Marked By The Last Omen
*Marked by the Last Omen*
Kieran Vale learned early that survival was not a reward, only a habit.
He grew up in a city that forgot people like him, where hunger was ordinary and silence was safer than hope. Kieran never expected more from life than to endure it, one quiet day at a time. Then the sky fractured, and the world he knew folded in on itself without warning.
He wakes in the Shatterlands, a realm stitched together from broken futures and ruined timelines. Cities hang frozen mid-collapse beneath a fractured sky, and the air hums with something watching. Monsters roam freely. Humans awaken strange powers. Survival becomes a contest governed by rules no one understands.
That is when the mark appears.
Branded into Kieran’s back like a living wound, the eye-shaped sigil burns with heat and dread. Along with it comes visions of his own death, moments before they happen. Every time the mark activates, his body moves on instinct, avoiding fatal blows before his mind can react.
The mark saves him.
And every time it does, someone else dies.
At first, Kieran refuses to see the pattern. Death is everywhere in the Shatterlands. But the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Each warning redirects fate, sparing his life at the cost of another’s. His power does not prevent death. It transfers it.
As the Awakened organize into fragile factions, Kieran becomes something worse than powerless. He becomes dangerous. Others gain weapons, elements, or control over beasts. Kieran gains fear. Rumors spread of disasters that follow him, of a man marked by an Omen that demands payment in blood.
Kieran tries to isolate himself, to suppress the mark, to survive without triggering it. But the Shatterlands do not allow neutrality. Every hesitation invites annihilation. Every refusal costs lives.
When he meets Iria Solenn, a calculating survivor who can access the memories of the dead, Kieran begins to understand the truth. The Shatterlands were not an accident. The Awakened were not chosen at random. And the system governing this realm is not cruel or kind.
It is indifferent.
At its center stands the Arbiter, an unseen observer that enforces balance and watches humanity struggle beneath impossible choices. To it, Kieran’s Omen is not a flaw.
It is a mechanism.
As Kieran grows stronger, the mark evolves. The visions linger longer. The outcomes grow clearer. And for the first time, he glimpses futures where the deaths are not random.
They are chosen.
Kieran must decide whether to let fate claim lives in his place, or to take control and decide who pays the cost of his survival. In a world where power demands sacrifice, he faces a truth more terrifying than death.
The Last Omen was never meant to save the world.
It was meant to see how far a human could be pushed before breaking.
And the system is watching.
