fiercely looked at the hardback notebook clutched to her chest, at the four complex symbols on the flyleaf—and in that singular, crystallized moment, their meaning was understood as if branded into her deep soul:
The Rotting Earth Codex.
Elara collapsed onto the pallet, gasping for ragged breaths, her body drenched in cold sweat. The fever persisted, but the crisis of her mind had been temporarily averted. She raised a trembling hand, looking at the still-flickering Shadow Ember Moss, then down at her own, newly clear hands.
That warmth... it was not the power of the Stellar Core. Lecturer Oliver described the Core's awakening as pure, luminous, and harmonious with the cosmic track. What she felt was a somber, earthen power, sourced from the Rotting Earth beneath her feet, carrying the dualistic meaning of both decay and brutal, tenacious rebirth.
Simultaneously, the clearest, coldest fragment of alien memory surfaced in her mind. It was a desperate, hoarse voice, a sigh crossing countless dimensions:
"...Do you see now... this accursed bloodline... Our very soul structure is Dissonant with this reality... The Stellar Core? Hah... That shining light will only scorch us, reject us... This Path, for us, was severed from birth..."
Elara's eyes snapped open, her pupils contracting fiercely in the gloom.
It wasn't a lack of talent.
It was Rejection.
The Stellar Core, the source held up as the symbol of power and status, inherently rejected the existence of her bloodline from its very genesis.
She slowly sat up, leaning against the cold wall. Outside the shack, the rain fell, and Cinder Town's night remained cold and wet. But in the eyes of the sixteen-year-old orphan, a fire of a completely different nature now burned. It was no longer a simple thirst for knowledge, nor resentment over class injustice, but a complex, terrifying light blended with despair, fierce understanding, and cold, hard resolve.
The dream of the Stellar Core had been a phantom illusion. The true road, the only road, was hidden within The Rotting Earth Codex, this bizarre Shadow Ember Moss, and the extra-dimensional Witch's Legacy—a legacy that the Core itself sought to destroy.
The Witch's Path had quietly begun at the touch of her fingertip to the forbidden moss, the moment she decoded the forbidden title. The road ahead was an abyss, strewn with thorns and leading into deeper darkness, but at least, she had seen a direction. And The Rotting Earth Codex rested silently against her chest, a slowly beating, cold heart, awaiting the next whisper.