The Forsaken Land never knew a true sunset; it only experienced a deepening of its perpetual bruise. The sickly violet light that bled through the ash-choked canopy finally gave way to a gloom so absolute it pressed against the very senses. In the shelter of a cluster of obsidian rocks, shielded from the chilling, swirling currents of dark air, a fire was coaxed to life.
It was not a roaring, cheerful flame. It was a shallow, hissing heat, born from a pile of dry, gnarled roots that Shiva had gathered. The White Beast had initiated it the way she always did: by curling her immense, pure-white body around the fuel, inhaling deeply, and then releasing a controlled burst of her inherent, concentrated Heart of Darkness. The raw power, contained and focused, was enough to ignite the wood, turning the black kindling into a bed of embers that glowed a menacing, deep crimson.
Elric tended to the fire now, his small, dirt-streaked hands expertly turning the Cinder-Hare. He had meticulously skinned and cleaned the carcass with his slate knife, and now the small body was roasting on a skewer fashioned from a shard of bone. The smell was the closest thing to comfort the boy had ever known—a primal scent of scorched flesh that mingled with the metallic, sharp tang of the raw darkness in the air.
Beside him, magnificent in the low light, Shiva was already eating. Her meal was a different kind of beast—a Stone-Gore, which was less hair and more ligament and muscle. She tore into the raw, dark-red meat, her powerful jaw working silently, the only sound a sickening, wet crunch of bone. Her coat, stark white against the black rock, was a beacon of predatory dominance, yet her presence, to Elric, was simply safety.
Elric ate slowly, peeling flakes of cooked meat from the bone. He preferred the cooked food, a trait that Shiva had once mused was the only obvious sign of his human origin. As he chewed, his intense red eyes were not on the food, but on the shifting, dancing reflections in the crimson embers. His mind, still humming from the strange encounter at the Barrier, was occupied with the impossible things Shiva had spoken of.
He was six years old, but his internal landscape was vast and lonely. He knew only Shiva. He knew only the corrupted trees, the blue fungal light, the hostile wind, and the eternal pressure of the dark mass in the air. The concept of the "outside" world—the one of light, of Humans and Priests, of fear and judgment—was an abstraction. Yet, it pulled at him with a magnetic force.
He thought of the mirror image the Barrier showed him: his face, devoid of context, staring back from the edge of the world. "The world of Light is hidden," Shiva had said. "It is not meant for the gaze of the cursed."
Elric finished a piece of the Hare, meticulously wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, before finally breaking the thick silence.
"Shiva," he began, his low voice barely audible over the crackle of the embers.
The great White Beast paused in her chewing, a massive chunk of Gore meat hanging halfway from her jaws. Her pale red eyes fixed on the boy, the mental connection between them already open.
"Yes, little Elric?"
"The Barrier," Elric said, turning the thought over carefully, as if it were a dangerous, sharpened stone. "If I could... if I ever found a way to pass it. If a human ship came too close and I simply leaped across the final hundred feet of purified air. Would the Light Realm accept me?"
The question was not born of naïveté, but of desperation. Six years of breathing pure darkness had given him an unnatural resilience, but it had also fostered a deep, instinctual knowledge that he was different. He was not a beast—he required shelter, he cooked his food, he spoke in thoughts and whispers. He was a human anomaly in a land of monsters.
Shiva dropped the meat from her mouth with a soft thud. The silence that followed was heavier than the air of the Forsaken Land itself. It took the White Beast a long moment to respond, her mental voice, usually a drum-like resonance, coming across strained and low.
"The question is foolish, Elric. You speak of 'acceptance' as if you were merely moving from one den to another. You would not be moving dens; you would be attempting to mix oil and cleansing fire."
"You were born with the Heart of Darkness. It is not a learned habit; it is the very core of your existence. It defines you. It is the reason they threw you here. They feared you would grow to be precisely what you are: a vessel capable of wielding the power they sealed away."
Elric looked down, stirring the embers with his bone skewer. "But they don't know. Not the common people. Only the priests."
"They do not need to know," Shiva countered, her voice now sharp, cutting through the boy's misplaced hope. "They would sense it. Not consciously, perhaps, but your very presence would sicken them. The citizens of the Light Realm have been bathed in the Temple's faith for a thousand years. Their very nature recoils from us."
"If you walked through their streets, they would not see a boy dressed in rags. They would see a shadow. They would see a threat. And they would act with the cruel, absolute purity the Light always reserves for the Darkness."
She leaned closer, her huge head inches from his. The air around her pulsed faintly with the power of her own shadowed heart. "They will kill you, Elric. With holy magic and sacred steel. They will burn your body until the taint is gone, and they will celebrate their virtue for doing so. They will never look upon you with acceptance. They will look upon you with the zealous fear that created this prison."
Elric flinched, not from fear of Shiva's physical proximity—he never feared her—but from the searing truth in her words. Yet, the stubborn, human part of him, the part that defied the oppressive nature of the Forsaken Land, refused to be extinguished.
"But what if I hid it?" he whispered, his red eyes lifting to meet hers with a challenging intensity. "If I mastered the stillness of my own heart, the way you taught me to hunt. If I could fold the shadow-smudge inward, until only a human-like heat was all that was left. Could I survive then? Could I blend in?"
This time, Shiva did not respond quickly. She lifted her head, her nostrils flaring as she took a slow, agonizing breath of the dark air. The silence stretched so thin that Elric could hear the frantic thump-thump of his own rebellious Heart of Darkness. He saw, for the first time since his memory began, a flicker of true, wrenching uncertainty in the ancient beast's eyes.
"A true concealment of the Heart of Darkness..." Shiva pondered, her voice a deep, distant echo in his mind. "It is a power that belongs to myth. To the legends of the first Sins before they were sealed."
She thought of Wrath. She thought of Pride, the two most beautiful and manipulative of the Seven. If any of them could hide their true nature, it was only briefly, and only to serve a catastrophic purpose. But Elric was not a Sin. He was a new creation—a blank canvas smeared with the potential of cosmic shadow.
"You ask a question that cuts to the core of the ancient war, Elric. A question about identity and deception," Shiva admitted, slowly rising to her full height. Her motion displaced the heavy air, swirling the smoke and ash into a brief, chaotic vortex. "I know how to kill and how to survive, but I do not know how to become what I am not."
She began to pace the confined space of their den, her powerful muscles flexing beneath the snow-white coat. "My life is bound to the wild heart of this land. My kin are the corrupted beasts. We live by instinct, by the clarity of our darkness."
She stopped, turning to face him fully, her huge form blocking the view of the fire. "But I am not the only exile here."
Elric froze, the bone skewer slipping from his grip onto the slate ground. His red eyes widened, reflecting the crimson embers with a flash of raw, childish hope.
"There are others," Shiva continued, her voice regaining its steady, powerful resonance. "Not beasts. Not corrupted soldiers. Others who were once of the Human Realm, who crossed the Barrier willingly or were banished for crimes other than birth. They possess a kind of knowledge that neither you nor I shares."
"There is one such being. An outcast who has lived near the foothills of the Black Mountains for centuries. He deals in secrets and truth. He watches the shadows, and he has seen things change outside the Barrier over the long years."
Shiva took a final step, nudging the dropped bone skewer with her nose. "He might know the language of the Human Realm. He might know the true nature of their deception. He might know if a Heart of Darkness, cloaked in silence, could survive their scrutiny.
The profound hopelessness that had been settling over Elric's small frame vanished, replaced by a sudden, intense surge of energy that felt almost painful. He had asked a theoretical question, and Shiva had offered him a living answer.
A human? The thought burst from his mind, laced with disbelief and excitement.
"A former human, Shiva corrected gently. "Once you're inside this forsaken land, you can't call yourself human, Elric. You must prepare yourself for what you will see. But he has the mind of a human, and that is what you require."
The White Beast settled again, fixing her gaze on the boy. "We will go. But not yet. The journey is long and fraught with the beasts that travel deep, far from the Barrier's residual cleansing. The scent of your youth will draw them out."
She lowered her head, nudging the remainder of the Cinder-Hare toward him.
"Finish your food, Little Darkness. Gather what scraps of warmth and strength you can. When the moon-shard is at its highest point in the sky, we leave this den. We will travel toward the whispering edge of Wrath's domain. And we will find the one who keeps the secrets of the world of Light."
Elric looked at the half-eaten rabbit, no longer seeing a simple meal, but the fuel for the journey. He did not hesitate. The lingering questions that had plagued his six years now had a potential voice, a potential answer. He snatched up the bone skewer, his face settling into the familiar, intense focus of the hunter. But this time, the focus was not on survival. It was on a desperate, burning hope for acceptance.
He was going to find out if the world of Light could be fooled. And Shiva, the fierce protector who knew that the boy's attempt to hide his nature was merely the first step toward unleashing it, would lead the way.