The world had long forgotten the night it was first swallowed.Some said it began with a whisper—a mournful chant spilling from the cracks between reality and nothingness. Others claimed it was a punishment, a debt of humanity's arrogance finally collected.
The truth was simpler, and crueler.
The Shroud was not a storm, nor a plague, nor a punishment. It was hunger given form. A tide of ash and silence that bled across the sky, devouring cities like sparks on wet paper. The moment it descended, the balance between life and death fractured. The dead no longer slept; the living no longer ruled.
From within the Shroud, horrors clawed their way into existence—Cursed Beasts shaped from humanity's own fears, and worse still, the Hollowed, mockeries of men with faces like broken mirrors, feeding endlessly on both flesh and spirit.
Nations fell. Empires crumbled. The survivors learned to live as scavengers, clinging to the remnants of old light.
And yet, within that abyss, something else stirred. Not all who entered the Shroud were devoured. A rare few were chosen—or cursed. Given fragments of the very hunger that sought to consume them. Their veins burned with power, their souls carried the mark of consumption. They were weapons and abominations both.
Among them would rise one whose path was carved not by choice, but by need. A boy cast into the jaws of the Shroud, branded by the sin of devouring.
His curse would not simply let him survive.It would demand he feed.
On monsters. On men. On the Shroud itself.
And with every bite, the line between savior and beast would blur.