His first breath tasted of iron, his first memory was agony—and from that moment on, Ashren Vale belonged to the darkness.
The first memory Ashren Vale ever had was pain.
Not the kind that faded with time, but the kind that etched itself into every breath, every twitch, every heartbeat. A searing, mind-splitting pain that eclipsed his senses and seared his soul into the void. He was no older than four when the chains were first fastened to his wrists—not the metaphorical kind poets wrote of, but cold, biting iron that tore at his skin and left crimson trails in their wake. The shackles were too big for his frail arms, so they used rags to bind the gaps, rags soaked in the sweat and blood of those who wore them before.
He didn't remember his mother's face. Didn't recall the warmth of a lullaby or the tenderness of a home. All he knew was the sound of screaming. His own. Others'. Theirs. It all blended together into an eternal night. In the lower pits of the Obsidian Hold, silence was a luxury, and sleep a forgotten myth. Children whimpered until they learned not to. Until the screams of the newly broken replaced theirs. Until their hearts beat in rhythm with the crack of whips and the clanging of rusted chains.
The Elites called it "conditioning"—the process of breaking a child's will. Every slave born beneath the jagged spires of the Hold was subject to it. Ashren had once overheard a noble laughing, saying that if you cracked a soul young enough, it would never mend. He didn't understand it then. But he would. He would, when he looked into the mirror and didn't recognize the hollow-eyed husk staring back. When his reflection flinched before he did.
They took away his name first. Then his voice. Then his sleep. Then his mind. Each day a slow unraveling. Each night a test of endurance. He learned not to scream when the beatings came—not because it stopped hurting, but because the screams made them smile. The less he gave them, the less they took. That was the first lie he believed. Because the Elites always took. They took his friends—little Marri with the sun-colored hair who disappeared after crying out during a ritual. They took his hands, over and over, until callouses became skin and pain became routine. They took his hope and replaced it with a rot that festered beneath his ribs.
Time lost meaning. Days bled into weeks, then months. There was no sun in the lower pits, only torchlight and shadows, and the shrieks of those who didn't survive the night. The guards wore demonsteel armor, their eyes glowing with the sickly red of possession. Their cruelty wasn't born of duty. It was sport. They played games. Who could make a child bleed the most without killing them? Who could break a slave's limb and still make them work? Who could turn a boy into a beast? And always, always, the laughter—sharp and jagged, echoing through corridors of stone and bone.
Ashren was a favorite.
He didn't know why. Maybe because he never begged. Maybe because he never cried. Or maybe because they saw something in him he hadn't yet—some twisted spark that wouldn't die. They called him "Mutt" and sometimes "Ash," when they bothered to remember he had a name at all. But most of the time, he was just another pair of bleeding hands to scrub floors, carry blood-soaked corpses, and serve wine during the unholy feasts of the possessed.
And then came the Ritual of Binding.
He was ten when they selected him. A decade of filth and suffering etched into his bones. The Ritual was supposed to be for the elite-born—those gifted children bred to house demons in carefully curated bloodlines. But sometimes, rarely, they took a slave. For fun. For experimentation. For what they called "purging the weak." The last boy taken before Ashren hadn't survived the summoning. His body tore itself apart, innards liquefied, skin burst into flame.
Ashren lived.
The pain of the ritual was worse than any whip, any fire, any knife. It wasn't physical pain—it was soul-deep, like being skinned from the inside. The demon they tried to bind to him fought back. Not against Ashren, but against the summoners. It had been betrayed. And in that moment of chaos, in that spiraling cyclone of ancient malice and broken magic, Ashren didn't die.
He consumed it.
Not entirely. Not perfectly. Just a fragment, a shard of rage and knowledge that should never have been his. When the summoning chamber collapsed, Ashren was found unconscious amid a ring of burned corpses and a glyph carved into the stone by hands that weren't his. The Elites debated whether to kill him or dissect him. But then he opened his eyes, and the High Seer saw something.
They didn't kill him. They made him useful.
Ashren became a Vessel—one of the sacred few whose bodies carried demonic residue. He was paraded through halls on a chain, displayed like a cursed artifact, forced to kneel at every feast and let them touch his skin like he was a relic of dark glory. But it wasn't the demon's power they revered. It was the fact that he had survived.
They thought they'd broken him. They were wrong.
Because inside Ashren burned a hatred so pure, so absolute, it became a second soul. It whispered to him at night. Not the demon—it was gone, mostly—but the power. The System. A corrupted interface that no one but he could see. It was broken, fragmented, but real. It told him things. Showed him weaknesses. Let him store pain and trade it for strength. It fed on his suffering. And gods, did he have plenty to offer.
He spent the next six years pretending.
Pretending to obey. Pretending to feel fear. Pretending to be broken. All while the System grew. All while he mapped their halls, learned their names, watched their rituals. He carved their weaknesses into his memory with the same precision he used to polish their obsidian floors. He learned their footsteps, their hierarchies, their blind spots. He even learned their prayers, those twisted incantations whispered over meals and massacres alike.
Until the day he snapped.
It wasn't dramatic. No army. No flames. Just one boy and one guard. A cruel word. A spit to the face. A blow meant to shatter his ribs. And Ashren caught the blade. With his hand. And crushed it into dust. The look in the guard's eyes—the shift from amusement to confusion to terror—that was the first time Ashren smiled.
He killed seventeen Elites that night.
And vanished into the world above, leaving behind a legacy of ash and whispers.
Now, the world calls him the Demonbreaker. They speak of him in fear, in awe, in anger. But they do not know the truth. They do not know the boy who was born in chains. They do not know the hollow that walks in his place.
They do not know Ashren Vale.
But they will.