The fire came at midnight when the sky still held a faint chill. It didn't arrive slowly like a blaze from carelessness; it came like long-suppressed fury, breaking in, swallowing, and tearing through every house like thin paper. The wind, which on ordinary days carried the songs of the farmers, turned into a mouth that helped spread the red tongues, slamming against the roof tiles, penetrating the cracks, and turning the roofs into pieces that fell in swirling descent. The sound of screaming wasn't long; it was cut short, choked, trapped between the floor and the walls, like a suddenly severed thread.
In Tapak Jaran Village, which always seemed to be asleep day and night, the disaster became an unending night. The village wasn't famous on any map; it was just a cluster of thatched-roof houses, stone-filled paths, and trees that bowed down like silent witnesses. The times before the fire were unremarkable: children played in the field, women dried rice, old people sat in front of their huts with warm cups of tea. But that night, everything turned into an indelible black mark.
Behind the floorboards of the house on the very edge, in a slight gap where the wood had shrunk, a boy named Linfei, about six years old, pressed his face against the narrow slit. His young eyes, still wet with incomplete sleep, witnessed a world split in two: before the fire and after. His eyes weren't fixed by bravery, but by a nameless terror inside his small chest.
He watched dark-clad shadows pass; their footsteps were heavy, not like those seeking bread, but like those searching for something unseen, something that absolutely did not belong to the village. They moved quickly, aligned in tight formation. In their hands were long tools that glittered under the bonfire's light: not ancient spears, not arrows, but foreign objects that roared with a sound like small dragons. They returned again and again, entering house after house, making no distinction between old or young, fearful or helpless.
Linfei covered his mouth with a worn cloth so his breathing wouldn't draw attention. He pressed his body flatter beneath the boards, feeling the wood warm against his cheek from the seeping heat. Above him, the voices mingled: short, coarse laughter, the friction of cloth, and occasionally a step that halted when someone found something or someone they wanted to eliminate. Through the gaps in the floorboards, he saw an old man trying to crawl out, his face like weathered paper, his eyes pleading. Two dark-clad men turned, then one raised something, a sound like cracking bone tore the air, and then there was no more screaming. Only a dragging sound as the body was pulled to the side of the path.
For two days he hid there. Two days as long as a winter for a child who should have been playing with friends. For two days, Linfei only heard but did not see the world change: the sound of burning wood, the sound of collapsing floors, the shards of furniture falling, cries that dared not be heard, hurried footsteps that left blind traces. He heard foreign voices speaking a language he had never learned: harsh words, filled with conviction. He fleetingly caught a word repeated in the whispers: treasure, power, key. Those words were like a foreign wind that slipped through the cracks in the boards, crawling into the small room that had become his palace for two days.
The first day was a night of chaos. He heard the burning of wardrobes, the sound of breaking tiles, and the sound of boiling water in a pot being ignored. At one point, a great shake made the board above him shift, dust fell like a fine rain, and something dropped onto the floor beside him, perhaps a barrel, perhaps a human body. He held his breath until his entire body trembled.
On the second day, when the sky was red like an angry face, the sounds became more organized, almost like people cleaning up a stage after a disgraceful performance. He heard whispers closer to the truth: the leader was convinced that the village held something invaluable, an object or knowledge that could change fate. They said that someone in the village somehow knew of its existence, and because of that knowledge, everyone had to be eradicated so no one would carry the secret to the other side.
Linfei didn't fully understand. To him, the treasure might be a small satchel hidden in the attic, or a forgotten box of sweets. But his eyes were too young to deceive himself for long. From the mere scratch of the voices, he could sense that whatever the raiders' goal was, it was more than just an object: it was an essence that could change the order of things. The word power was touched by their voices like something they wanted to devour, and the tone in the loudness of that word made the blood in Linfei's head clot.
After they left, or more precisely, after the sounds clearly receded and the wheeled steps faded, Linfei remained silent. He didn't dare come out, didn't dare confirm what was outside. He felt in his body that the world had been cut off from its usual rhythm. Two days had given the heat time to deeply soak into the wood, making the floor stick like skin. Dust covered everything; thin ash settled on his eyelids every time he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
When he finally crawled out, the world that met him looked like a nightmare come true. The village path was full of charcoal. The houses that still stood looked like skeletons after a fire: black posts, hanging frames, empty husks. A smell filled the air, a smell that clung to the skin, that seeped into his clothes even after he tried to cover his nose. The smell was a mixture of scorched flesh, wood sap, and something sharper: the smell of hot metal and chemicals deliberately used to dry human blood so it wouldn't easily decompose. Linfei covered his mouth, but the smell penetrated to his most basic memory, making him vomit and pass out for a few minutes under the shadow of a half-burnt tree.
Corpses lay everywhere, but not in a natural way. Some lay as if asleep; a hand stretched out as if trying to reach for something. Others writhed, faces stretched like someone still protesting a final lie. Some were half-roasted; others looked as though they were taken by an invisible illness. Among the debris, there was another small child, a baby, perhaps not yet a year old, wrapped in black cloth, its mouth open innocently. Linfei, now standing on the edge of all this horror, did not cry. The tears had been lost long ago in his ears, replaced by a formless, trembling sound, like a broken leaf on a frozen river.
He walked among the bodies with small, forced steps, like someone assessing the path back home. There was a clenched fist beneath a collapsed door, an arm holding a small object, a remnant of the life he had left behind. Linfei, though not fully understanding the meaning of anything, reached for the fist. Inside it was an old, forged medallion, layered with dirt and blood. On its back was engraved a symbol that looked familiar, a small image he had often seen on his mother's cloth when she watched the artisans passing in the market. His brow tightened; he felt the weight of that symbol, as if something demanded him to keep or destroy it.
On the other side of the road, a house that looked like a warehouse left a different mark: its floor was filled with heavy tracks, like wooden wheels, but also the tracks of long, spiked boots. On the threshold of that house, there were traces of writing on the ground, lines that hadn't completely faded, like symbols painted with blood. Linfei stared at it and, without knowing why, felt a fear older than the plantations or the houses. Something in those lines whispered to his instinct: don't touch, don't go near.
He quickly gathered what he could carry: a half-burnt packet of rice, a piece of cloth, and the medallion. His mother, father, and sister were all gone. Everything that had once made gentle sounds in his head was buried among the ashes. Soon after, he walked away from the village that had become a sea of ash, walking like an animal that had just survived a storm. Without a clear destination, he followed the path leading to the forest, seeking a place where the smell of corpses no longer pierced his lungs.
As he walked, the rustle of the wind carried live whispers from distant mouths. There were priests from the nearest town descending, scouting with sharp eyes, merchants coming to assess the gap left behind, experts circling the village like flies over a carcass, measuring, observing, and gesturing to one another. They spoke of possibilities, of a treasure that might be beneath the village ground, of signs that something very valuable had been found by one of the residents and therefore had to be stopped. From a safe distance, Linfei heard the names of beings he didn't know mentioned: scholars from distant kingdoms, people with symbols of authority, and seekers who lived off the scraps left behind in a world of war.
Linfei also heard a snippet of conversation that made him stop, crouching behind the bush he temporarily called home. A large man, his voice rough but calculated, said, "We can't leave a trace. If people know that this village holds something, whatever it is, then war will come again. We need to close it, close off all possibilities."
Another, in a dirty shirt and wearing a small necklace, countered, "But who holds it? Who knows? It could be a small child, or an old person. We mustn't leave any witnesses."
Linfei swallowed his saliva, almost choking. He pressed his body to the ground, closed his eyes, and could only pray from his small core, a prayer taught by no one, but grown from pure necessity: Let me live. He felt a tremor in his chest, and for the first time since the night of the fire, tears fell on his dirty cheeks.
He didn't know how long he hid in that bush. When the afternoon sun swept the sky and the shadows lengthened like reaching hands, he decided, without a sound, without a plan, to go further. Inside him, there was one simple, strong desire: to find a place that hadn't been taken by the fire, to find air that didn't carry the smell of corpses, and to find a face that was still warm. He walked, and his steps led him to a road heading out to the world beyond the village, a world that now looked different, like a puzzle piece that no longer fit.
And as he walked away, the medallion in his grip shone faintly under the fading light, a small symbol that seemed to hold a story yet to come.
Linfei walked away from the village with a weary body and heavy breath, but the medallion in his hand was not the only object he carried. Hidden beneath the worn cloth wrapped around his neck was something smaller: a piece of dark stone, slick and dense like a starless night. The stone did not reflect light like ordinary rocks; it held the light, affirming it in the darkness. The crystal was pitch black, with fine veins that seemed to flow like frozen ink inside it.
He couldn't remember exactly when his mother had slipped it into the cloth. He only remembered a trembling hand, a whisper accompanied by the sound of burning planks, and eyes that said, without words, that the object must be guarded. "If you meet danger," his mother's voice trembled in his small head like an echo, "guard it. Don't let others know." The words were like a mantra clinging to his mind, but their meaning was still vague for a child who had just lost his home.
As night began to crawl, he sat under a half-burnt tree. He tied the cloth around his waist so it wouldn't fall, then without a plan, he took out the crystal. The black crystal felt strangely warm in his palm, like a small, beating heart. He stared at it for a long time, not because he wanted to understand, but because the object called forth a pure, small curiosity: why could something be so dark as to be frightening?
When his small eyes focused on the crystal's surface, something changed. Not outside, but inside. The air around him became thick, heavy like wet cotton candy. The shadows behind the trees seemed to draw closer, moving subtly without sound. The crystal in his hand pulsed, its black light creeping out like a procession of smoke from within the stone. He briefly saw something like black lines penetrating the entire space, as if a map was appearing on the surface, a map he had never studied.
Before he could look away, the essence anchored to the crystal flowed, not through the skin, but through his breath. The sensation came quickly: a cold that penetrated the bone, then a burning heat from within. The voices he had only heard from behind the boards for two days now became clear, layered: whispers that invited, whispers that accused, whispers that promised. They spun in his ears, linking foreign tones with fragments of words he knew: power, seal, revenge.
Pain exploded like a rock struck from the inside. Linfei screamed, a loud, long-suppressed sound, a ripple that jolted the silent air. His scream was not just a sound; it was a string of feelings demanding room to burst. Unconsciously, both his hands clenched; nails dug into his skin until it bled slightly. His small eyes folded shut, his lips groaned, his body writhed like a fish trying to find air out of the water.
A dark aura spread from the crystal like ink spilled on white cloth. Around him, the dry leaves scattered as if afraid, and the shadows of the trees straightened like crouching figures. The air stopped momentarily, a bird on a branch fell silent, the hands of the clock on the face of the world seemed to slow. A leaf that had been floating lightly a second ago now dropped like a stone. As night drew near, the darkness created did not come from the sky; it came from this tiny object that was now the center of something much larger.
The power sought an entry. It crept through the skin, infiltrated the veins, and ignited something that had never been lit in Linfei's heart. It wasn't merely a feeling; it was a memory that wasn't his, an image of the past that wasn't the child's experience, and ancient words that he didn't understand but felt like seeds for a new instinct to grow. He felt an ancient fury, a will to preserve, and a sharp hatred for those who had taken or might yet take from the world.
His scream turned into a dying sob as Linfei's consciousness dimmed. In the darkness that followed, he saw things that made no sense: the ruins of a city he never knew, faces that were not his mother's, and a black-framed door that opened into a space where all the world's sounds gathered into one. It was there that he felt something speaking to his core, not through words, but through a cold, compelling pressure. "We are Erebos," a collective voice echoed in his head, feeling like a thousand dying people speaking in one tone. "We are the forgotten power, the suppressed rage. Those who burned your village sought us. They fear what we can give you. Come, wounded child. Let us be your weapon."
The sensory system was so strong that the little boy's body stubbornly refused. He rolled, writhed, kicked the ground, but every movement was countered by an invisible object's pull. At the peak of that tension, he felt something break inside him, not bone, not muscle, but a subtle boundary between what he knew as himself and what wanted to become him. When that boundary cracked, he screamed once more, and then darkness swept his entire vision.
When he finally regained consciousness, two more days had passed, but this time in a different sense. The world around him waited with bated breath. He was locked on the dirt floor, his body simultaneously hot and cold, like an object that had just been melted and then frozen. The Erebos crystal was still in his hand; but now its surface no longer pulsed. He felt an injury inside his head, a lingering vibration that made him dizzy. His shoulders felt heavy, as if he carried something invisible.
Within a few steps after waking up, he noticed a subtler but most definitive change: his voice was no longer the same when he called. When he called for his mother in the shadow of his mind, his voice sounded like a foreign echo; when he breathed, the sound of his breath sounded deeper, as if something guided its rhythm from within. But what made him most uneasy was when he touched the crystal: not just a cold sensation, but a brief flash of vision: brass-handled gates, faces he vaguely recognized, and old words that now clung like a healed wound.
Linfei wanted to cry from fear. He wanted to call out to anyone who might hear. But the sound of the call now felt not strong enough to penetrate the fog within him. He fumbled, then slipped the crystal into the cloth around his neck, pressing both hands over it like someone closing a hole in a leaking boat. He felt that the object, though seemingly powerless, had marked him; something was ready to grow there if given the chance.
While he struggled to get up, firm footsteps approached, no longer the steps of those looting, but the steps of those who came to assess. A middle-aged man in a decent-looking robe rode from a distance, walking carefully among the ruins. Behind him, two sturdy men carried small bags of tools. They were not raiders; they looked like people accustomed to seeing such a fractured world: experts, perhaps, or those who tracked strange trails.
The middle-aged man stopped a few steps from Linfei, looked at the small, slumped body, then glanced at the black crystal peeking from the cloth. His eyes narrowed. There was a swiftness in his movements that indicated he recognized something, a hidden sign in the crystal's pattern. He bent down, not to take the object, but to assess: was the boy alive, or just a fixture that could be ignored?
"Child," his voice was gentle, but there was an unexplainable tone, a mixture of curiosity and fear. "Can you hear me?"
Linfei stared, the hoarse voice that came from his lips sounding like a call from the bottom of a well. "I... I..."
The man sighed deeply, then took out a fine cloth and gently, not like someone taking spoils, lifted Linfei's head slightly. In that motion, he briefly touched the crystal. The man's eyes widened, a flash that could not be concealed: a sense of knowing, and a fear that what was known meant great danger.
"You have something dangerous," he said softly to Linfei, not accusing, but advising. "This object... it's not for small hands. Who gave you this?"
Linfei bit his lip, glancing toward the village that had become ash. "Mother," he said weakly. The voice was almost broken. "She said... don't tell."
The man closed his eyes for a moment. There was something like honor flashing on his face, perhaps empathy, perhaps regret, then he made a quick decision. He ordered the two men behind him to move away, secure the area, while he himself added a little cloth to Linfei's neck, tucking the crystal in and covering it tightly. He did not take it from Linfei; he knew, with a vague sense, that the object must stay with its owner, or at least in a place where it wouldn't be easily taken by greedy hands.
"Child," the man said again, crouching down so his face was level with Linfei's, "you must not return to the village. Many will want to take what is left. The road to the east is safe for a while. Go under the shadow of the old tree, then look for the nearest house. Say you are from this village, and they will help you, if they are not afraid of what you carry." He tried to insert a smile. "Your life is more important than this object."
Linfei stared at him, hesitant. A rapid trust grew in the stranger, perhaps because his voice was gentle, or because his eyes looked like those who had seen much injury and remained alive. He nodded slightly, then tried to get up. The feeling in his head was still heavy; his vision was slightly spinning. The man held his hand, guiding him slightly.
Before they parted, the man placed something in Linfei's hand: a dry cloth, a piece of bread, and a small piece of paper with faint writing. "For contingencies," he said. "If you meet people who ask about that object, say you wear it to warm your soul. Don't lie or fabricate. And if you feel something else, come back to this spot. I don't know who else you can trust."
Linfei accepted the objects, thanks piled up in his small eyes. He walked slowly at first, then more steadily as his hips strengthened. Beneath the cloth, the Erebos crystal was silent, but there was a subtle tremor that never faded. He walked into the forest, past the fence he once knew, now just burnt posts, and onto a narrow path circling the hill. Behind him, the village looked like a crack in a mirror that could never be repaired. In his chest, something pressed, a feeling that might become a lifelong burden.
When night came again, he lay down under an ancient tree whose branches were like protective arms, staring at the scattered stars that were still reluctant to appear through the fog. In a sleep that wasn't entirely calm, he dreamed once more: not children's dreams of cake and games, but flashes of the voices of millions of souls, a gate, an incessant whisper. "They took everything from you," the Erebos voice whispered, now more personal, more piercing. "They killed those you loved. They thought they could erase us. Show them how wrong they are. Let our fury become yours. Let your vengeance blaze with our darkness."
He woke up with his palm pressing the cloth to his chest. The Erebos crystal remained there, cold and inviting, as if waiting for something that hadn't happened yet. In the distance, faint laughter sounded, not cheerful laughter, but laughter rolled by time, and Linfei knew, in a way he didn't fully understand, that his life would no longer be as it was before the fire. Vengeance, which was previously an abstract feeling, now had a voice. He had an ally in the darkness. And one day, not as a hero, but as an avenger, he would return. The fire that consumed his village might have been extinguished, but another fire, darker and deeper, had just begun to burn in his heart.
In the whispering forest, beneath the gently roaring branches, Linfei pulled his small blanket tighter. Behind the cloth, the Erebos crystal was never entirely calm. He felt, upon closing his eyes, that something was waiting, not outside, but inside a fragment of himself, something that would gradually learn to speak, whisper, and demand retribution.
And in that night wind, far from the smoky village, another whisper crept: a rumour coming from those lurking at a safe distance, from the experts who mapped possibilities, from the people who were hungry for pieces of power. They spoke of one name in whispers: Erebos, a legacy of war, or perhaps something older. Some said it was an amulet that protected; some said it was the key to reopening what was sealed; others called it only a muddy stone that brought bad luck. But those voices, though different, converged on one thing: they knew of the existence of something that could shift the balance.
Linfei slept, but the dreams and whispers still clung to the edges of the day. In his chest, around the Erebos he hid, something moved slowly, not strong enough to pose a danger now, but enough to ignite the fire of vengeance that would one day burn brighter than the fire that consumed his past. He didn't know who would come to claim his destiny, but one thing was certain: when the time came, he would not arrive as a savior, but as a storm of darkness bringing destruction to those who had stolen everything from him.