Kael Veilheart had always known the world was cruel.
He was born with a face that made people uncomfortable.
One eye the shade of stormy cobalt, the other abyssal black. A sharp contrast made even more jarring by his hair—divided clean down the middle. On the side of the blue eye, his hair was an icy white cascade. On the side of the black eye, inky darkness fell. His face was symmetrical, his features calm and unbothered—but to others, it was wrong. Too different.
They called him a freak. A glitch. "Two-face."
Even in elementary school, kids avoided him. Parents whispered. Teachers glanced at him with unease. When he was old enough to understand, he realized: the world didn't hate him for what he did. It hated him for simply existing.
By high school, he was used to the stares. The insults became sharper, more creative. His desk was defaced once with the words "demon spawn." No one stopped it. No one cared.
He had no friends.
So, he embraced the silence.
Kael became the boy who sat at the back of the class with his hoodie up, AirPods in even when they were dead, scribbling notes in quiet. Teachers called him brilliant but "antisocial."
The only love he had—the only light—came from his parents.
His father, Vincent Veilheart, ran an empire of cold logic and spreadsheets. But at home? He was the man who watched anime with Kael and explained business terms using fantasy metaphors. His mother, Elira, was chaos incarnate. She painted on the walls, danced barefoot in the kitchen, and called Kael her "miracle boy."
They never once made him feel wrong. Never once asked him to change. They were rich, elegant, powerful—and still, they made him feel safe.
When he joined college, he hoped for change—but people were just older versions of the same cruelty. He didn't try to fit in. Didn't care to. He found comfort in his own rituals: waking up late, attending lectures with his hoodie hiding his unnatural hair, barely speaking a word.
And when he got back home—yes, he still lived there—it was like stepping into a sanctuary.
His room was dim and perfect. Dual monitors bathed in cool blue light, a dark aesthetic surrounding shelves of books, half-finished code projects, and notebooks filled with webnovel ideas. Here, he wasn't Kael Veilheart the cursed anomaly. He was the player. The creator. The storyteller.
Gaming. Anime. Webnovels. A little coding. That was peace.
Then came his online crew—his only true friends—from the MMO Eclipse Code.
Rin, the chaotic rogue with a sharp tongue and zero filter. Mace, a tank in-game and in life—a wall of sarcasm and subtle kindness. And Juno, the ghost-quiet genius who always knew too much.
They never judged his eyes. Or his hair. Or his silences.
They just… liked him.
Then, in the final year of college, the sky fell.
His parents went on a business trip to Japan.
The plane never landed.
The news didn't hit him like a crash. It hit like a void collapsing inwards.
He didn't scream. He didn't cry. He just sat.
He spent days in their room. Listening to old voicemails. Smelling his mother's perfume. Running his fingers over his father's keyboard.
Then came the official cause: mechanical failure.
But Kael had inherited his father's instincts.
He noticed the gaps. The inconsistencies. The silence from the airline. He hired a private investigator. Dug through black box reports. Chased rumors.
And he knew—it was planned.
When he told people, they gave him pitying looks. Told him it was grief. That he needed sleep.
So Kael stopped talking.
He lived alone now, in a mansion made of silence and shadows.
He barely ate. Slept irregularly. Drifted in and out of consciousness. Stared at the cursed symmetry of his own face in the mirror, wondering if the world had always known he was meant to be left behind.
Until his crew showed up.
In real life.
They barged in with groceries, insults, and zero tact.
"Kael, if you don't shower, I'm calling animal control," Rin snapped.
They stayed for a few days. Cleaned. Cooked. Dragged him outside.
He smiled. Once. A twitch.
Then came the first vision.
They were parked on a hill overlooking the city at night. Kael blinked—
—and the world changed.
The city twisted into a husk. Red fog blanketed everything. Screams echoed from unseen throats. In the distance, a throne forged from ribs and bone sat on a spire of ash. A shadowed figure rested atop it.
Watching him.
He blinked again. Gone.
He said nothing.
They went home the next day. Finals loomed.
The second vision came during an exam.
Blood leaked onto his paper. A figure crawled across the ceiling above. Whispers coiled in his skull like smoke:
"Do you remember the screams yet, heir?"
Blink. Gone.
Graduation came. Then an internship.
The third vision struck at work. He looked at his screen—only to see an eye staring back. Not his eye.
Its eye.
Black and blue.
And then the fourth.
Kael, in bed.
No walls. No roof. Just sky like torn flesh. A shadow formed at his feet.
"You see, because you remember."
"You remember, because you belong."
And behind it—
The Blade.
Buried in ash. Surrounded by skeletal hands. Chained. Alive.
It pulsed.
Waiting.
Kael sat up in bed, breathless.
The world had mocked him.
Feared him.
Because even then… it knew what he was becoming.