Solus limped through the broken streets, each step a reminder of his body's limits.
Ash floated like lazy snow through the air, coating the ruins in a dull gray. The mist had thinned, but it wasn't truly gone — it lingered, clinging to shattered stones and twisted iron, whispering in a voice too low for language.
His hand throbbed. Where he had struck the Herald's halo, a faint mark had burned itself into his palm — a sigil of fractured light. No one else could see it. But Solus could feel it — a pulse, like a second heartbeat beneath his skin.
Ahead, the village's edge beckoned: broken fields, empty roads stretching toward the unseen wilds. He should keep moving. Find safety. Find answers.
But as he staggered past the wreckage of a fallen watchtower, something tugged at his senses.
Not a sound. Not a voice.
A... weight.
As if the air itself had leaned down to whisper into his ear.
He stopped.
There, among the rubble, something glinted faintly — a shard. Smaller than the others, no bigger than a dagger's blade, half-buried in the dirt.
It pulsed with the same wrong-colored light as the crack in the sky.
Solus hesitated.
The shard felt alive — not in the way an animal breathes, but like a wound that dreams of bleeding.
Instinct told him to leave it.
But deeper still, another part of him — the part that had survived the Herald — whispered differently.
Take it.
Slowly, Solus crouched and reached for the shard.
The moment his fingers brushed its surface, a jolt shot through him — not pain, but revelation.
Images flooded his mind:
A tower of black stone crumbling into the sea. Eyes stitched shut with threads of gold. A blade that could cut the name out of a man's soul.
And beyond it all, the Rift — vast, endless, hungry — singing a song of endings.
Solus ripped his hand back, gasping. The shard had melted into his palm, vanishing as if it had never been separate from him at all.
The sigil on his skin flared brighter for a moment, then dimmed.
And now... he could hear the whispers more clearly.
Not words, but impressions:
Path. Key. Choice.
The world shifted.
No — he shifted. The ruins around him blurred, their edges bending slightly, unnaturally. His perception stretched outward, brushing against unseen threads crisscrossing the land like the veins of a dying beast.
He was connected now. Anchored — and yet adrift.
Solus clutched his chest, struggling to steady his breath.
He didn't know what he had just accepted. Only that there would be no turning back.
Ahead, the empty road yawned open like a throat ready to swallow him whole.
And somewhere far beyond sight, in the deeper folds of the Rift, something stirred in answer.
Waiting.
Watching.
Smiling.
The road was no longer a road.
What had once been dust and gravel had thinned into something like mist woven into shape — solid enough to walk on, but only barely. Every step Solus took sent tiny ripples through the ground as if he were treading water that only pretended to be Earth.
The trees that lined the edges of the path leaned inward, blackened and brittle. Their branches reached out like skeletal fingers, their bark whispering against itself in voices Solus refused to listen to.
He pressed onward.
Every so often, the landscape twitched.
A distant hill would blink out of existence, only to reappear a few steps ahead, folded into a different shape.
Ruins dissolved like mist when he approached, then reassembled behind him.
The reality was sick here — bending, bleeding, becoming something else.
Yet the shard in his hand — no, inside him — anchored him.
Kept him from unraveling along with the world.
Time lost meaning. Minutes stretched into hours. Or maybe it was the other way around.
At last, after what felt like days compressed into a single heartbeat, he reached a clearing.
At its center stood a monolith — a single, towering slab of black stone, cracked down the middle, leaking faint streams of silver mist.
Something was carved into its surface.
Not letters.
Not runes.
Wounds.
Cuts so deep they wept colorless blood.
Solus approached cautiously.
The closer he drew, the heavier the air became, as if a thousand invisible hands pressed down on his shoulders.
He reached out —
— and the world shivered.
The sigil on his palm flared, illuminating the monolith in a sharp, cold light.
The wounds in the stone... moved.
They slithered, and rearranged, forming the shape of an eye — lidless, ancient, infinite.
And it opened.
A voice flooded the clearing. Not spoken aloud, but carved directly into Solus' mind:
"Name yourself."
Solus staggered back, gritting his teeth.
He felt the weight of the question, heavy enough to crack bone.
It demanded more than just a word.
It demanded his truth.
He stood there, trembling, the mist swirling around his ankles.
Who was he?
A survivor?
A shard-bearer?
A stray, lost between two deaths?
The answer rose from somewhere deep inside — deeper even than the part of him that had grasped the shard.
Not a memory.
Not a hope.
A certainty.
Solus Onelight straightened his spine.
His voice was hoarse but steady as he spoke:
"I am Solus Onelight."
The monolith shuddered.
The clearing pulsed once — a heartbeat of the dead world — and then everything went still.
The eye closed.
The wounds were sealed.
The mist retreated, drawing back like a breath held too long.
Before him, at the base of the stone, something materialized:
A doorway, outlined in silver light, leading downward into darkness.
An invitation.
Or a warning.
Maybe both.
Solus took a slow breath, feeling the sigil's steady pulse against his skin.
And without looking back, he stepped through.
The light from the doorway flickered once as Solus crossed its threshold — and then the world above vanished, swallowed by a seamless black.
The stairs beneath his feet spiraled downward, carved from the same stone as the monolith. They shimmered faintly, not with light, but with memory — a quiet resonance that prickled at the edges of his mind.
Each step echoed, a slow, deliberate sound, impossibly loud in the silence.
The air grew colder, and denser.
Breath crystallized in front of his lips, even though he could no longer see it.
Down and down he went, past walls marked with strange, shifting etchings.
Symbols that moved when he wasn't looking, twisting through meanings he couldn't grasp.
There was no time here. No day or night.
Only the endless descent.
And the whispers.
At first, they were nothing — scraps of noise too faint to decipher.
Then words began to form.
"You are too late."
"You do not belong."
"Give it back."
Solus gritted his teeth and kept moving.
The shard inside him burned — a low, steady ache that pulsed with every heartbeat.
It guided him, kept him from slipping into the madness coiled in the walls.
After what could have been hours or mere seconds, the stairs ended in a cavern.
The space was vast, so vast it seemed impossible it could exist beneath the world.
The ceiling soared out of sight, and the floor rippled like dark water even though it was solid stone.
At the center of the cavern, waiting for him, was a figure.
Cloaked in tattered black cloth, face hidden beneath a mask of broken bone, the figure radiated a pressure that crushed the air flat.
It said nothing.
But Solus understood.
This was a Gatekeeper.
A fragment of something ancient, left behind to guard whatever lay beyond.
The sigil on his palm flared to life again, and the shard inside him stirred — a trembling tension, half fear, half recognition.
The Gatekeeper lifted a hand.
Reality twisted, and from the darkness, a weapon formed:
A blade that was not a blade — a crack in existence itself, jagged and humming with silent violence.
Solus inhaled slowly.
There would be no words.
No negotiations.
Only one truth left to carve into the world:
Survive — or be forgotten.
He raised his own hands, feeling the shard's power seep into his bones, threading his blood with quiet, defiant light.
And when the Gatekeeper lunged, the battle began.