The night should have been silent.
But silence does not crackle.
It does not sound like timbers crumbling, nor whisper with the hissing breath of smoke slipping between the ruins of once living homes. The air was thick—thick not with fog or mist, but with a weight that made it hard to breathe. A stifling warmth clung to everything, unnatural for such a late hour, as though the night itself had grown feverish.
There was no moon in the sky even though it was at its peak,yet the world below pulsed with an otherworldly glowing flicker, broken, and violent. It washed over cobblestones now fractured and blackened, over trembling iron gates and half-collapsed thatched roofs. The smell was metallic, choking, and carried the unmistakable sharpness of death.
Something terrible had torn through this place, and the night was not done echoing.
Bodies lay scattered like discarded marionettes, limbs twisted in final moments of fear or resistance. Not a single cry stirred the air. Not even the soft breath of a dying plea. Only the slow, consuming pop and crack of what had once been a village.
And in the center of it all stood a figure.
Still.
Immovable.
His armor, obsidian-dark, caught the shifting light around him and twisted it—bending it into hues of pale violet, as though the fires themselves feared to reflect upon him in their true color. It wrapped around his form like if the evening's shadow had taken shape and chosen to walk as a man. His face—if it was still a face—was hidden behind a veil-like mask, black as the void between stars. No eyes, no mouth, no soul visible.
Just emptiness.
A torn cape hung from his shoulders, fluttering slightly in the heat-heavy breeze, the edges frayed where they brushed against ash and bone. In one gauntleted hand, he held a sword—long, steel, and polished like glass. It mirrored the chaos around him but offered no judgment, no remorse. The blade was simply there, like him—present.
He had not arrived after the horror.He was the moment it began.
And as the embers danced around his boots like spirits afraid to get too close, a strange hush fell over the night—as if even the flames dared not speak his name.
The village would not see another morning but only the heavy sense of the inevitable faith.
***
After the slaughter the light found him.
Not the flicker of flame—that had long since died into ash—but the colder, purer light of the rising sun. It crept across the wreckage of the village, tender and indifferent, brushing against scorched stone as if the morning itself had no memory of what the night had taken.
And then it touched him.
He stood at the heart of the ruin—unmoving, unbothered. His silhouette, once monstrous in the dance of firelight, had begun to dissolve. The armor that shimmered violet hours before, absorbing every flicker of flame like a mirror to hell, dulled beneath the touch of dawn. The killing beauty faded, and in its place, plain steel reemerged.Tarnished, weather-beaten, marked by the years and the weight of its history.
The veil slid back revealing half a face.
His eyes remained visible,sharp and deep, with a gentle shade of brown . They did not weep, but neither did they forget. They had watched entire lifetimes burn. They had seen betrayal, begged for justice, and been offered only silence. The veil still covered the lower half of his face, as it always did in the nights—but now it faded, dissolving with the last shiver of shadow.
And what remained was a man. Not a monster. Not a myth.
Just a man with tired eyes covered by ash. His shoulders fell as if some unseen weight slipped from them. He reached up, ran a gauntleted hand across his brow, then removed it slowly—examining the fingers, still stained faintly red.
"Again"
It was the fourth night that concluded the curse's effect for this year.
He hated counting. It made it feel predictable. Measurable. But nothing about it ever felt smaller.
The curse didn't consume him every night. Only four specific nights, when the moonlight struck the altar just right, as it had the night he was betrayed. Four nights when the wound reopened, not just in flesh, but in memory.
He had been a knight once. A good one, by some standards. Too loyal, perhaps. Too blind.
He had knelt before a king who smiled, and before nobles who sharpened knives behind his back. They called it sacrifice. He still remembered the sound of their voices as they chanted, still remembered the stone beneath his knees—how cold it had been.
They gave him to a god. Or something older. Something watching from behind the stars.
It didn't take him.
It cursed him. Depriving him from his heart and taking it away—leaving a void in his chest.
Now, when the moon touched that altar again, it didn't call him—it dragged him. And he became something else.
Not just a killer. A reckoning.
And then morning came, and he was just a mercenary in rusted armor, walking the charred edges of the roads, doing what he did best for a man with no conscience or neither coin.
He turned from the village, its remains smoldering behind him like an old wound left to rot. He started down the road, toward the south. Another town. Another inn. Another stranger with a purse full of problems and the look of someone desperate enough to pay him.
He killed to survive.
But he hated it. Hated the way the blade felt in his hand when the curse faded away. Hated the way people looked at him—half with fear, half with need.
What else was there for him ?
He didn't have a name anymore. Not since the altar. Names belong to people with futures. He had none.
But somewhere deep in the remoteness of the world, the altar remembered it.
And it would call again.