She wakes to the sound of her own heartbeat.
A sharp, painful thud…
Then another.
Then silence.
Cold earth presses against her back, rough and unyielding. Her fingers twitch, brushing against brittle, dead grass. The air smells of damp soil, decay, and something metallic — the taste of blood still lingering at the back of her throat. She opens her eyes.
Above her, a sky she's never seen stretches like a bruise. Purple storm clouds churn and twist around a pale, waning moon. None of it makes sense. The world tilts unnaturally beneath her, and she tries to sit up. Her chest screams in protest, as if her ribs still remember the blade that stole her life.
Her breath catches.
He Killed her.
He killed her.
The thought repeats through her head on loop as the memory of the blade slams into her. The memory of the sting, the sharp cuts, the lasting betrayal she felt in her last moments. He killed me? Why? The familiar feeling of blood drenches her clothes as she looks down. Am I still alive? How? She sits up in shock panicking while looking around.
She gasps, dragging air into her lungs, terror scorching her insides.
"Easy, child."
The voice rolls like distant thunder, yet it carries a strange, unnatural quiet. She freezes. A figure stands over her, taller than any human, cloaked in black mist that flows as if alive. Shadows crown its head like a twisted halo, and two faint, dim-blue flames flicker where eyes should be.
The God of Death.
"Your life was stolen," He says. His voice cuts through the silence like a blade. "Unfairly. Cruelly. Wastefully."
She scrambles backward, hands sinking into the dirt and the scattered bones around her. The field stretches endlessly, a graveyard of white, bleached skeletons.
"Where am I?" she whispers, voice trembling.
"Not your world. Not anymore."
Thunder groans overhead. A pulse of power stirs deep in her chest — destructive, hungry, ancient. It tastes of ice and fire at once, and she feels the soil beneath her tremble.
Bones shift. A skull lifts itself from the ground, empty sockets glowing faintly blue. Another joins it. Ribcages, femurs, entire skeletons rise, assembling around her like silent, obedient animals.
She screams, scrambling upright. The dead do not attack. They kneel.
The God of Death tilts His head.
"This world is threatened by an Old God," He intones. "One your kind should never awaken. Its priest — its vessel — grows stronger by the hour. I require a mortal champion to end him."
Cold wind lashes her face. Her heartbeat hammers like war drums.
"Why me?" she chokes out. "I'm nobody."
The world stills. The God bends closer, and even the wind holds its breath.
"You, Aria Thorne, are the only soul the Old God cannot consume," He says. "And you have already survived death once. That makes you stronger than you know."
The skeletons rise behind her, forming a silent army. She feels their presence threading into her veins — a whisper of necromancy she never asked for.
"Stand," Death commands.
She stands.
"Take this second life," He says. "And break the chains of the cult that seeks to doom us all."
Thunder cracks overhead. Her shadow stretches unnaturally long and jagged, as though flames burn inside where a heart used to beat.
She barely understands what is happening, but one truth blazes within her:
She refuses to die again.
She refuses to let anyone else suffer as she did.
Her fists clench. The ground cracks beneath her feet.
A new world. A new purpose.
A name whispered by the dead: Death-Touched.
She exhales shakily.
"Fine," she says. "Tell me where to start."