The child woke to silence.
Not the peaceful kind—the kind that pressed against his ears until even breathing sounded wrong.
Stone walls hemmed him in. They were cracked, scorched, and stained with something darker than soot. The air smelled of iron and ash, as if the chamber had swallowed a fire and never let it go. He tried to sit up. His limbs answered slowly, heavy and distant, like they belonged to someone else.
A man stood a few steps away.
Tall. Still. Watching.
The child did not know his name, yet something inside him whispered that this man had been there when the world almost broke.
"You're awake," the man said.
His voice did not echo.
The child noticed that first, before the pain, before the fear—because the room should have echoed. Stone always echoed.
"Where… am I?" he asked, throat dry.
The man paused only a moment. "Alive," he replied. "For now."
The child's hands shook as he looked down at his chest.
Beneath his skin, red lines glowed faintly, pulsing like veins carved into flesh. A symbol—ancient, unfamiliar, alive—rested over his heart as if it had always belonged there.
The Blood Sigil.
It did not hurt.
That terrified him more than pain ever could.
"What did you do to me?" the child whispered.
The man lowered himself to one knee, expression unreadable. Up close, the child saw exhaustion carved into the man's features—tiredness that went deeper than sleepless nights.
"I stopped the world from ending," the man said calmly, "by giving it something else to end instead."
The words made no sense. Yet they sank into the child's bones like cold water.
He tried to remember his own name. The thought slipped away as if someone had cut the thread.
A soft scraping sound drew his attention to the wall.
His shadow stretched along the stone—too long, too thin. When he lifted his hand, the shadow followed late, lagging behind by half a heartbeat. It twisted at the edges, restless, as if it wanted to peel itself off and crawl away.
The man's eyes tracked it. "So it has begun," he murmured.
The child swallowed. "Begun… what?"
The man's hand rose, then stopped midair. His fingers trembled slightly before he lowered it again, as if touch itself was dangerous.
"A bond," he said. "Between you and something that should never have learned how to stay."
The chamber groaned.
Hairline cracks widened. Darkness seeped through the stone like ink bleeding into paper. The temperature dropped—not the honest cold of night, but a cold that felt deliberate.
Then came the laughter.
Soft. Amused. Everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Little vessel…"
The child's scream burst out before he could stop it. This time, sound echoed properly—sharp, panicked, alive.
The man moved instantly, stepping between the child and the shadows. His posture changed: not just a guardian, but a wall.
"Do not answer," he commanded. "No matter what it promises. No matter what it takes."
The laughter deepened, curling through the air like smoke.
"You wear my mark now," the voice whispered."You will hear me. Always."
The Blood Sigil burned.
Images flooded the child's mind—faces he did not recognize, places that should not exist, screams layered upon screams. Memories that were not his own clawed at his thoughts, trying to nest inside him. For a moment he tasted salt, then blood, then something older than either.
When it stopped, he was crying without realizing it.
The man exhaled slowly, as if counting the seconds that had not killed them. "It's worse than I feared," he said.
The child looked up at him, shaking. "Will it leave me alone?"
Silence lingered between them. Even the cracks seemed to listen.
Finally, the man answered, voice low. "No. But I won't leave you."
The shadows receded, sinking back into the stone as if retreating for a better moment.
The chamber fell quiet again.
Only then did the man notice something else—and the child saw it too, because it was impossible to ignore.
His shadow no longer aligned with his feet.
It lingered half a step behind, slightly turned away—as if deciding whether to follow him at all.
And in that thin gap between himself and his shadow, the child felt the first clear truth of the seal:
Something had survived inside him.