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Keeper's Adage:
"A man who hates his own reflection will gladly drink another's face. Beware the thirst that seeks to drown the self, for what emerges may wear your skin and remember your life better than you ever did."
–From the Scroll of Sundered Threads, Keepers of Stories Archive
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The amethyst crystal pulsed in Lugal's hands like a captured star. In the absolute dark of the vent shaft, its light was the only truth. The Void within him was a silent, screaming hunger, but it was the emptiness in his own chest—the hollowed-out space where a sense of self should have been—that truly yearned for it.
Nothing. You are nothing. The old curse was a mantra. Lugal, the Sinks rat. Lugal, the Forum's discarded tool. Lugal, ballast. He clutched the crystal tighter. He would be someone else. Anyone else.
Show me, he begged the void inside and out. Let me forget.
He opened his mind and fell into the light.
The world snapped into a terrifying, glorious clarity. He was not Lugal. He was Kaelen. His body was a weapon, sheathed in armor of dawn-forged steel and silver. But it was not the armor that held him aloft. Etched into the vambraces on his forearms, pulsing with a soft, golden light, were Aeridorian Glyphs of Ascent. They did not grant flight; they negotiated with the wind, persuading it to bear his weight, to become a solid stair beneath his boots. He rode the sky not like a bird, but like a master walking a tightrope of air currents.
The thrill was a drug. This was not the brutal, mechanical rising of an Embermark lift. This was an art. A communion. He was one with the endless blue. Below, the world was a tapestry of war. And ahead, the enemy: the ECLIPSE-KIN.
They were abominations. Figures of polished obsidian and stolen starlight, their forms a mockery of the men and women they had once been. They moved with a silent, jerking grace, their outlines flickering with the trapped, screaming after-images of the identities they had consumed and worn as skins. They were emptiness parading as life, and the air around them grew cold and silent.
"Hold the line!" Kaelen's voice—his voice—was a clarion call. He banked, the glyphs on his vambraces flaring as he commanded a gust to slam into an Eclipse-Kin, disrupting its charge. His sun-blade seared through the void-stuff of another. He was a hero. He was glorious. He was—
—diving low over a forest of colossal, ancient trees, their trunks wider than Embermark spires. A refuge. Then, the desolation of the Blighted Craters. A place of last hope. He landed softly, the wind-glyphs on his boots sighing as they released him onto the black rock.
Refugees huddled in a crater's shadow. He saw their fear, their exhaustion. "They are coming!" he shouted, his heart clenching. "You must go!"
And then he saw her.
Elara. Her name came to him as instantly as the breathtaking punch of her presence. She was not clean, not pampered. She was smudged with ash, her dress torn, but her eyes… her eyes were the violet of a twilight sky, and they held a strength that shamed the battlefield. She held a child, but her gaze was on him, the Sky-Walker, filled with a awe that was like a physical touch.
In that single, suspended moment, Kaelen's entire world narrowed. The war, the Kin, his duty—it all burned away in the furnace of a sudden, all-consuming fantasy. He wouldn't just save her. He would save her and win her. He saw it unfold in his mind's eye: his heroic last-minute rescue, sweeping her onto his Raptor, flying her to safety while her family found their own way (they always did in these fantasies). He saw her gratitude, her tears of relief, the way she would look at him, her savior. He saw the two of them, after, in a quiet place. Her touch. Her lips. A life, a love, a story worth having.
It was a foolish, glorious dream. And it was his undoing.
"Come with me!" he pleaded, striding toward her, his hand outstretched. "I can get you out!"
Elara's eyes filled with a terrible conflict. She looked from his face to the family clinging to her, to the old man who was her father. "I… I cannot leave them."
The rejection was a dagger. His beautiful fantasy shattered. He couldn't process it. "There's no time! They will die! You will die! Please!" He reached for her arm, his touch desperate.
A scuff of boot on rock behind him. He turned, irritation flaring. Was it her foolish father?
It was an Eclipse-Kin.
It wore the face of a young Aeridorian soldier, but the eyes were pools of silent, hungry void. The face was a mask. A trophy. It had been right behind him, drawn by his shouting, his distraction, his desire.
Kaelen's sun-blade was half-raised when the Kin's weapon—a blade of solidified nothingness—moved.
There was no pain. Only a shocking, cold absence. The sky tilted. He saw Elara's face, her mouth open in a soundless scream. He saw the volcanic rock rushing up to meet him.
The last thing he felt was not fear, but the bitter irony of it all. He had been so busy dreaming of a life with her that he had forgotten to protect the one he was already living.
The fantasy died with him.
—
Reality was a cold, hard slap. Lugal was on his knees, his own throat clutched in his hands, gasping for air that felt too thin, too real. A silent scream was trapped in his lungs—Kaelen's scream.
The emotions were a maelstrom inside him: Kaelen's soaring pride, his desperate love for Elara, his crushing humiliation, his final, bitter regret. They were more vivid, more real than anything Lugal had ever felt. His own life—the hovel, the Sinks, the betrayal—felt like a pale, poorly written prologue to this epic tragedy.
"Elara…" he sobbed, the name a prayer and a curse on his lips. He scrambled back, his eyes wild. He wasn't Lugal. Lugal was a ghost, a shadow. He was Kaelen. He had to get back. He had to warn them. He had to save her.
He stumbled from the shaft into the tunnel. A miner coming off shift recoiled. "Seven-thirty-eight? You sick?"
"The Eclipse-Kin!" Kaelen-Lugal slurred, grabbing the man's grimy tunic. "In the tunnels! Can't you hear their silence? We have to muster! Where is my sun-blade?!"
The miner stared, then shoved him back. "He's cracked! The deep-lung has taken his mind!"
Others gathered, forming a wary circle. Kaelen-Lugal stared at them, these ground-bound, hopeless men. They were like statues. Didn't they understand the danger? The beauty they were losing?
"Elara is in the crater!" he yelled, his voice cracking with a desperation that was not his own. "We have to go back for her! I have to save her!"
Two miners moved to grab him. He fought with a skill and strength that was alien to his own body, born of Kaelen's muscle memory. "Unhand me! I am a Sky-Walker of Aeridor!"
A Warden's prod slammed into his side. Agony, pure and undiluted and utterly Lugal, ripped through the glorious delusion. The vision of the sky fractured. Kaelen's memories, his love, his regret, were whipped away like smoke.
He convulsed on the ground, the Warden's boot pressing down on his neck. The miners stared down, their faces a mixture of pity and fear.
Lugal gasped, the taste of mine grit and blood in his mouth. The weight of his own, wretched identity crashed back down upon him. He was Number 738. In a mine. Covered in filth.
But the echo of Kaelen's life lingered like a phantom limb. The memory of flight. The face of Elara. The taste of a love so potent it felt like a physical wound.
The Void within him was sated, humming with the pleasure of the experience. It had not just consumed the memory; it had lived the fantasy, felt the desire, and tasted the regret.
Lugal, broken and weeping on the cold stone, understood. His self-hatred was the key. The Whispered Void would use his desire to be anyone else, to feed him identities until he forgot which memories were his own. It would let him live a thousand lives, love a thousand times, die a thousand deaths.
All so it could feel something. Anything.
And all Lugal had to do was keep hating himself enough to open the door. The despair was no longer just a weight; it was a currency. And he was rich with it. He would spend it all, every last coin of his own soul, to buy the power to become someone—anyone—else. Even if the price was forgetting he had ever wanted to.