The first breath clawed through rotted lungs like rusted nails.
Zevrak Kain jolted upright in a puddle of filth and black water, his throat convulsing with choking spasms. He hacked up mucus, bile, and blood—not his, not entirely—and then collapsed again against a half-rotted barrel, eyes wild, senses screaming. His skin felt paper-thin. His bones were splinters bound together with fever.
Around him, the alley stank of mold, iron, and death.
He was alive.
No… he was reborn.
The curse had worked.
A grin tore across his cracked lips, as glorious as it was hideous.
"Still smiling, even now," he rasped, voice that of a dying child—but mind ancient, ruthless, and ablaze with memory.
The execution. The betrayal. The divine curse.
Every detail seared into his soul.
And now… this. This ruinous vessel.
Small. Sickly. Ribs like piano keys. Skin pale and flaking. He could hardly move.
But he was Zevrak.
And this world was still his to break.
Viremoor was a city where death slept in gutters and dreams ended with coughing blood.
Once the crown jewel of the Southern Theocracy, it had collapsed when the Grey Plague consumed its clergy and tore through its noble quarter like fire through parchment. Now, the divine wards sputtered uselessly on shattered chapels, while corpse-pickers and plague-rats ruled the streets.
The alley he had awoken in sat between two collapsing tenements. Sickly ivy strangled broken statues of saints. Overhead, wooden balconies hung like broken ribs, and bloodless corpses dangled from rusted hooks, strung up by those desperate enough to believe plague demons could be warded by sacrifice.
Something shifted nearby.
Zevrak's eyes sharpened instantly, his senses expanding, heart slowing.
A shadow moved at the alley's end—quick, hunched, starving.
A boy. Maybe fifteen. Knife in hand, shoes wrapped in cloth. He looked at Zevrak the way wolves looked at limping prey.
The boy crept closer.
Zevrak stayed still. Listened. Calculated.
Cloth padding… right foot drags slightly. Limp. Knife untrained. Weak wrists. He's desperate.
The boy lunged, blade flashing.
Zevrak moved.
In an instant, the child-body Zevrak inhabited surged forward—not fast by his old standards, but fast enough. His hand clamped around the thief's wrist. He twisted. Bone snapped. The thief screamed.
Then Zevrak whispered a word he hadn't spoken in this world yet:
"Khay'rn."
A tendril of shadow erupted from his palm—ink-black, smoke-like, with threads of pale blue runes spiraling through it. It snaked into the thief's mouth, eyes, nose.
The boy convulsed. Twitched. Then went still.
Zevrak leaned in, savoring the moment.
Memory transfer successful.
Visions exploded in his mind—half-formed thoughts, pain, hunger, nights spent hiding under collapsed pews, a sister long dead from rot-skin, the sound of priests screaming as plaguefires devoured the cathedral.
He saw himself through the boy's eyes: a dying child in a corpse alley. Easy prey.
Zevrak exhaled slowly, power humming in his veins like old music returning.
Shadow-weaving still answers my call, he thought. Good. The curse didn't strip my core arcana—only the vessel is weak. I'll fix that.
He looked down at the boy's cooling corpse, then up at the plague-colored sky.
"First blood," he whispered. "Let's make it divine next."
He needed shelter. Food. Flesh to rebuild. Mana to feed his dying spark.
The corpse alley gave way to twisted backstreets, lined with murals painted in rot and desperation. Whispers came from shuttered homes. Babies wailed behind barricades of furniture. Street preachers, wearing birdlike plague masks and smeared ash, screamed about the coming Cycle Purge. The Black Sun, they said, was watching. Judging.
Good, Zevrak thought. They feel it too.
A group of cloaked figures passed nearby—long staffs, rusted medallions, yellowed skin. Church Censors. They dragged a coughing woman in chains. Her eyes met Zevrak's. Pleading. Terrified.
He tilted his head.
"Too late for mercy," he whispered.
And moved on.
The Bone Market of Viremoor sat beneath the ruins of the old cathedral. An underground auction for plague alchemists, cannibal surgeons, and cursed relic hawkers. Zevrak found it by following the scent of blood, incense, and crushed dreams.
Inside, under the arches of broken stone angels, twisted souls bartered flesh for immunity, prayers for poison.
He traded the thief's memories to a mind-eater in exchange for a cloak and a dose of bloodglow—liquid mana condensed from plaguefire. It tasted like burning glass. He swallowed it without flinching.
Strength returned—slightly. His limbs didn't tremble anymore.
But he needed more. Power. Resources. Influence.
And soon… followers.
That night, in a collapsed shrine lit by diseased moonlight, he found a girl waiting.
She sat on a rusted throne of bones, wrapped in rags, her left eye glowing faintly green. She smiled when she saw him. Not with surprise. But expectation.
"I saw your shadow in the plaguefire," she said. "You're the one who fell."
Zevrak raised an eyebrow. "And you are?"
"Serana Virell," she said softly. "Or what's left of her."
His mind froze.
The name. The traitor.
He looked closer. The girl was young—maybe seventeen, street-scarred, hair silvered by fever. But her face… the shape… the eyes…
Not her. But a version. A reincarnation, perhaps. Another twist of the gods' sick joke.
"Do you remember?" he asked.
"I remember fire. Chains. Screams. And a man whose smile frightened gods."
She stood. Something dark coiled behind her. A weapon made of plaguebone. A jagged blade fused with her soul.
"I dreamed you'd come," she said. "And I'd follow."
He stepped closer, tilting her chin up with one finger. Her skin was cold—but her eyes blazed.
"Then kneel," he said.
And she did.
To be continued…