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Fool's Journeys – Prologue
They say the world ends not with a scream, but with a silence so vast that even the dead hold their breath.
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The night was not a night. It was an open wound in the sky.
A colossal moon floated among the clouds, saturated with a deep red hue, spilling its light upon the earth like a wound that bled and never healed.
Its glow stretched across the ravaged plain, exposing what the darkness had tried to bury: thousands of bodies strewn like broken reeds, bones jutting from pulverized flesh, and lifeless eyes that seemed to still be staring at a scene that had not yet concluded.
The air was too heavy to breathe, saturated with the scent of scorched iron, clotted blood, and the smoke rising from fires that had not yet died out.
Silence was the first thing that seized your attention. A terrifying silence, unlike the usual stillness of night—rather, the silence of a graveyard that had swallowed the voices of its inhabitants.
Nothing could be heard but the groan of the wind dragging torn shreds of fabric across broken spears, or the death rattle of a wounded soldier exhaling his final breath.
The scene appeared as a painting suspended between life and death, between a scream never released and a tear that found no eye to fall from.
But that silence did not last long.
Suddenly, a tremendous uproar thundered in the distance, like the roar of an enraged sea. The earth trembled beneath the pounding of footsteps, and steel began its song of ruin once more, blades clashing in showers of sparks that illuminated whatever darkness remained.
Cries rose—some human, desperate, others foreign, as if emerging from the depths of hell itself.
The battlefield became an open inferno: fire and smoke, screams and tears, bodies falling like autumn leaves in a merciless storm.
At the edges of the plain, specters fought like lost ghosts, indistinguishable—who was attacking and who was defending. Faces covered in soot and blood, eyes blazing with madness or brimming with desperate hope, hands clinging to broken swords or pierced shields.
The fighting had no purpose; it was like a grand dance of death, its sole aim to consume more and more.
Then came the climax…
A single shriek tore through the sky, followed by an explosion of light that flooded the battlefield, so intense that even shadows themselves vanished for a moment. The earth convulsed as if it were about to split open and swallow everything above it, and the sky blazed crimson.
The moon, which had been watching the scene like an eye from the underworld, seemed to draw closer and closer, filling the heavens with its presence, dyeing everything the color of blood. No sky, no earth—no white, no black. Everything became red.
Then… everything stopped.
This silence was heavier than any scream. The steel ceased its ringing, the footsteps stopped running, even the air seemed frozen in place. Nothing remained but fragmented sounds: the death rattle of a wounded man releasing his last breath, the sigh of a warrior exhausted by the days before the swords could finish him.
The world seemed to hold its breath, waiting for a moment that had not yet arrived.
And there… at the farthest edge of the field, stood a young man, his presence obscure.
His voice was not among the cries, nor his sword among the interlocked blades. His body stood rigid as a pillar of clay, his eyes wide, staring at the chaos with a heart-wrenching helplessness.
His face was pale, as though the blood had drained from him before the battle could. His trembling hands clutched the hilt of a sword that had never been raised. Cold sweat trickled from his brow, mixing with the dirt on his cheek, as if time had stopped for him alone.
He was neither a hero nor a leader.
No one paid him any attention, no one pointed toward him. His presence there was like a single drop of water lost in an ocean of blood.
Yet there was something else in his eyes… a mixture of fear and awe, of a vague realization that what was unfolding before him was not merely a battle, but something beyond comprehension—something that might change the face of the world.
And suddenly… everything changed.
The red moon trembled, its light fading little by little, as if an unseen hand had reached out to strangle its glow.
Shadows crept over it slowly, devouring it bit by bit, until it drowned in absolute darkness. A total eclipse… a moment when the sky itself seemed to announce the end.
The young man's breath shuddered, his eyes widening further, as if he were watching the fall of the world with his own eyes. In his heart, in that moment, there was no doubt: the end had come. The night had transformed into a grave without walls, large enough to hold everyone still standing.
And stillness encompassed the horizon. It was not ordinary silence, but another face of fear… a waiting heavier than death itself, until even the earth seemed suspended in a gasp never released.
The sky was submerged in its eclipse, the moon dead, floating like a closed eyelid over the world. And the air had become drifting ash, seeping into chests, filling them with a void more crushing than any sword.
Yet there was a vague sensation… as if an invisible path was being carved through the shadows. It was not traced upon stone, nor drawn upon dust—it was alive, writhing like a hungry creature, swallowing all who drew near it.
It was neither a path of salvation nor a road to perdition… but a passage that consumed footsteps, leaving the walker suspended between shadow and light.
Like the path one walks in a dream, unsure how it began and unable to wake. Each step weighs heavier on the feet, and every pause dissolves hope little by little. Yet still—no one stopped. As if continuation itself was a spell, or a curse unbreakable.
And at the heart of this mystery, a strange name echoed without sound. A name like a whisper heard by departing souls, or an echo lingering after everything has faded.
No one knew its meaning, and no one dared to interpret it. But the earth and the sky, the fire and the ashes—all of them seemed to point toward it, waiting for the moment when it would be spoken aloud.
The name of that path…
A name created to remain suspended until the very end:
— The Fools' Path.
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