The dining room light buzzed faintly, casting a warm glow over the small table where three people sat.
Jasper, the youngest, had black hair that was darker than the night sky itself and yellow eyes that were full of energy.
He was halfway through his plate. His voice overflowed with excitement. "In Oathbound, they just added a new update."
Ethan poked at his vegetables. He had heard this speech every day for a week, word for word. "Jas, can we talk about something else for once?"
Jasper barely paused, looking up to see his twin brother barely holding himself from cursing, before shifting his focus back to his favorite game, Oathbound.
With a sigh, Ethan pushed his chair back. "I'm going to bed."
Climbing the stairs to head to his room, he pushed open the door and stepped inside, only to be greeted by a messy room filled with fallen clothes and various books about architecture.
Ethan sighed at his mess, closed the door with a soft thud, hoping to not wake up his pet cat.
Sitting down at his bed, Ethan opened his laptop and started scrolling through his emails, barely glancing at them for more than a second.
One particular email did manage to get a reaction from him, a full scholarship admission to Harvard.
"Life as a genius really is great," he muttered, his voice barely above a whisper, moving a hand through his hair.
He was just 16, not even in his senior year of high school, and yet he had already gotten invitations from three of the best colleges in the US.
Having already skimmed through everything, Ethan's cursor hovered over the final email in his inbox.
Sender: Primiordial Pact
Subject: Eternal Oath Invitation — Limited Recipient
He frowned. He'd never signed up for anything related to this damn game. He wanted to curse at Jasper for using his email to sign up for this useless garbage, but he held it in, couldn't risk letting his cat wake up.
Wanting to see what kind of mess he had been dragged into, he clicked it.
Do you swear to accept the Eternal Oath, Zane Blessborne?
Two options pulsed below the text: YES and NO.
"What the hell is this?". That was the first thought that came into his head as he stared at words that made no sense to him.
For starters, Jasper's in-game name wasn't even close to what was written here. And why the hell did he not have such a cool surname?
The longer he stared, the more wrong it felt. Like the words themselves were alive. He must have been sleep-deprived.
Creepy didn't even begin to cover it.
His cursor hovered over NO. All he had to do was click—
Then the words pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
The entire screen erupted in blinding white light.
Ethan flinched, throwing up his hands to protect his poor eyes, but the glow wasn't coming from the monitor anymore — it was spilling out into the room, flooding every shadow. His bed rattled. His cat jumped awake from his peaceful slumber.
"What the—?!" His voice was swallowed by a deep, thrumming sound, like a heartbeat echoing through the walls.
The last thing he saw before everything went blank was the word YES burning across his vision.
———
Back in the room
Ethan's cats started walking towards his bed, moving towards the place where his master had vanished, until he was standing just beside Ethan's bed.
A faint shimmer rippled along its fur. Bones shifted. Limbs lengthened. Within seconds, the cat stood upright — no longer feline, but a tall man in a long black coat, his golden eyes gleaming in the dim light, catching the last fading rays like molten metal.
He turned toward the bed, his expression unreadable, and began to murmur in a low, alien tongue. The air trembled. The ground cracked. It was as if space itself was being torn open.
Blue-black sparks bloomed in the space before him, at first scattered like fireflies, then surging together until they formed a swirling, shimmering portal.
"It's done," he said quietly to no one in particular.
Without hesitation, the man stepped through, and the light swallowed him whole.
———
The portal sealed behind the man with a noise that sounded a lot like glass shattering.
Darkness stretched out in all directions, broken only by faint motes of blue light drifting through the air. Ahead, a circular platform hovered in the void. Two figures were already there, waiting.
The first was a woman in flowing silver robes, her face half-hidden by a veil. The other was a broad-shouldered man whose armor seemed forged from shadows themselves.
"You're late," the armored man said, his voice deep and cold.
"I had to make sure the Blessborne heir crossed over," the former cat replied, brushing an invisible speck from his coat.
The veiled woman tilted her head. "And… did he accept the Oath?"
Golden eyes glinted in the dim light. "He didn't need to. The Oath accepted him."
A faint smile crossed the armored man's face. "Let's hope this pleases the ones above, because if it doesn't . . ."
He didn't need to finish; everyone in the room already knew what he meant
———
Ethan woke to nothing.
No bed. No walls. No sound.
Just an endless black void stretching in every direction, so complete it felt like it was swallowing him whole. His breaths came fast, too loud in the emptiness.
"Hello?" His voice echoed strangely, like it was bouncing back from somewhere impossibly far away.
He tried moving, but there was no ground beneath him… yet somehow he wasn't falling.
Then, far ahead, a single blackish purple word flickered into existence.
[LOADING...]
He tried thinking about what that light was, he did, but with such a panicked mind, thinking was all but impossible. The only thought in his mind was that he had died.
His pulse thudded in his ears. He clenched his fists, but there was no sensation of fingers curling, no feeling of skin or muscle — just the faint awareness of movement in a space that didn't exist.
The void pressed in on him, suffocating without air. He turned in circles — or at least he thought he did but the blackness never changed. No up. No down. No horizon.
"This… isn't possible," he muttered, his voice trembling. Yet even his own words sounded wrong, like they'd been swallowed and spat back in a distorted echo.
[LOADING...]
Louder this time. Brighter.
A chill worked its way down his spine — or whatever was left of it.
The word flickered… then vanished.
For a moment, there was nothing again.
And then he saw it — far in the distance, a single point of light. Small. Steady. Beckoning.
His breath caught.
It was the oldest cliché in the book — the light at the end of the tunnel. The promise of peace. The final page of a story he didn't remember agreeing to finish.
But as his eyes adjusted, he realized this was no soft, golden glow. This light was cold, edged in silver, and it pulsed in slow, deliberate intervals… like it was breathing. Like it was alive, and it had just noticed him.
The black void around him shifted, folding inward, pulling itself into a long, narrow corridor. The walls weren't walls at all, but shifting veils of shadow that seemed to whisper in a language his mind couldn't hold.
And at the far end, the breathing silver light.
A pressure built in his chest, a strange, aching pull urging him forward. His pulse matched the light's rhythm, every beat syncing with that silver glow until it felt less like his heart was his own.
He wanted to run toward it.
He wanted to run away.
And in the space between those thoughts… the light took one, slow step closer.
Ethan's breath hitched.
It moved.
The corridor stretched toward him now, shadows lengthening, reaching like the claws of something just beyond sight. The pull in his chest became a sharp hook, and every time he resisted, pain lanced through him — not in his body, but somewhere deeper.
[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED]
The words flared across the black void, cold and final.
Before he could react, the silver glow surged forward, swallowing the distance in an instant. The light was no longer far away — it was in front of him, towering, formless yet solid, a shape that bent the void around it.
Something brushed his thoughts. Not a voice. Not words. Just understanding.
Come.
He shook his head violently. "No. I didn't—"
The silver flared brighter, and suddenly he was moving — not walking, not running—just pulled. The shadows streaked past, the whispering around him swelling into a thousand overlapping voices chanting in that alien tongue.
The light opened, like a door or a maw, and for one heart-stopping second, Ethan saw a world beyond — fragments of a sunless sky, towers carved from black stone, rivers of blue fire snaking through the land.
He had time to draw one breath.
And then the light closed around him.
Everything inverted.
Up became down. Heat became cold. Breath became fire. Life became death.
And Zane Blessborne — though he didn't yet know the name — was gone.