The rain fell heavy that June night in Karakura Town, each drop seeming to carry the weight of fate itself.
Lavairiis stumbled through the downpour, his small eight-year-old hands clutching a worn leather sketchbook to his chest. The orphanage director had reported him missing hours ago, but he couldn't stop. Not when the things were out tonight.
The boy could see them—the monsters. The ghosts. The spirits that no one else acknowledged. For three years since arriving at the Karakura orphanage, he'd lived in silent terror, thinking he was going mad. The other children couldn't see them. The adults dismissed his fears as nightmares.
But tonight, something had changed. Tonight, when he'd desperately sketched in his book—his only possession from before the orphanage, the last gift from parents he barely remembered—the drawing had responded. Had awakened.
A flash of spiritual pressure drew his attention like a beacon. He rounded the corner near the riverbank and froze.
A woman with long orange hair stood protectively over a small boy who lay unconscious on the ground. Before her loomed something from Lavairiis's nightmares—a massive creature with a white mask and a grotesque lure dangling what looked like a crying girl.
But the woman seemed wrong. Weak. She was trying to manifest something—he could feel the energy flickering around her—but it kept sputtering out like a dying flame.
The monster lunged.
No!
Lavairiis's hands moved on instinct, tearing open his sketchbook. The pages were already soaked, but it didn't matter. His pencil flew across the paper with desperate precision, drawing from memory something he'd sketched a hundred times before—a figure from a video game he'd loved in... in...
When did I play video games? I'm eight. Why do I remember...
No time. The image was already burned into his mind: a knight in battered armor, a greatsword taller than a man, a tattered cape, and a name that echoed from some half-remembered dream.
"ARTORIAS!" he screamed, not understanding why that name felt so right. "PLEASE! SAVE HER!"
The sketchbook exploded with indigo light.
The spiritual pressure that erupted from those pages was vast, ancient, and utterly foreign to this world. The rain itself seemed to recoil as a figure tore free from the two-dimensional page, becoming solid, real, tangible.
Knight Artorias the Abysswalker stood between Masaki Kurosaki and Grand Fisher.
He was exactly as Lavairiis had drawn him—towering and intimidating, his armor dented and scarred, his greatsword Sif's blade held in one hand with casual strength. The tattered blue cape whipped in a wind that shouldn't exist. Where his eyes should be, only darkness showed through the helmet's visor.
But he was incomplete. Translucent at the edges. Flickering like a projection. This wasn't the full strength of the Abyss Knight—it was an echo, a shadow given form by a child's desperate faith and awakening power.
Grand Fisher hesitated, its predatory instincts screaming danger.
Artorias said nothing. He never did, in the game. Instead, he moved.
The Abysswalker's fighting style was something Masaki had never witnessed—brutal, aggressive, almost feral. He closed the distance to Grand Fisher in a single leap that cracked the pavement, his greatsword swinging in a wide arc that howled through the rain.
Grand Fisher barely dodged, its lure snapping back as the blade carved through empty air where its head had been. The Hollow screeched and retaliated with its claws, but Artorias was already spinning, already attacking again, his movements a relentless chain of strikes that gave no quarter.
"What... what is that?" Masaki gasped, scooping up Ichigo and backing away. She could feel it—this warrior had spiritual pressure, but it was wrong somehow, twisted, like it belonged to something that shouldn't exist in their world.
Lavairiis ran toward her, his small legs barely keeping him upright. "Please! You have to run! I don't know how long he can—"
Artorias's form flickered, becoming translucent for a heartbeat.
The knight was fading.
Grand Fisher noticed immediately, its predatory cunning overriding its fear. It lunged not at Artorias, but past him—directly at Masaki and the children.
"NO!" Lavairiis screamed.
Artorias moved with speed that shouldn't be possible for something flickering out of existence. He didn't block. He didn't parry. He simply placed himself between the Hollow's claws and Masaki Kurosaki, and let those razor talons strike him.
The attack should have torn through his fading form. Instead, it met armor that had withstood the Abyss itself. The impact sent shockwaves through the rain, and Grand Fisher recoiled with a shriek of pain, three of its claws shattered.
But the effort cost Artorias everything. His form destabilized completely, breaking apart into fragments of indigo light that swirled back toward Lavairiis's sketchbook.
The last thing the knight did—before dissolving entirely—was plant his greatsword into the ground between the Hollow and its prey. A final warning. A line in the sand.
Grand Fisher, wounded and sensing more spiritual pressure approaching from the distance, made the calculation all Hollows eventually make: survival over feeding. With a snarl of frustration, it retreated into the rain, vanishing into the night.
Silence fell, broken only by the downpour.
Lavairiis collapsed to his knees, the sketchbook falling from his trembling hands. The page where he'd drawn Artorias was blank now, completely empty, as if the graphite had been consumed to give the knight form.
He looked up to find Masaki Kurosaki staring at him, still holding her unconscious son, her brown eyes wide with shock and... understanding.
"You saved us," she whispered. "You're just a child, and you saved us."
"I... I can see them," Lavairiis managed, his voice breaking. "The monsters. I've always been able to see them. No one believes me. They think I'm crazy. But you—you can see them too, can't you?"
Masaki's expression softened. She'd been there once, young and alone with abilities no one understood. She knelt down, shifting Ichigo to one arm so she could reach out to this rain-soaked, terrified boy.
"What's your name, sweetheart?"
"L-Lavairiis. From the orphanage on Fifth Street."
"An orphanage?" Something in Masaki's eyes hardened with determination—the same look she got whenever she decided to protect someone. "Not anymore. Not if you don't want to be."
She pulled him into a one-armed embrace, and for the first time in three years, Lavairiis felt safe.
"You're coming home with us, Lavairiis. Anyone who would risk everything to save strangers—who would summon a knight from their drawings to protect a mother and her son—that's someone who deserves a family."
Through his tears, Lavairiis could only nod.
He didn't understand yet why the name "Artorias" had felt so right. Didn't understand why his memories felt strange sometimes, like they belonged to someone older.
But he understood this: he'd found someone who believed him. Who saw what he saw.
And somehow, impossibly, he'd changed something tonight. Something important.