The kneeling crowd didn't move.
Kael stood amidst the carnage, sword dripping black blood, chest heaving. His mind spun, trying to process what he was seeing.
There were at least thirty of them—shadows clothed in remnants of old-world armor, robes tattered by time, limbs twisted by generations of survival in a world that had long since abandoned sanity. Human enough to kneel. Inhuman enough to terrify.
One stepped forward.
Taller than the others. Its body was a canvas of old war sigils and ritualistic brands. Its face was hidden behind a cracked silver mask shaped like a mourning skull. Yet its voice was calm, almost reverent.
> "Kael Voss. You are the bearer of the First Chain. The cursed bloodline made whole."
Kael stared at it, sword still raised. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"You do."
The figure's head tilted, as if studying him. "You feel it now. The weight. The hunger. The song beneath your breath."
Kael's pulse quickened. The hum was back—stronger now. Like something ancient was stirring inside his very marrow.
"What are you?" he asked.
"We are the Disavowed. The Keepers of the Memory. When your kind locked the truth behind golden gates and rewritten scripts, we remained. Watching. Waiting."
Dren's last screams still echoed in Kael's head. He glanced back at Anya, barely breathing beside the fire, wrapped in pain and confusion.
"I'm not your savior," Kael growled. "I'm not your prophet."
"No," the figure agreed. "You are our curse."
---
They carried Anya on a makeshift stretcher through the dead forest beyond the overpass. Kael walked beside her, blade still unsheathed, eyes never resting for long.
The Disavowed moved in silence, their footsteps eerily light. They led him through a ravine of skeletal trees, past rusted machines half-swallowed by the earth, and deeper into what they called the Grave Nerve—a canyon split by the collapse of ancient gods, or so they claimed.
The leader of the group called himself Malrek. He spoke sparingly but answered Kael's questions with a grim sort of patience.
"You were born marked," he said. "Not by the High Circle, nor by fate. But by something much older. When the war shattered the Veil, fragments of what was scattered. One piece—the First Chain—sank into your bloodline."
Kael frowned. "A chain? Like a weapon?"
Malrek shook his head. "A prison. A pact. A promise. And a price."
He explained that the Chains were binding anchors forged in the final days of the pre-collapse world—meant to hold back something vast and monstrous that had nearly devoured reality itself.
"Seven Chains for seven Pillars of the Void," Malrek said. "But one broke. And when it did, it sought a vessel. A soul strong enough to carry its burden."
"You're telling me that's me."
Malrek turned his masked gaze toward Kael.
> "Not just you. You are what comes after."
---
By dusk, they reached the Shrine of Rusted Stars.
It was not a temple in the traditional sense—just a clearing surrounded by jagged monoliths of broken satellites and orbital fragments, their long-dead circuitry forming patterns in the earth like a cosmic altar.
Kael had seen relics like this before—ruins of the age when mankind thought it could conquer space, build gods from code, and outlive its own cruelty.
But something was different here.
The ground hummed beneath his boots.
He helped ease Anya down beside a dying tree wrapped in synthetic cables. She was feverish, murmuring in her sleep. Infection was setting in.
Malrek knelt beside her, drawing a blade made of obsidian bone. Kael stiffened.
"I said I'd protect her."
Malrek didn't flinch. "I would not harm her. But she bears the mark of contact. The creatures that attacked you—Devourborn. Touched by the same darkness. If she is not cleansed, she will become like them."
Kael hesitated. Then, reluctantly, stepped back.
Malrek drew a line of blood from his palm and whispered in a tongue that made Kael's spine shiver. The blade shimmered. He placed it on Anya's chest.
A pulse of light shot through her body—then faded.
She stilled.
"Sleep now," Malrek said, almost kindly.
Kael watched her breathing even out. Then turned to face him.
"I want answers. Real ones."
Malrek nodded. "Then step into the Wound."
---
The Wound was a pit at the center of the shrine—a perfect circle, black and pulsing, surrounded by fragments of fallen stars.
Kael stood at its edge.
"What's down there?"
"Memory," Malrek said. "Not yours. Not mine. Ours. All of us. The cost of forgetting."
Kael didn't move.
But the voice inside him did.
> "Go. You must remember what they buried."
He jumped.
---
Darkness swallowed him.
No falling. No motion. Just shifting. The world turned inside out.
And then—
He was no longer in the Wound.
He stood in a city of light and glass. Towering spires reached the clouds. Flying constructs soared overhead. The sky was blue. Clean. Before the fall.
And in the center of it all stood a child.
Not more than five years old.
Alone.
Crying.
Kael stepped forward, but the world shifted again.
Now the child was older—ten, maybe. Standing before a council of masked figures, chained at the wrists.
"His blood is marked," one of them said. "It cannot be allowed to remain unbound."
The child screamed as a searing brand was pressed to his chest—a symbol Kael now recognized.
The Chain.
Suddenly, Kael saw himself in the boy. The same dark eyes. The same fury.
The same curse.
He was watching his own past.
But more than that—he was watching something planted in him. A lie wrapped in memory.
---
He woke in the Wound, gasping.
Malrek helped him up.
"I saw… something. I saw me. A child."
Malrek nodded. "The chain binds more than flesh. It binds time. Your lineage is a loop. You are not the first Kael Voss. Merely the latest cycle."
Kael's mind reeled. "I don't believe in destiny."
"Then change it."
Malrek turned, cloak swirling.
"The High Circle hunts you now. They felt the chain's awakening. You must choose: hide, and be hunted… or rise, and become what you were meant to be."
Kael stared at his hands again.
Still bloodied.
Still shaking.
But stronger than before.
> "I never asked for this."
"No one ever does," Malrek said. "But still… the world devours. And someone must choose to devour it back."
Kael clenched his fists.
Anya stirred in the distance, murmuring his name.
And then, from the edge of the shrine, a horn blew—deep and hollow.
Malrek froze.
"They're here."
Kael stood.
"Who?"
> "The High Circle's Purge Squad. Chain-Killers."