Darkness lived here long before anything else.
It clung to the ancient stones like dust, sleeping in the grooves carved by time, keeping the air cold, silent, and unmoving. In the heart of the Forson Labyrinth—once a sorcerer's stronghold, now an empty husk—the darkness breathed with the shallow patience of something abandoned.
For centuries, nothing stirred.
But tonight, something changed.
A tremor… faint, almost imperceptible… rippled through the deepest chamber.
The lightless room had once been a workshop of forbidden craft. The walls were etched with runes, now faint and cracked; shattered crystal prisms lay scattered like broken glass; scorched markings marred the stones where magical fire had once roared. A stone throne-like pedestal sat in the center of the room, split down the middle from long-ago overload—an explosion of arcane force frozen in time.
And at the foot of the pedestal lay—
—a puppet.
Small. Silent. Motionless.
No larger than a child, built from pale wood that had long since lost its sheen. Delicate patterns were carved along its limbs: elegant, subtle curves that looked like they once held meaning, though the centuries had eroded whatever story they told. Its head was rounded, its face smooth except for slight indentations: the suggestion of a nose, a faint ridge of cheekbones, the shallow outline of eyelids.
The puppet looked simple at first glance.
But the longer one looked, the more almost human it appeared—too precise, too careful, too beautiful in its symmetry.
And then there were the faint runic lines across the chest. Nearly invisible. Sleeping.
Until now.
A flicker rippled across one of the ancient floor sigils—barely a glimmer.
Then another.
Like fireflies awakening in a forest where light had not existed for ages, the runes began to glow… softly… timidly… as if afraid of their own breath.
Something had disturbed the dungeon.
Something had fed it energy.
And like a dying heart spasming back to life, the ancient magic reached out—blind, instinctive—and found the puppet.
A thin line of light crawled across the runes embedded in its chest. Dust lifted from its surface in a slow, graceful drift.
For the first time in centuries, the puppet moved.
A twitch of a finger.
A faint shift in its wooden ribs.
Its hollow eyes, carved and empty, sparked with a pinprick of light—white-blue, fragile, trembling.
Then—
Thump.
The dungeon seemed to inhale.
And the puppet awakened.
At first, there was nothing.
No memory.
No thought.
No name.
No identity to cling to.
Just… awareness.
Something like sight, though no eyelids blinked. Something like sound, though no ears existed to receive it. Something like breath, though the puppet had no lungs.
It simply was.
A point of consciousness floating in endless dark.
But then sensation followed—slow, clumsy, and overwhelming.
Cold stone beneath a body.
Weight—its own weight—pressing down.
Stillness, broken only by a strange heat radiating from its chest, pulsing gently.
It did not understand the heat.
It did not understand itself.
The first emotion it ever felt was confusion.
It attempted movement, though it had no word for "movement." A command pulsed through its awareness, raw and instinctive.
Move.
A wooden finger twitched.
The sound echoed in the chamber, tiny but deafening in the silence:
click…
The puppet flinched from the noise—reflex without understanding. Confusion deepened. Another signal pulsed from its chest:
Move. Move. Move.
Its arm jerked.
Its legs spasmed.
A soft, crackling sound filled its joints—dust shaking free after centuries of rest.
Then—
Its head lifted.
The world tilted, blurry and incomprehensible. Shadows shifted. Light danced in fractured reflections from the ruined crystals scattered across the floor. The puppet stared, hollow glowing eyes following the glimmers.
Light.
It did not know what light was.
It only knew it felt… drawn to it.
The puppet pushed itself upright, slow and trembling, every motion unsure. Its limbs obeyed instinctively, though they creaked with stiffness, its joints shuddering with strain.
The awareness inside the puppet flared with a new sensation.
Hunger.
A soft, trembling throb in its chest.
A hollow emptiness expanding within it.
Not in a stomach—there was none.
Not in a throat—there was none.
But deep, deep within the core of its being.
A craving, ancient and instinctive.
A need that had waited centuries to awaken.
Something in the dungeon answered that hunger.
A faint glow pulsed deeper in the darkness—a dull red aura, faint, flickering. A small creature skittered across the dungeon's cracked stones, blind and pale from centuries underground. Its body shimmered with the dim radiance of condensed Arcana—a weak dungeon monster, yet alive.
The puppet froze.
The creature—something between a hairless rodent and a lizard—sniffed the air, clicking its teeth. Its movement was clumsy, slow, sickly. The dungeon was dying; even its monsters were weak.
But to the puppet?
It was light.
It was energy.
It was food.
Hunger.
The puppet did not know the word.
But it understood the pull.
Its body moved before thought existed. Crawling—limbs stiff, motions unnatural—drawn to the faint glow like a newborn moth to flame. The creature paused, sensing something, turning toward the puppet with blind, milky eyes.
It hissed.
The puppet froze, head tilting.
Observing.
Studying.
Then—instinct surged.
It pounced.
The movement was clumsy, unbalanced. But the puppet fell upon the creature with all the weight of dry wood and forgotten magic. The monster squealed, thrashing, claws scraping against the puppet's smooth arms.
Then—
A whisper stirred inside the puppet's mind.
Devour.
Not a voice.
Not a command from outside.
But something built into its very being.
The puppet obeyed.
It pressed its carved fingers into the creature's body, grasping clumsily. The creature's arcane glow seeped through its wooden palms like mist drawn into a vacuum. Light poured into the puppet, threads of essence spilling from the monster into the puppet's chest.
The hunger screamed—
and the puppet consumed.
The monster's glow faded.
Its body collapsed into ash.
The puppet shuddered violently.
Cracks ran across its limbs—
carved lines brightening—
patterns awakening.
Its joints shifted, strengthening.
The runes in its chest pulsed with renewed light.
Energy surged through the puppet, overwhelming.
It collapsed forward, shaking uncontrollably, small wooden body overwhelmed by the flood of essence.
When the trembling stopped, the puppet lifted its head.
Something inside it had changed.
Its vision sharpened.
Its limbs felt lighter.
The hollow emptiness of hunger quieted—though it did not disappear.
A faint whisper of identity fluttered through its awareness, incomplete but present.
Who?
What?
Why?
It did not know.
Could not know.
But for the first time in centuries, the puppet felt.
A small emotion—faint as dust—touched its consciousness.
Not joy.
Not fear.
Not pain.
Curiosity.
It examined its hands, turning them slowly. The faint glow under its wooden surface had grown brighter, painting patterns on the floor. It lifted one foot, then the other, standing shakily on thin wooden legs.
It took a step.
A second.
A third.
Quiet, deliberate, unsteady—but purposeful.
The dungeon groaned, sensing the change.
Runes flickered across the walls.
A faint vibration passed through the stone.
Something ancient had awakened.
Something forbidden had stirred.
The puppet—small, elegant, wrong—had taken its first steps.
And the dungeon… watched.
The puppet turned its head slowly, hollow eyes glowing faintly with new light, seeing the world not as darkness anymore, but with awareness—primitive, but growing.
It had no name.
No will.
No voice.
No purpose.
Only hunger.
And curiosity.
And the first spark of a consciousness that did not belong.
It stepped forward again, moving deeper into the chamber, toward a world it could not yet understand—a world that would fear it, hunt it, seek it… or follow it.
Another tremor ran through the dungeon.
A low whisper echoed in the air, too faint to hear, too ancient to understand:
It begins.
And in the heart of the dark,
the puppet walked for the first time.