THE ORPHAN IN THE ASHES
The world did not forget Flare Nacht.
They didn't name him in the papers. No
official statement linked him to the event. But they all knew.
Whispers moved faster than truth.
Nurses talked. A janitor swore he'd seen the mother twist. A traumatized doctor
gave a drunken interview he was never supposed to give. In it, he said just
four words that would stick for years to come:
"The baby didn't cry."
The press scrubbed it. Governments
buried it.
But the rumor lived.
And for those who believed it — who
needed someone to blame — it didn't matter that Flare was a newborn. That he
had no say in anything. He was a symbol. A myth. A shape for their grief to
fill.
They called him:
The Cradle Curse
The Ashen Trigger
The Boy from Ground Zero
None of it reached his ears for years.
But it shaped every room he entered.
Year One — State Custody
Flare was raised inside concrete.
He had no extended family. No adoption
applications. No flowers delivered to the ward.
Just files.
Thick, sealed files stamped with more
black ink than information. Medical records flagged with terms like "anomalous
resilience" and "zero distress response." Video logs of Flare being tested,
prodded, watched.
He didn't cry much. Didn't scream.
Barely laughed. But he watched everything. And when he began to speak, he did
so carefully — like someone who already understood that words could cost you
things.
When other kids reached for toys, he
reached for patterns. When they fought, he stayed still. When they cried, he
stared at the windows.
Like he was always waiting for
something.
Years 5–10 — Early Childhood in a
Broken World
He wasn't alone in the facility, but
he felt like he was.
The other children weren't cruel — not
all of them. But enough were. They threw whispers at him like rocks:
"You're bad luck."
"My dad said your mom's a monster."
"You were born wrong."
One day, a boy shoved him during
lunch. Flare didn't shove back. He didn't cry either. He just sat there, cold
peas on his tray, fists clenched until his knuckles turned white.
The next day, the boy had a black eye.
No one could prove it. But they knew.
So did Flare.
Years 11–14 — The Ashen Years
By the time Flare hit puberty, the
world had changed again.
The Ashen were no longer mysterious.
They were classified, tracked, hunted. Containment zones. Death protocols.
AI-driven soul monitors. People wore wristbands to report heartbeat changes.
Death was a civic duty now — not just to endure, but to manage.
But children still died. Accidents
still happened. And when they did, the Ashen rose.
One night, the facility lost power.
Two kids in the east wing died — a
seizure and a fall.
They came back as something fused — a
pair of rotting wolves stitched together at the belly, sharing a jaw. One
staffer died, became something worse and was executed when it was found outside.
Another lost both legs. Flare, only twelve, grabbed a broken mop handle and
drove it through the dual wolf creature's skull.
He didn't do it to be brave.
He did it because it felt familiar.
Like he'd seen that motion before.
Like his hands knew.
When the responders arrived, they
found him leaning against the wall. Blood on his arms. Splinters in his palms.
"I didn't want them to suffer," he
said.
They stared. "….But you can't kill
Ashen with a stick…"
He was twelve.
Years 15–18 — The Slayer Corps
By sixteen, he'd run away twice. By
seventeen, he was done with the system.
The Joint Global Defense Initiative —
what people just called The Slayers — recruited him quietly.
They didn't care about his past. Not
really. They cared that he had zero fear response and a perfect record on every
psychological resilience test they threw at him.
And they cared that he survived Ground
Zero.
He was accepted into the Enhancement
Program on probation. They told him he might not survive it.
He told them, "I've already survived
hell. You're just offering me tools."
Enhancement: The Core Grafting
The Ashen leave behind bones and cores
— crystallized remnants of their corrupted soul-energy. Most were unstable. But
some… some could be refined.
Infused. Integrated.
Core Grafting wasn't cosmetic. It was
blood-deep. The procedure hurt. Weeks of seizures. Muscle regrowth. Neural
re-synchronization. At least two people died every year from compatibility
failures.
Flare survived it all.
His perception heightened. Reflexes
surged. Strength doubled, then tripled. Neural speed reached a level that let
him read threat vectors before they happened.
But the real difference came in how he
moved — not like a soldier, but like a warrior, something designed to fight
monsters.
They forged his weapon from the bones
of a corrupted colossus — a lightning-charged hand-and-a-half sword, brutal and
beautiful, sparking with barely-contained voltage. His shield, round and sleek,
had an oscillating edge designed to saw through tendons and bone on rotation.
He named the sword Greyfire. The
shield? Lumen.
He never said why.
Year 19 — The First Hunt
The alarm came at dawn.
A suburban block, 17 confirmed dead.
One of them, a girl in her twenties, had died from untreated injuries. Her
Ashen form was fast — quadrupedal, covered in fur and blood. Eyes like
shattered glass. Teeth like curved bone daggers.
It moved like a memory trying to
escape itself.
The rookies hesitated.
Flare didn't.
He stepped into the breach alone.
The creature lunged.
He parried with the shield. Baited it.
Waited for the lunge. Then — drove Greyfire through its ribcage.
The pulse backlashed — it always did —
searing light and heat and shrieking pain.
But Flare stood still as the Ashen
collapsed.
It whimpered.
And in that whimper, he didn't hear a
monster.
He heard a girl.
Later, in the locker room, someone
asked him, "Why don't you hate them?"
He didn't answer for a while.
Then, finally, he said:
"Because they didn't choose this. They
didn't ask to die, and they didn't ask to come back.
So I put them down.
Not out of hate.
Out of mercy."
No one replied. Who could?
Now — Age 34
His name still isn't in any records.
But every Slayer knows who he is.
He's a myth inside a man's skin.
Lieutenant Flare Nacht.
He walks alone, but not because he
likes it. He just… doesn't trust most people to carry the same weight.
He jokes sometimes. Around people he
cares about. Not often.
He doesn't do sarcasm. Hates it,
actually. Prefers real words. Real feelings.
He has a wife. A daughter. Keeps their
pictures tucked inside his locker. Never looks at them before a mission.
He says it hurts too much.
He trains harder than anyone. Sleeps
less than he should. Eats like survival is a job.
And every time he kills an Ashen, he
whispers something beneath his breath before delivering the final blow:
We pull back from his face.
Blood on his cheek, drying in jagged
streaks. Ash flaking from his collar like burnt petals. His chest rises and
falls — slow, deliberate. Not from exhaustion, but from restraint. From the
kind of composure only pain can teach.
His sword is still humming. Softly.
Like a storm waiting to be remembered.
He stares forward — not at the
monster, not at the aftermath, but at something beyond it all. Something
unseen. Like he's watching a thread unravel in the distance.
His eyes are tired.
But they're still sharp.
Still alive.
He doesn't smile.
He just exhales, turns away, and says
the only word that matters when your job is to end the suffering no one else
can:
"Peace."