The night was dead and the storm raged with relentless fury, rain drumming against the crooked roof. Inside the dimly lit room, a woman with disheveled green hair cradled herself, her breaths ragged, her body weak from the strain of labor. No midwives came. No voices comforted her. She was alone.
Her trembling hands lifted a small child, his cries slicing through the stillness of the night. Green eyes, blurred with tears and exhaustion, gazed down at the newborn. She did not know how this had come to be. She could not recall when she had been pregnant, or how she had arrived here—but as her eyes lingered on the infant, a strange, fleeting satisfaction stirred within her heart.
Then the convulsions began. Her body twisted violently, her veins bulging as if trying to tear free from her flesh. Blood poured like tears from her eyes, from her nose, from her lips. The newborn cried louder, his tiny body shaking in her arms.
The storm outside fell silent. The air thickened. An eerie weight pressed into the room, crushing and suffocating. Shadows gathered in the corners, and the woman's convulsions ceased. Her head tilted forward, and from her mouth, a voice unlike any mortal sound echoed—layered, broken, like the weeping of a hundred tortured souls.
"My son… oh my son… Azarel."
The child's cries stopped. The silence grew unbearable. His tiny amethyst eyes opened—shimmering faintly in the dark.