Chapter 2
Then everything went dark.
The rain showed no sign of stopping. It kept falling, steady and relentless, as though the sky had no memory of what had just happened below it.
The road stretched out empty in both directions. No vehicle in sight, no headlights, no sound of an engine anywhere near.
The boy woke up far from the car. He had been thrown clear when it crashed, hurled out into the dark and landing in a tangle of bushes that had, just barely, softened his fall enough to keep him alive.
His head was badly injured. Scratch marks covered his arms and legs, thin red lines crossing over each other like something had raked its claws across his skin. Blood poured steadily from a gash near his temple, and his whole body ached in a way that made him feel as though some animal had gotten hold of him and only just let go.
"What happened...?"
He stirred, blinking against the rain, trying to make sense of the shapes around him. When his senses finally came back into focus, he realized he wasn't in the car anymore. He had no idea how long he had been lying there — it could have been minutes, it could have been much longer.
Fear crept over him first, slow and cold, and then all at once when he lifted his head and looked ahead. His eyes went wide.
For a few seconds the world seemed to stop entirely. His thoughts froze mid-motion. His breath caught somewhere beneath his ribs and refused to move.
He screamed.
"Mom!!"
"Dad!!"
He dragged himself up and rushed toward the flipped car, his small, bruised body moving as fast as it could manage. His pace was slow — too slow — weighed down by the terror of what he might find. With every step that closed the distance between himself and the wreck, his fear grew heavier, and so did the silence coming from where his parents should have been.
Cold rain mixed with the blood running down his face, blurring his vision until he could barely see where he was going. The only sounds left in the world were the falling rain, the last rolls of thunder, and the frantic, uneven pounding of his own heart.
When he finally reached the car, his whole body went still.
Blood pooled across the ground, thinned and spread by the rain, soaking into the mud beneath the wreckage.
"Mom...?"
No answer came. His mother's body hung upside down from her seat, lifeless, unmoving. He turned from her — he couldn't look, not yet, not fully — and rushed instead to his father's side.
His father was barely conscious, his eyes finding his son's face with something that looked like sorrow deeper than the pain he must have been in.
"Ashen. I'm sorry, my beautiful child."
Ashen's fear spiked even higher at the sound of his father's voice, thin and strange in a way he had never heard before.
"Dad, please — stop talking like that! Nothing's going to happen to you!"
"Nothing will happen to you," his father repeated softly, as though the words were meant more for himself than for his son. "Someone will come. Someone will save us."
There was pity in his voice now, the particular pity of a man who already understood there wasn't much time left.
"Ashen... the world isn't as beautiful as you think it is."
"If it were, those people back there wouldn't have driven off and left us to die like this."
"But don't you worry. Someone will pass by. Someone will stop and help."
He tried, even now, to comfort his son — to keep the fear in Ashen's eyes from becoming something worse. Regret sat plainly across his face, deeper than the blood and the pain.
"Don't be scared, my little boy."
"I'm fine. I just need a little rest, that's all."
He squeezed his son's hand, just for a second, and then let it go — loosening his grip the way someone does when they already know rest isn't coming, not the kind he meant.
"Then, once I've recovered, we'll go fo—"
He never finished the sentence.
His life left his body mid-word, the last thing he ever meant to say hanging unfinished in the rain. Whatever comfort he had been trying to give his son died with him, incomplete.
"Dad...?"
"DAD?!"
"Please — say something!"
"Please, why did you stop talking?"
"Dad, I'm right here! Please, talk to me!"
"Dad — wake up!"
But no matter how many times he called, his father did not answer, and somewhere underneath the panic, Ashen still hadn't let himself understand that his father was already gone.
Both of his parents were dead.
And the silence that followed wasn't just painful — it was indifferent, as though the night itself hadn't even noticed what it had taken.
A child, alone now, in the middle of the wilderness.
The smell of burning oil and blood hung thick in the air, sharp enough to make his head spin, thick enough to make him feel like he was losing his mind a little more with every breath.
He cried without stopping, his tears mixing with the rain until he couldn't tell one from the other anymore.
Eventually, the rain that had been his only companion through all of it finally stopped, and its absence left him feeling more alone than the storm ever had.
His screams carried out into the dark, far enough to travel, but there was no one out there to hear them, no one to come running, no one to help.
The blood loss from his head wound was catching up to him now, dragging at the edges of his vision.
"My head hurts."
"And my whole body — it aches."
"It hurts so much... Mom. Dad."
His body grew weaker by the second, and his soaked clothes clung to him, doing nothing against the cold that had settled into his bones. Using whatever strength he had left, he forced out one last scream into the dark.
"PLEASE — SOMEONE HELP US!"
And with that, his legs gave out beneath him. He collapsed to the ground, his vision dimming, the world folding into shadow at the edges.
"Why...?"
But something shifted.
The air around him felt heavier all at once, as though something unseen had stepped in close, closer than anything human should have been able to get without sound.
Then he heard it — a faint noise, growing steadily louder. Footsteps, but wrong somehow, heavy in a way that didn't belong to ordinary boots. Like someone walking in shoes carved from stone.
"Who's there?"
His voice barely carried, thin and cracked, almost swallowed by the quiet. Still, he forced his head up, spending the last of his strength just to look.
And he saw a figure standing over him.
A soldier — or something shaped like one. But wrong. Different in a way Ashen couldn't name, in a way he had never seen before in his short life.
"Who are you?"
"No — it doesn't matter. Please, save them."
"Please. Save my mom and dad."
"I'm begging you."
Whatever the soldier felt in that moment stayed hidden beneath the mask covering his face, unreadable, unmoved.
The clouds had begun to break apart overhead, and moonlight spilled through the gaps, falling cold and pale across the wreckage. On his chest, a sigil began to glow, faint at first and then brighter, visible now under that thin moonlight — a symbol that belonged to no nation, no flag, nothing Ashen had ever been taught to recognize.
Ashen stared up at him, one last thought rising through the fog closing in around his mind.
Why aren't you doing anything?
But before he could say another word, the darkness took him completely.
Chapter 2: End