Ash rained from the heavens.
If they could still be called that.
The sky had collapsed long ago, buried under smoke and silence. What remained was a yawning void — smothered in soot, choked by screams. A ceiling of death stretched endlessly overhead, and beneath it... only rot.
He lay there, still — a nameless corpse among corpses. Cold blood matted his skin. Most of it wasn't his.
Yet his eyes opened.
Slowly.
As if resisting existence itself.
He didn't remember his name.
Didn't remember how he ended up in a mass grave where the earth still twitched.
Didn't remember anything before the darkness.
But his heart — it remembered how to beat.
Each thud echoed like a war drum inside his ribs.
Familiar. Measured. Merciless.
Above him, the world moved.
Twisted silhouettes marched through the haze — demons, ancient and starved. Horns cracked like fractured stone, claws clicking as they scraped against bone and blade. Their gait was regal, almost amused.
Following them came the puppets.
Humans.
Mouths sewn shut. Eyes hollow and blind. Limbs bent unnaturally. They moved without thought, like puppets yanked by a dying god's hand.
But he didn't move.
Not yet.
There was something sacred in stillness. Something powerful in restraint.
He stared at the smog. The place where the sky used to be.
"Where am I?"
He didn't speak it.
His voice had abandoned him long ago — just like everyone else.
He was… the forgotten.
The Nameless.
Far away, something tore the silence apart.
A scream. Raw. Human. Female.
It shattered against the cathedral ruins like a hymn cursed by its own echo.
She was nailed to the altar.
A girl — no, a woman — cloaked in blood and defiance.
Elara.
Chains coiled around her limbs like serpents. Nails were driven through her hands, anchoring her to broken stone. Cuts lined her body in intricate spirals — symbols of some ancient ritual, or perhaps just cruelty disguised as faith.
Around her, robed beasts circled — neither man nor monster, but something that drank from both. They chanted in tongues long forgotten by even the dead. And every time they killed her...
She came back.
Her body pulsed with pale light. Bones snapped and reformed. Her scream would fade... only to begin again.
"Why… won't I die…?"
She whispered it like a prayer.
But there were no gods here.
Only demons. Only silence.
Only the curse that stitched her soul together every time they ripped it apart.
Immortality was not a gift. Not in this world. It was a sentence.
And Elara had been sentenced longer than her memories could hold.
But pain has a strange way of preserving what time forgets.
Through the agony, something sparked.
A memory.
A presence.
A face she couldn't name — but felt carved into the marrow of her being.
A touch she'd forgotten, but her blood had not.
"If no one remembers him…
Let me be the last."
She coughed blood. Trembled.
And with a broken finger, she drew a shape in the air — a sigil fractured by time, once painted across a war god's throne.
"Return to me," she whispered.
"Please... find me."
Her voice disappeared into the ash.
But something shifted.
In the pit of corpses, a sound.
Not a breath. Not a word.
A crack.
The kind that bones make when they're called back to purpose.
A body moved.
A shadow stood.
Cloth clung to him like smoke. Blood steamed from his skin. His face, half-hidden behind strands of damp hair, was expressionless.
But his eyes...
His eyes glowed. Not with power. Not with life.
With rage.
Behind his back, unseen by the blind, a crystal pulsed with faint red light — buried near his spine. One of Seven. Dormant no longer.
It remembered.
She remembered.
And that was enough.
His gaze cut through the fog, falling upon the shattered cathedral.
She was there.
Crucified. Broken. Dying again.
And something in him fractured.
"I don't know who you are," he thought.
"But someone I was… loved you."
His feet moved before his thoughts caught up.
The first demon turned, grinning through jagged fangs.
"Another corpse risen—"
His head didn't finish the sentence.
Because it wasn't there anymore.
A lash of blood had whipped through the air, carving cleanly through muscle and bone. It wasn't his blood — it was taken. Stolen from the dead that surrounded him.
The Nameless did not blink.
The second demon reached for a weapon.
He got a spear through the throat instead — made from shattered ribs, sinew still twitching.
The third ran.
He was the smart one.
But not fast enough.
Nameless raised his hand.
Behind him, a hundred blood droplets floated — suspended like crimson stars in a broken galaxy.
They flicked forward.
And then the demon's body burst from within, flesh peeling like burnt paper.
"I don't remember her."
"But I remember what I am."
He walked.
Every step deliberate. Balanced. Like a guillotine in motion.
"And I…
Am death to the ones who touched her."
The robed beasts screamed.
Their rituals shattered like glass under his presence.
They cast barriers. Illusions. Fire.
It didn't matter.
He passed through them like wind through smoke.
Limbs split. Mouths tore. Hearts ruptured in their chests without warning.
The controlled humans — the puppets — he spared.
For now.
Because they were not enemies.
They were the proof of evil.
But the others?
The ones who laughed when she cried?
He broke them slow.
Crushed their bones with silence.
Ripped minds apart with gestures.
One tried to crawl away.
He grabbed its jaw — and pulled.
"You remember pain, don't you?"
"Then remember this."
He reached her at last.
Elara.
Her eyes were closed.
Her chest still.
He knelt beside her. Touched her face — bloodied, bruised, divine in ruin.
Her blood stained his hand.
And for a moment... he felt her memory inside him. The shape of her soul in his veins.
"You remembered me when the world didn't."
"I swear to the shattered sky — I will not forget you again."
And for the first time since his return...
He looked up.
There was no sky.
Only the void.
But in that darkness… one crystal hummed.
And far away, something else stirred.
The war had begun.