The air itself trembled.
It wasn't silence—it was anticipation, as if the entire world was holding its breath before the explosion.
Novan stood amid the ashes, his clothes torn, his chest heaving with a rhythm so fierce it echoed in the air.
Every breath that left his mouth turned into a wisp of gray smoke, fading before it could touch the wind.
Above him, the sky was not a sky—it was a crust of shadows, cracking slowly as black light seeped through like blood from a wound in heaven.
The pulse in his chest was not human—it was something older, deeper.
Its sound struck against his ribs like drums heralding a forbidden ritual.
Before him stood a strange being—its body clad in metal armor, with veins of dim light flowing beneath, its face hidden by a mask carved from frozen screams.
When it spoke, the voice was not that of a single man… but a chorus of whispers tangled together:
> "You are late, Heir of the Source… the earth still remembers its pulse."
Novan did not move his lips.
All he felt was the boiling inside him.
The pulse in his chest hammered so hard that his bones trembled.
The ground beneath began to split with faint lines of black light, as if something deep below was awakening to the call of his heart.
The creature raised its spear.
It was no ordinary weapon—it was a fragment of the night itself.
When it moved, the air tore apart around it, and a piercing cry shattered the silence—a gray spark shot toward him at the speed of light.
He did not see it—he felt it.
It ripped through his body like a thread of pure agony, striking the ground behind him and erupting into a whirlwind of ash and cold fire.
He leapt aside, gasping.
The sound of the explosion echoed inside him more than in the air.
Then he raised his hand…
without even realizing he had done it.
From his chest burst a strand of black warmth—alive.
As if his heart had bled light.
The thread stretched and thickened, shaping itself into an arm of shadow—massive, sentient—wrapping around the creature's spear and shattering its blade in an instant.
The echo rang out—the sound of glass breaking inside a dream.
The air filled with glowing dust, and a strange heat flared between them.
That was the moment Novan lost control.
He screamed, and a circular wave of darkness exploded from his body, throwing everything back.
The ground rose like a sea of ash, and the sky fractured.
Even the light fled.
Everything moved to a single rhythm—the rhythm of his pulse.
Black arms erupted from the ground like living roots, twisting, searching, consuming.
All of them were his.
All of them beat to the same pulse.
He saw himself within them—his rage, his sorrow, and something he had never admitted before: fear.
The creature did not retreat.
Its broken spear reformed itself from ash and light.
When it pierced Novan's chest, the blood that flowed was not red as humans know it—but black, warm, and alive.
He fell to his knees.
The world stopped.
The air turned heavier than iron.
Sound vanished.
And in that silence, he heard a whisper—
a voice that did not belong to this world:
> "Blood is memory… and memory is the gate."
He opened his eyes—and saw Aris's face.
She smiled at him in the darkness, her eyes clear as water, before her face turned to ash and scattered into the void.
Time froze—then shattered.
Black light burst from Novan like a storm of living smoke.
It split the sky and folded the earth upon itself.
Even the masked creature vanished in the blaze.
When all was still again, Novan stood alone—
within a circle of molten ground, half human, half shadow.
Veins of darkness coiled around his arms like living tattoos, and his eyes—one human, the other pure void—gleamed under the torn heavens.
He raised his gaze to the broken sky and said softly, yet with truth in every word:
> "This isn't my power… it's my curse."
A breeze passed by, carrying an old, familiar echo:
> "The more you fight the shadows… the closer you become to them."
He smiled—half a smile, that of a man who knows the end hasn't yet begun.
Then he turned toward the horizon.
The mist there was moving—as if it had a heartbeat.
And from within it emerged human shapes—tired faces, bodies tainted by the curse, eyes stripped of light.
Novan whispered, his pulse quickening once more:
> "So be it."
He lifted his hand, and the shadows coiled around him like a cloak of living night.
This time, they did not flee from him—
they awaited his command.
But…
countless questions drifted through his tormented mind.
What were these things?
How did I fight?
How am I still alive?
And why did that creature look so much like me?
Am I the curse?
Am I something the world was never meant to know?
What is this place?
What happened to it?
Who am I?
And thus began the struggle of the First Pulse—
between the one born to bear the curse, and the one whose heart is the curse.
---