Chapter 1 — The Sound That Shouldn't Exist
Darkness.
It wasn't the ordinary kind — not the absence of light, but the presence of something heavier, deeper, as though the night itself had weight. It pressed against the skin, seeping through the cracks of the world. In that suffocating blackness, a single sound broke the silence.
Drip.
It was faint. A droplet of water hitting stone.
Then another.
Drip. Drip.
The rhythm echoed endlessly, bouncing through the hollow ruins of a place that no longer remembered its own name.
Kael opened his eyes to it.
He didn't gasp, or jolt upright. He simply… was.
One moment he wasn't; the next, he found himself lying on a floor of cracked marble, staring at a ceiling of fractured glass that looked like a sky frozen mid-collapse.
There were no memories. No images. Not even a name — not at first. Only the strange awareness of being… and the question that followed:
"Where… am I?"
The voice that escaped him was hoarse, unused, and carried too clearly in the empty air. It startled him — as if he hadn't expected his voice to exist at all.
And then he heard it.
A sound that should not exist.
A whisper.
It came from behind the fallen columns, faint and broken, as though someone was trying to speak through a layer of water.
"...Kael…"
The name struck him like a pulse of cold. His own lips moved, whispering it again.
Kael.
The syllables felt familiar. Not remembered — recognized, like an echo of something long forgotten.
He stood.
The world around him was… wrong.
A shattered city, silent beneath a sky that never brightened nor darkened — a perpetual dusk where color seemed drained, where sound refused to travel far. Buildings leaned like exhausted corpses, their windows reflecting nothing. The air shimmered faintly, rippling like disturbed water.
He walked forward, careful, each step sending dust swirling into that unnatural stillness.
Then he saw it.
A shape, kneeling in the middle of the street.
At first, he thought it was a person — a woman, perhaps, her long hair flowing down her back. But as he drew closer, he noticed the way her body flickered. Like smoke caught in windless air. Her skin shimmered, translucent, the color of moonlight on broken glass.
When she turned, there were no eyes in her face — only hollow light.
Kael froze.
The thing tilted its head. The whispering began again.
"...Do you… remember… me…?"
He couldn't move. Couldn't think. The sound of her voice wasn't just heard — it vibrated inside him, stirring things buried too deep to name.
Regret. Loneliness. A thousand half-formed feelings without memory to explain them.
Then the air screamed.
The world twisted. The woman's figure convulsed, her face splitting into a maw of shadow. The hollow light in her body burst outward, and from within it crawled something impossible — a creature of soundless shrieks, all limbs and echoing void.
Kael stumbled back, heart hammering. He didn't know what it was, or why it was looking at him — only that it wanted him gone.
Instinct took over. He turned to run—
—and his foot struck metal.
Something clattered across the ground — a broken chain, dark and cold, its links glinting faintly with a dull silver light. Without thinking, he grabbed it.
The creature lunged.
Kael swung.
The chain sliced through the air, cutting a faint trail of silver fire. It struck the creature, and the world resonated. For an instant, he saw something — a flash of a memory that wasn't his.
A city burning. A hand reaching out.
A voice, whispering through the flames:
"Don't forget who you are."
Then, silence.
When Kael opened his eyes again, the creature was gone. Only ashes remained — and faint ripples in the air, like fading sound waves.
He stood there for a long time, panting, staring at the chain in his hand. Its metal pulsed faintly, as if alive. He could feel something inside it — a presence, gentle but cold.
The whisper returned. Closer now.
"Welcome back… Kael."
He turned sharply. Nothing but shadows.
But he knew, somehow, that something was watching him. Listening. Waiting.
He looked up at the endless dusk and felt the weight of it pressing down on him — the silence of a world that had forgotten how to breathe.
And deep within that silence, Kael heard the faintest trace of an echo.
A voice. His own. From somewhere very far away.
"Remember