The air did not simply still; it suffocated. It was a dense, ancient silence, heavy with the dust of a thousand years and the palpable oppression of banished deities. This was the Forsaken Land, a scar upon the world's face, meticulously quarantined from the civilized realms by the very power that defeated its inhabitants.
Above, the sky was permanently bruised—a perpetual twilight where weak, sickly violet light strained to pierce a canopy of ash-choked oaks and gnarled, nameless trees. Below, the ground was a patchwork of crumbling slate, fungal growths that glowed an unhealthy blue, and dry, cracked earth that drank any moisture immediately, leaving only regret.
It was here, at the furthest edge of this cursed realm, that the Barrier of Light held its eternal vigil. It wasn't a wall, but a shimmering, vertical sheet of energy, hundreds of feet high, radiating a sterile, unforgiving white. To the uninitiated, it was a beacon of purity; to the creatures who bore the Heart of Darkness, it was a tormenting cage. The barrier hissed softly, a sound like frozen steam, and where it met the ground, the very rock turned chalky and brittle.
Just beyond the Barrier, where the Light fought a futile battle against the inherent gloom, a simple woven basket sat amidst the thorny scrub.
Inside, swaddled in linens of fine, if now damp and dirtied, silk, lay a baby.
He was tiny, perfect in the way all newborns are, yet profoundly unsettling. His hair was a fine, dark, already dusted with the grey ash of the Forsaken Land. His skin, porcelain white, was unmarked by the harsh transition he had just endured. His eyes, though presently closed, were set beneath surprisingly dark, arched brows—a promise of severity in an otherwise cherubic face.
But it was not his physical features that held the land's attention. It was the absolute, crushing stillness radiating from him. The basket had been set down barely an hour ago, yet he had not uttered a single cry. There was no petulant whine, no gasping sob of abandonment. The fear that should have been his birthright in this cursed place was absent.
The baby breathed, a steady, shallow rhythm. And surrounding him, invisible to all but the deepest sensory organs of the creatures in the Forsaken Land, was a faint, almost imperceptible smudge of shadow. It was not a shadow cast by light, but a shadow of light—the complete and utter absence of the sacred spark. This was the darkness the Temple of Light had feared, the antithesis that had caused the High Priest to tremble and demand the child's execution. This was the inherent Heart of Darkness that pulsed, slow and calm, beneath the delicate flutter of his tiny heart.
He was the offspring of a human Duchess, a woman of noble blood and fierce love, and a man who had wept as he sealed his first child's fate. They had hoped the barrier would consume him, purifying the darkness before it could bloom. The priest had suggested banishment as a hesitant, tearful concession, a cruel compromise between murder and mercy. But the land did not consume; it merely recognized its own.
In the deeper parts of the gloom, where the air was colder and the blue fungal lights grew thickest, a creature moved. It was unlike the clumsy, brutish monsters that were birthed by residual sin energy. This one was magnificent and terrifying—a pure alpha predator of the Forsaken Land.
It was a leopard, but one sculpted from nightmare. It was massive, easily the size of a warhorse, and its coat was a blinding, unnatural white. This intense coloration was not a sign of purity, but a twisted irony. Its fur was the color of fresh snow, yet every fiber was saturated with the very Heart of Darkness that defined this realm. It moved with a liquid grace that defied the treacherous terrain, silent as a falling shadow, hence its common epithet: The White Beast.
The beast had been drawn by the absence of sound. Noise was common in the Forsaken Land: the scraping of mutated claws on stone, the shriek of trapped spirits, the perpetual hiss of the Barrier. But silence, a deep, living silence where life nonetheless existed, was unheard of.
The leopard lowered its magnificent, heavily muscled head, its pale red eyes, rimmed with predatory black, surveying the scene. It sniffed the still air. Human. The scent was faint, almost washed away by the raw magical corruption of the barrier's fringe—a young human.
Instinct drove the leopard. It was starvation given physical form. Its long, curved claws, the colour of polished jet, sank noiselessly into the soft earth as it stalked forward, its belly low to the ground. It rounded a cluster of thorny black bushes and finally saw the basket and the infant within.
Its initial reaction was confusion, quickly followed by a strange, unsettling curiosity that superseded the hunting impulse.
It had seen humans before, foolhardy travelers or banished criminals, and they all reacted the same way to its presence: a sharp intake of breath, a widening of the eyes, and a primal, despairing scream. The leopard fed on that fear as much as it fed on flesh. Fear was the language of the human world, the fuel of the Temple's strength.
But this child...
The leopard paused, perhaps ten feet away, its chest rising and falling slowly. The infant's basket was within easy pouncing distance. The child was awake now.
The baby's eyes were open, and the leopard saw, with a jolt that resonated deep in its dark core, that they were not the blue or brown of human innocence. They were a stunning, vivid red—the exact shade of its own predator's gaze, but softer, clearer, and utterly lacking in fear.
The child stared directly at the monster. And then, a miracle of human innocence and dark affinity occurred.
A wide, gummy, and entirely genuine smile bloomed across the baby's face.
The tiny, pale hands lifted from the silk swaddling, not in a defensive gesture, not in a cry for help, but in a delighted, exploratory reaching. A soft, gurgling sound of pure, untainted happiness escaped the boy's lips. It was a noise that should not have existed in the Forsaken Land, a sound that defied the Barrier of Light and the sins it guarded.
The monster faltered. Its massive form stilled completely, muscles rigid not from preparation to attack, but from an impossible paralysis of instinct. The scent of the child was a dual assault: the faint, clean odor of milk and human skin, overlaid by that potent, familiar smudge of raw, primordial darkness. It was a darkness that the leopard itself was born of and hunted by.
The child was reaching for it. For the claws, the teeth, the predator that should have been his death.
The leopard took a tentative step closer, curiosity now overriding everything else. It was an involuntary motion, driven by the profound dissonance of the moment. It was close enough now to feel the faint warmth radiating from the small body, and to hear the continued, happy babble.
The baby laughed—a breathy, fragile sound, like the tinkle of crystal. His hand reached out, wobbling for a moment, and then his tiny fingers brushed the rough, cool fur of the leopard's muzzle.
It was not a touch of fear. It was a touch of welcome.
At that contact, a bizarre reaction occurred within the leopard. The consuming hunger that had fueled its every move since its birth suddenly receded, replaced by a hollow, aching emptiness. It was the recognition of a shared prison, a shared nature. The Temple of Light had banished this child because of the darkness in his heart; it had banished the leopard for the same darkness in its spirit. They were kindred souls in this desolate land.
The beast should have snapped its jaws and ended the moment. Instead, it tilted its head, allowing the soft hand to stroke its jaw.
A silent, ancient covenant was formed in that moment.
The leopard remembered its own lost mother, the one killed by the Temple's paladins a century ago, her hide burned and her spirit cursed. It remembered the cold of its first lonely night. It looked at the child, the embodiment of everything the Temple feared, smiling in the very face of fear, and a fierce, possessive instinct bloomed in the void left by its departed hunger.
This is mine.
The thought was not spoken, yet it reverberated through the silent, corrupted forest. The light cast him out. The darkness accepts him.
The leopard gently nudged the basket with its nose, pushing the baby's hand away only to settle its heavy head beside the rim. It felt the shadow pulse, gentle and steady, next to its own, wilder, dark core.
With immense care, the leopard grasped the edges of the silk blanket in its powerful jaws, taking up the slack in the material so that the baby, still gurgling happily, was not jostled. Then, with a smooth, powerful movement, it stood, lifting the entire basket and its precious, unsettling cargo.
The leopard turned its back on the hissing Barrier of Light, turning fully toward the deeper, untamed blackness of the Forsaken Land—towards the mountains where the Seven Sins were sealed, and where its own den lay hidden. It was choosing a path into the darkest recesses of its existence.
The baby, now carried in the jaws of the most dangerous predator in the realm, finally closed his red eyes and settled into a sleep as profound and silent as the cursed land itself. He was safe. He was home.
Elric, the boy born with a heart of darkness, was now in the care of the darkness incarnate. The Temple of Light had not extinguished the flame; they had merely transported the fuel into a furnace.