Cold.
It wasn't the sharp bite of winter, nor the damp chill of early morning dew. This was something deeper, an emptiness that sank through skin and muscle to gnaw at the marrow of his bones. It felt… ancient.
Seth's eyelids twitched before they finally opened, heavy as stone. His vision blurred, clearing slowly to reveal a sky unlike anything he had ever seen. It wasn't the familiar blue of his youth, nor the clouded gray he had grown used to in his final years. No — this sky was fractured, torn between two forces that clashed in a silent, endless struggle.
Bands of molten gold streaked across the heavens, colliding violently with vast swathes of black. The two colors twisted and writhed against each other like great serpents, neither gaining ground nor conceding it. Lightning crawled lazily between them, lingering too long before fading, only to return in the exact same jagged shape moments later.
It was beautiful. And it was wrong.
He lay there for a moment, staring upward, his breath forming faint clouds in the frigid air. The silence pressed in on him — not the peaceful kind found in untouched wilderness, but the oppressive stillness that came after something terrible.
With effort, Seth pushed himself upright. His palms pressed into cracked, blackened earth that flaked apart beneath his touch, brittle as burnt parchment. The ground felt strange — not quite stone, not quite soil, as though scorched by fire and then frozen in place.
He glanced around, trying to take in his surroundings. The land was littered with the remains of a city, or something that had once been one. Towering buildings leaned at unnatural angles, their silhouettes jagged and broken like teeth in the mouth of a corpse. Their surfaces were warped, as if they had melted and then solidified mid-collapse. Streets had split apart into uneven slabs, some curling upward, others sunken deep into fissures that disappeared into darkness.
There were no voices. No birds. Not even the whisper of wind.
Then — the voice came.
"My beloved son, awaken."
Seth froze.
The words did not echo through the air; they resonated inside him, vibrating in his bones. They bypassed his ears entirely, as if they were being spoken directly to his soul. The tone was both terrible and comforting — a voice he knew, yet could not place within mortal memory.
His heart stuttered painfully. He had heard that voice before. Long ago. Too long ago.
"The fragments… they have been loosed upon the earth. Both Heaven and Hell have spilled their essence into this world."
Fragments?
The word burned in his mind, heavy with meaning. His instincts told him these were not mere objects, but pieces of something greater, something that should never have been here.
He rose to his feet slowly, eyes sweeping over the strange horizon.
"Gather them. Return them to their rightful place… or all realms shall fall."
And then — silence.
The weight of the voice lingered, pressing against him like a heavy hand. The stillness returned, but it was no longer empty. It was waiting.
He didn't understand why he was here. His last memory… no, that was impossible. He remembered the end. He remembered death.
So why was he alive?
He glanced down at his hands again. They were young. Strong. Free of the lines and scars that had marked them in his later years. His chest tightened. This was his body at twenty-five. The age before everything had gone wrong.
The sky overhead churned slowly, the golden and black bands twisting tighter around each other. A faint vibration rippled through the ground beneath his feet — not enough to shake him, but enough to remind him that this place was not still. Not truly.
A sharp whistle split the air.
Instinct, sharp and immediate, flared to life.
Seth dropped low, the motion smooth and practiced. A black-fletched arrow hissed through the space where his head had been and struck the ground behind him with a dull, heavy thunk.
The shaft quivered in the cracked earth. Wisps of oily darkness curled from it, twisting and coiling like smoke caught in slow motion. Even from here, Seth could feel the wrongness radiating from it — a cold that clawed at the edges of his mind.
He straightened slowly, his gaze sweeping the ruins ahead.
There.
A figure stood atop the jagged remains of a wall, draped in a cloak so black it seemed to devour the light. The hood cast the figure's face in deep shadow, but two crimson points glowed faintly within, unblinking and cold.
The stranger's voice carried easily through the dead air.
"Well… looks like the little child finally woke up."
The words were casual, but the tone was razor-sharp.
Seth said nothing.
The figure tilted his head slightly, studying him with the detached curiosity of a predator watching prey.
"You're not from here," the man continued, voice low and almost conversational. "And yet… I can smell it on you. The fragments."
Seth's eyes narrowed. "And if you can?"
A slow grin spread across the shadowed face.
"Then your head will make me rich."
The moment the words left his mouth, he moved.
No — vanished.
Shadows rippled across the broken ground, rushing toward Seth from every direction at once. His pulse spiked. His right hand rose instinctively, and light flared from his palm.
It poured outward in a sudden burst, pure and blinding, flooding the ruined street. The shadows recoiled instantly, tearing back as though the light burned them.
A hiss of pain came from above. Seth's eyes darted upward.
The cloaked figure clung to the underside of a shattered archway, his grip tight on the hilt of a curved blade of black steel. The edge of his cloak smoldered faintly where the light had touched it.
"Tch… you're not supposed to have that," the man growled.
Seth's voice was calm, though his muscles were coiled like a spring. "And you're not supposed to be here."
The assassin bared his teeth. His curved blade hummed faintly, a resonance that prickled against Seth's senses. The sound wasn't loud, but it felt as if it was echoing inside his skull.
The man lunged.
Steel met light in a crash that shattered the silence.