It began as whispers do—soft, uncertain, half-believed even by those who spoke them aloud.
In temple courtyards where incense coiled slow and sweet through afternoon heat, clerics murmured of visions granted in the small hours before dawn. The Goddess of Light herself, they claimed, had pressed words into their dreaming minds—words of salvation, of answered prayers, of hope descending like rain upon parched earth. Such pronouncements were not uncommon. Every season brought its share of divine messages, each one polished smooth by repetition until it became indistinguishable from rumor, from wishful thinking, from the agenda of whatever lord or council found it useful to claim the Goddess's favor.
This prophecy should have been no different.
It spoke of strangers. Of light. Of humans who were not of Terraldia, arriving to stand between the world and its ending. Pretty words. Vague enough to mean anything or nothing. The kind of thing easily dismissed over breakfast bread, filed away beneath more pressing concerns—harvest yields, trade negotiations, the small daily erosions of peace that required attention.
And yet.
Across the vast, unforgiving breadth of Terraldia—in deserts where sand swallowed sound, in forests so dense the canopy devoured the sky, in mountain passes where wind carved bone from stone—something began to happen.
They appeared without warning.
One moment, a hunter tracked deer through twilight undergrowth, her breath misting in the cooling air. The next, the forest erupted in white light so brilliant it seared afterimages into her vision. When her sight cleared, a figure stood where none had been before: a young man in strange, form-fitting garments of a deep blue material she did not recognize, clutching at his head as though his skull might split, speaking words in a language that was not his own but which her ears somehow understood. His eyes—wide, uncomprehending, already beginning to fill with the first edge of panic—swept the foreign landscape as if searching for something he would not find.
In a Terraldian market square, a merchant hawking root vegetables looked up from her stall to see brilliance fracture the midday sun. The crowd scattered. When the light faded, three figures remained: two women and a man, all dressed in clothing of impossible variety—one in what appeared to be sleeping garments, another in some manner of uniform bearing symbols no scholar would recognize, the third in garments so torn and stained with old blood that it was clear she had been in the midst of something terrible when the light took her. They stood frozen, hands raised as if to shield themselves from a blow that had already landed, their mouths shaping questions no one present could answer.
On a coastal cliff where waves had worn the rock to jagged teeth, an Elven ranger paused mid-step. White light bloomed across the water's surface like a second sun breaking the horizon. When it dimmed, dozens of forms dotted the beach below—some already moving, stumbling through surf toward shore, others motionless in the shallow water where the tide would soon claim them if no one intervened. From this distance, they looked like debris scattered by a shipwreck. It would take hours to understand they were people. Days to comprehend what that meant.
In a Dwarven mining settlement carved into volcanic stone, the eruption of light within the tunnels themselves sent workers scrambling for the surface, certain the mountain had finally chosen to wake. Instead, they found men and women materializing in the very heart of their workings—appearing in spaces too small, too hot, too filled with the machinery of excavation. Some emerged whole. Others did not. The screaming echoed through the tunnels for what felt like hours.
And in the wild places—the spaces between settlements where only monsters and the desperate dared tread—they appeared alone.
A woman in a river, current already pulling her under before she understood where she was.
A child in a cave system so deep and lightless that no rescue would ever come.
A man atop a mesa, surrounded by nothing but sky and stone and the slow, patient circling of things with wings and hunger.
They arrived with nothing. No weapons. No provisions. No understanding of the world that had claimed their physical existence, or the languages that now filled their mouths without their consent, or the memories that had been stripped away—all of them, every last one, save for a single absence they could not name, a hole in their recollection that ached like a phantom limb.
The prophecy had been vague.
It had spoken of hope, of light, of salvation descending from the stars.
It had not mentioned the screaming. The dying. The way the world of Terraldia—beautiful, brutal, vast beyond comprehension—would swallow these strangers whole, and spit out only the ones strong enough, lucky enough, ruthless enough to survive.
It had not mentioned that salvation would come soaked in blood.
The legend was older than memory, carved into temple foundations and whispered in the cadence of children's rhymes.
In the beginning, there were two.
The Goddess of Light, radiant and eternal, who looked upon the void and filled it with form. She shaped mountains that touched the sky's ceiling, carved rivers that sang as they moved, seeded forests so dense their shadows held their own weather. Her creations were abundance incarnate—every leaf a different green, every stone a different weight, every creature a small miracle of adaptation and beauty. She made the world generous. She made it sing.
The God of Darkness, somber and absolute, who followed in her wake and gave her creations meaning through their ending. He was not destruction—not violence or cruelty—but finality. The moment when the song must stop so silence could have its turn. He shaped death as carefully as she had shaped life: not as punishment, but as boundary, as rest, as the mechanism by which one generation made space for the next. Without him, the world would have choked on its own abundance. Without her, it would have been barren stone and empty wind.
For uncounted ages, they maintained their balance.
Life bloomed. Death harvested. The cycle turned.
And then came the thinking things.
Humans. Elves. Dwarves. Beastians. Orcs. Beings who did not simply exist within the pattern but perceived it, questioned it, sought to bend it to their will. The Goddess delighted in them—saw in their cleverness and creativity a reflection of her own luminous vision. The God watched them with growing unease, recognizing in their ambition something that strained against the boundaries he had so carefully drawn.
They grew. They spread. They built cities that scraped clouds and delved mines that cracked the world's roots. They learned to forge metal, to weave magic, to bind the elements themselves to their purposes.
And they learned to want.
Not the simple wants of beasts—food, safety, the continuation of their line. But wants that had no ceiling, no natural limit. More territory. More power. More certainty that they would never have to yield, never have to bow, never have to accept that some things were beyond their grasp.
War came.
Not as a single conflict, but as a slow contagion spreading across generations. Elves and Orcs clashed over theological differences so profound they could not share the same sky. Dwarves fortified their mountain holds against everyone, trusting nothing that did not come from stone and fire. Beastians fought among themselves, their tribes fragmenting along the lines of which animal ancestry held dominance. Terraldian kingdoms rose and fell, their noble bloodlines wielding magic like weapons, like proof of divine favor, like shields against the inevitability the God of Darkness represented.
The world began to tear itself apart.
The God of Darkness looked upon the carnage—the fields salted, the forests burned, the rivers run red with the blood of those who should have lived centuries longer—and saw only one truth: his wife's creation was flawed. Sentience had been a mistake. Free will, a cancer. These thinking beings would not stop until they had consumed everything, including themselves.
If they would not accept the cycle, he would enforce it.
From his essence—from the deepest, coldest reaches where even light could not penetrate—he called forth the demons.
Not mindless things. Not mere beasts. But intelligences shaped from his own substance, given singular purpose: unmake the thinking races. Corrupt them, twist them, reduce them to components of a simpler pattern where thought was a liability rather than a gift. The demons were brilliant in their cruelty, strategic in their destruction. They did not simply kill. They perverted—turned Elvish magic into self-consuming fire, Dwarvish craft into structural collapse, Orcish strength into cannibalistic frenzy.
And in their wake came the monsters.
Creatures that had once been fauna, twisted by demonic influence into something that wore the shape of life but served only ending. They bred faster than they could be killed. They adapted to every strategy, every defense. They turned the world's own abundance against itself, until the forests were hunting grounds and the rivers were graveyards and the sky itself seemed to watch with patient, indifferent hunger.
The races fought back. Of course they did. What else could they do but resist their own extinction?
But the God of Darkness had made his demons well. For every victory the living claimed, two defeats followed. Settlements fell. Bloodlines ended. Ancient knowledge was lost to fire and claw and the slow, patient erosion of hope.
The Goddess of Light watched her beloved creations die.
And in her grief, in her desperation, in her refusal to accept that this—this—could be the final verse of the song she had begun with such joy—
She reached beyond the boundaries of the world itself.
She reached across distances that had no name, through gaps in reality that should not have existed, into a place where different rules applied. A place called Earth, where humans had evolved without magic, without gods walking their soil, without any awareness that their reality was only one thread in a tapestry of infinite worlds.
And from that distant, unaware place, she pulled.
Every human. All of them. Billions of lives wrenched from their context, their histories, their very world, and scattered across Terraldia like seed thrown by a careless hand. Most of their memories stripped away to make room for new language, new understanding. Everything they had been, reduced to fragments—feelings without context, skills without origin, and one vast, gaping absence where something crucial should have been but was not.
The prophecy had called it salvation.
The clerics had called it hope.
The Outworlders—those strange, displaced humans who arrived in light and confusion and blood—would come to call it the Emergence.
And in time, some would wonder: if this was salvation, what would damnation have looked like?
The Emergence unfolded in the span of a heartbeat.
One moment, Earth turned as it always had—cities humming with their millions, villages settling into evening routines, hospitals monitoring the steady beep of machines keeping fragile lives tethered to breath. The next, every human being ceased to exist in that world. Not died. Not vanished gradually. Simply stopped being there, as if reality had blinked and forgotten they had ever occupied space at all.
And in Terraldia, they arrived.
Billions of them. Scattered across a world whose vastness dwarfed Earth's inhabited continents, dropped into a landscape already straining under the weight of its own wars, its own hunger, its own slow collapse beneath demonic corruption and monstrous proliferation. They materialized in white light that burned afterimages into the vision of anyone close enough to witness—and then the light faded, and what remained were figures dressed in strange fabrics, speaking words that reformed themselves into Terraldian tongues even as confusion twisted their faces, reaching for memories that no longer existed.
All of their memories, stripped away and replaced with linguistic understanding, with basic comprehension of this new world's shape.
All of them. Except one.
They did not know what they had lost. Could not name the absence. Only felt it—a hollow space where something vital should have been, an ache without source, a grief that had no object. It sat in their chests like a stone, wordless and heavy, and would remain there for as long as they lived.
The Goddess of Light had envisioned salvation: an army of pure-souled warriors, each bearing a cursion—a weapon forged from their very essence, unique as fingerprints, capable of miracles when properly mastered. She had seen them standing against the demon tide, their borrowed strength turning the war's momentum, their arrival the fulcrum upon which Terraldia's fate would pivot toward light.
She had not accounted for the gap between vision and implementation.
She had not accounted for the fact that most of them would be dead within a week.
The fortunate minority—perhaps one in fifty—materialized within sight of civilization.
A woman appeared in a Terraldian market square at midday, close enough to stalls selling root vegetables and woven baskets that the merchants' first response was annoyance at the disruption rather than fear. She collapsed immediately, retching from the violence of translocation, and by the time she could stand, a small crowd had gathered. Cautious. Assessing. Already calculating what use she might be, what value could be extracted from this strange, disoriented creature who wore clothing of a cut and material they had never seen.
A man emerged in an Elvish settlement at the forest's edge, appearing between two ancient trees whose roots had grown together over centuries. The Elves who found him—hunters returning from a successful expedition—debated among themselves in their own tongue before one finally addressed him in Terraldian. Their hospitality was real, but conditional. He would be fed. Sheltered. Questioned extensively. And if his answers proved insufficient, or if his presence began to feel like a burden rather than a curiosity, he would find himself escorted to the settlement's boundary and told, with perfect Elvish courtesy, not to return.
These were the lucky ones.
They faced exploitation, yes—Terraldians who charged them exorbitant prices for simple meals, who offered employment contracts written in terms they could not yet fully parse, who smiled with their mouths while their eyes performed rapid calculations of advantage. They faced suspicion from Elves who found their energy discordant and chaotic, from Dwarves who distrusted anything that had not been earned through centuries of proven lineage, from Beastians who saw in them only another variety of human greed wearing a different face.
But they lived.
The rest—the vast, suffering majority—were not so fortunate.
A young woman, seventeen or perhaps eighteen, appeared in the heart of a desert whose name she would never learn. The sand stretched in every direction, unmarked by road or structure, offering no guidance except the sun's position—which meant nothing to her, this celestial vocabulary she had never been taught. She had been pulled from winter. She wore a coat designed for cold. The desert heat began its work immediately, dehydration creeping through her system with efficient malice. She walked in what she hoped was a straight line. The sand erased her footprints as quickly as she made them. On the second day, she began to see water that was not there. On the third day, she stopped walking. The sun found her still and pale, half-buried in a drift, her lips cracked and eyes open to a sky that offered no mercy.
A man in his forties materialized in a forest so dense the canopy formed a second sky—emerald darkness shot through with rare shafts of golden light that only emphasized the shadows they could not reach. He had been summoned mid-surgery, pulled from an operating theater where machines breathed for him, where medications kept his failing heart beating in rhythm. The Emergence granted him none of these supports. His body, suddenly forced to sustain itself without chemical assistance, began to fail within the hour. He managed perhaps a hundred meters before his legs gave out. He was still breathing when the forest floor's decomposers found him, but not for long after. The ecosystem was efficient. It did not judge. It simply processed what it was given.
An elderly woman appeared on a mountainside where the air was too thin to sustain human consciousness at her age. She had been in a care facility, surrounded by nurses and the gentle beeping of monitors. Now she knelt on bare stone, gasping in air that her lungs could not properly use, her vision already beginning to tunnel. She tried to stand. Her body would not obey. The cold came next—not the clean, quick cold of winter, but the deep, bone-settling cold of high altitude that seeps into marrow and refuses to leave. She was unconscious before sunset. Frozen solid before dawn.
And those were the ones who died from the world itself.
The monsters were worse.
In a cave system beneath the southern wastes, a young man opened his eyes to perfect darkness. The translocation had deposited him deep underground, in tunnels carved by water and time, far from any entrance he could have found even with light to see by. He called out. His voice disappeared into the black without echo—swallowed by distance or absorbed by the stone, he could not tell which. He began to walk, hands outstretched, feet shuffling to avoid sudden drops. The first web he encountered was thick enough to feel like cloth. He did not understand what it meant until movement registered—something large shifting in the darkness ahead, the particular skitter of too many legs moving in coordination.
He ran.
The spider that called this cave home had lived there for decades, growing to a size that would have been impossible on Earth. Its fangs were longer than his hands. Its venom was designed for prey much larger than humans, calibrated to liquefy muscle and organ tissue so the spider could feed at its leisure. It caught him within minutes—he was running blind while it navigated by touch and vibration, an asymmetry that could only ever have one outcome.
His screaming lasted long enough to attract two more Outworlders who had appeared in the same cave system, drawn by the sound of another human voice in the darkness. They found him webbed to the ceiling, still alive, begging in a voice made thick by venom and terror. The spider was already beginning to feed.
One of them tried to help. Climbed toward the webbing with bare hands, pulling at strands that cut into his palms. The spider descended and killed him in seconds.
The other ran.
She survived. Found an exit three days later, delirious from dehydration and the darkness, stumbling into sunlight that burned her dark-adapted eyes. She never spoke of what she had heard in those tunnels. Some sounds, once heard, do not survive translation into language.
The hospitals and care facilities of Earth had been full when the Emergence occurred.
Intensive care units. Dialysis centers. Psychiatric wards. Nursing homes. Millions of humans whose survival depended on technology that simply did not exist in Terraldia—machines that breathed, hearts that beat only with electronic assistance, minds stabilized by chemistry Earth had spent centuries learning to synthesize.
They arrived and died.
Some within minutes, bodies shutting down the moment artificial support vanished. Others over hours or days, as medications left their systems and conditions that had been managed became acute. A diabetic child, pulled from her hospital bed, lasted perhaps eighteen hours before her blood sugar crashed beyond recovery. A man on a ventilator managed six breaths on his own before his damaged lungs gave out. A woman in the grip of a manic episode, suddenly without the medications that had kept her stable for years, walked into a frozen lake because the voices in her head insisted it was the only way to be clean.
The Emergence made no distinction between the healthy and the fragile. It took everyone. And Terraldia, beautiful and brutal and utterly indifferent to the needs of those who had not evolved within its ruthless parameters, sorted them accordingly.
Even among those who were healthy, who appeared in relatively safe locations, who had some chance of survival—even among these, the reality of Terraldia asserted itself with vicious clarity.
An Outworlder woman appeared in a Terraldian village, was taken in by a family who seemed kind, was fed and given a place to sleep. On the third night, the family's eldest son came to her room. When she refused him, he raped her. When she tried to report it to the village elder the next morning, she was told that Outworlders had no legal standing, no right to make accusations against true Terraldians. She was advised to be grateful for the family's continued hospitality. She left the village that day and did not look back, even when she heard them calling after her that she would not survive alone.
She proved them wrong. Barely.
A man appeared near an Orcish settlement and was immediately captured. The Orcs debated his fate—some argued he should be killed as an interloper, others that he should be kept as a curiosity, still others that he might have value as a slave. The debate lasted three days, during which he was kept in a cage barely large enough to sit upright, given water but no food, displayed for the settlement's children who poked at him with sticks and laughed when he flinched. On the fourth day, he was sold to a traveling merchant for less than the cost of a decent sword. He learned to keep his eyes down and his mouth shut. He learned that protest earned beatings and compliance earned nothing but the absence of immediate pain. He learned that freedom was a concept that no longer applied to him.
A group of Outworlders, perhaps twenty strong, banded together for safety and attempted to approach a Dwarven hold carved into the mountains. They were met at the gates by armored guards who refused them entry. The Dwarves did not care that these strangers were lost, frightened, desperate. They cared that their holds were carefully balanced ecosystems of resource and population, and twenty unknown mouths could not be fed on sentiment. When the Outworlders refused to leave, when they began to plead and then to demand, the Dwarves opened the gates just long enough to loose a volley of crossbow bolts. Fifteen Outworlders died in the first salvo. The remaining five scattered. Two of them froze to death in the mountains that night. The other three were never accounted for.
And beneath all of this, threading through every death and degradation and moment of dawning horror, ran a current of simple, corrosive xenophobia.
To the Elves, these Outworlders were wrong—their energy discordant, their movements graceless, their very presence a disruption of natural harmony. They lacked the patience for proper magic, the attunement to growing things, the reverence for cycles that Elvish culture held as foundational. They were loud where they should be quiet, rushed where they should be deliberate, grasping where they should be accepting. The Elves did not hate them, precisely. Hatred would have required seeing them as equals. Instead, the Elves looked at Outworlders the way one might look at an invasive plant species—unfortunate, requiring management, best removed before they could spread.
To the Dwarves, Outworlders were soft. Undisciplined. Weak in ways that went beyond mere physical strength—weak in tradition, weak in craft, weak in the fundamental understanding that value must be earned through generations of proven worth. A Dwarf's identity was inseparable from their clan, their lineage, their place in a continuity stretching back centuries. An Outworlder had none of this. They arrived from nowhere, claimed nothing, contributed nothing. They were blanks. Voids. And voids, in Dwarven philosophy, were either filled with purpose or discarded.
To the Orcs, Outworlders represented everything contemptible—frailty disguised as civilization, weakness celebrated as virtue, survival through cooperation rather than dominance. Orcish culture valued strength, directness, the honest clarity of violence over the
cowardly complexity of negotiation. An Outworlder who begged for mercy was not sympathetic; they were pathetic. Proof that their world had made them unfit for this one. The strong survived. The weak were culled. This was natural law, and Outworlders who could not accept it deserved whatever fate found them.
Even among Terraldians—who were, after all, human themselves—the Outworlders found little kinship.
The blessed ones, those of noble blood who could wield magic through their demigod ancestry, saw Outworlders as a threat to their carefully maintained hierarchy. These newcomers spoke of strange concepts—democracy, human rights, equality—ideas that had no place in a world structured around bloodline and divine favor. They were dangerous not because they were strong, but because they were subversive. Their very existence questioned the foundations upon which Terraldian power was built.
The common folk, the Zilchers who worked the fields and tended the shops and made up the vast, uncounted mass of ordinary life, saw Outworlders as competition. More mouths to feed. More bodies taking up space in a world that already had too little to go around. And if some of those bodies could be exploited—put to work for less than a Terraldian laborer would accept, used until they broke and then discarded—well. That was just practical. That was just survival.
The slavers found them easy prey. Scattered. Isolated. Ignorant of local law and custom. Desperate enough to accept contracts they did not understand, to follow promises that would never be kept, to trust faces that smiled while calculating the going rate for human flesh in the next kingdom over.
They had been summoned as salvation.
They arrived as victims.
And in the days and weeks and months that followed the Emergence, as the body count rose into the hundreds of thousands and then the millions, as the survivors learned to hide their origins or wield them strategically or simply endure the endless, grinding hostility of a world that had never asked for them—a new understanding began to take root.
The prophecy had spoken of hope.
But hope, they were learning, was a luxury afforded only to those who survived long enough to imagine a future.
And in Terraldia, survival was never guaranteed.
Not even for those the Goddess herself had chosen.
The first fragile coalitions formed in the third week.
Outworlders found each other in the margins of Terraldian cities, in the shadows of temple districts, huddled in the corners of market squares where merchants wouldn't chase them for loitering. They gravitated toward familiar accents, shared references, the comfort of someone who remembered traffic and electricity and coffee—even if none of those things existed here.
But unity proved as elusive as safety.
A former surgeon from Tokyo argued that medical knowledge should be shared freely, that saving Terraldian lives would earn goodwill and integration. A mechanical engineer from Detroit countered that every piece of Earth knowledge was leverage—currency to be hoarded, traded only for protection or resources. A teacher from Lagos insisted they had a moral obligation to uplift this world. A soldier from Moscow said survival came first, morality later, and anyone who disagreed could die on principle.
The arguments turned to shouting. The shouting turned to shoves. Twice, to blows.
Cultural fractures ran deeper than philosophy. Religious Outworlders clashed with atheists over whether the Goddess of Light deserved worship or contempt for this catastrophe. Those who had lived under democracies mistrusted those who had known only autocracy. Language itself became a barrier—though the Emergence had granted them Terraldian tongues, it hadn't erased the instinct to distrust those who thought differently, who carried Earth's conflicts into this new world like contagion.
And terror—the constant, gnawing terror of inadequacy, of mortality, of being hunted—made paranoia a survival reflex. Betrayals were imagined. Resources were hidden. Alliances fractured before they hardened.
The ones who tried to share fared worst of all.
A woman who had been a nurse attempted to explain germ theory to a Terraldian healer. She spoke of invisible organisms, of sterilization, of infection vectors. The healer listened with narrowed eyes, then reported her to the local temple as a heretic who denied the divine nature of disease and healing. She was flogged in the public square as a warning against blasphemy.
An engineer sketched plans for a water filtration system that could serve an entire district. The Terraldian lord he presented it to smiled, took the sketches, and had him thrown in the stocks for three days. When released, the man found his design implemented—credited to a Terraldian inventor, his name erased entirely.
A physicist tried to explain combustion engines, leverage, basic mechanical advantage. He was called a liar, a fool, a madman peddling fairy tales. When he built a working pulley system to prove his point, it was confiscated as evidence of unnatural craft—possibly demonic. He was never seen again.
The pattern repeated across kingdoms. Terraldian power structures—nobles, clergy, guild masters—could not afford to validate Outworlder knowledge. To admit that these ragged, ignorant foreigners possessed wisdom beyond Terraldia's accumulated centuries would destabilize the very hierarchies that kept them in power. Better to suppress, ridicule, persecute.
Even when Outworlder ideas worked—especially when they worked—they were stolen, rebranded, and weaponized against their creators.
Few Outworlders had the coin to hire craftsmen, the influence to access workshops, the protection to experiment without persecution. Earth's brilliance remained locked in minds that died before they could translate thought into tangible salvation.
And then there were the cursions.
The prophecy had promised them. Temple clerics whispered of soul-forged weapons, manifestations of inner essence, tools of divine favor bestowed upon the Goddess's chosen. Outworlders were meant to summon blades of light, bows of thunder, shields woven from will itself—arms that would turn the tide against demonic hordes and monstrous swarms.
The vision was seductive: an Outworlder—still wearing the incongruous fabric of Earth, perhaps a school uniform or work coveralls—standing defiant in Terraldia's wilderness, raising one hand. Light blooms. The air hums with sacred resonance. And there, materializing in their grip, a sword of intricate design, wreathed in ethereal flame, perfectly weighted, impossibly sharp. Power made manifest. Destiny confirmed.
It was a beautiful lie.
The truth was slower. Crueler.
Cursions did exist. They were real. But they did not appear on command, did not announce themselves with divine fanfare, did not arrive when desperately needed.
Most Outworlders didn't even know they had one.
The first manifestations were accidents. A woman cornered by wolves felt something pull inside her chest—a wrenching, tearing sensation—and suddenly gripped a spear that hadn't existed a moment before. She killed two wolves before collapsing from the magical exertion, unconscious for sixteen hours, waking to find the weapon gone and no understanding of how to call it back.
A man fleeing bandits stumbled, threw his hands forward to catch himself, and found himself clutching a bow. He fired once—instinct, terror—and the arrow flew true, punching through a bandit's throat. Then the bow dissolved, unraveling into motes of light, and he had no idea how to recreate it. The remaining bandits beat him to death with clubs.
Days could pass. Weeks. The cursion sleeping somewhere inside, waiting for the right stimulus—desperation, clarity, epiphany—that most Outworlders never survived long enough to experience.
By the time they learned, most were already dead.
Even for those who managed the first summoning, ignorance remained a fatal handicap.
A cursion was not a weapon. It was a fragment of the soul, a manifestation of identity, a tool that demanded understanding, practice, and magical literacy the Outworlders simply did not possess. Terraldia's children grew up surrounded by casual magic, absorbing principles of mana flow, energy conservation, and mental discipline the way Earth's children absorbed language. Outworlders had none of that foundation.
They summoned swords and swung them like crowbars. They conjured shields and held them at wrong angles, wasting energy, leaving themselves exposed. They manifested ranged weapons without understanding trajectory, wind resistance, or the stamina cost of maintaining the construct.
A man summoned twin daggers that could phase through armor—a cursion of extraordinary potential. But he didn't know he needed to sustain them with focused intent. They flickered out mid-combat, reappearing in his hands as solid steel, and his opponent's blade caught him in the ribs. He bled out in a Terraldian gutter, cursion fading with his life, potential unrealized.
Even the strongest cursions were wasted in untrained hands. Power without knowledge was just another way to die surprised.
The few—the precious, statistically insignificant few—who survived long enough to experiment, to practice, to grasp even the basics of their soul-weapons became targets. Terraldians who feared their potential. Demons who recognized threats. Other Outworlders who wanted to steal, to scavenge, to claim power they hadn't earned.
The Goddess had given them weapons.
She had not given them time.
Yet some endured.
Not many. But some.
A former soldier from Earth adapted within days, recognizing Terraldia's wilderness as just another hostile environment. She moved at night, cached supplies, avoided cities entirely. When her cursion manifested—a recurve bow that fired arrows of compressed light—she practiced in secret, firing at trees until her hands bled and her magic stuttered. She learned. She survived.
A pair of siblings, separated from their family, bartered their way into an Elvish settlement by offering to work as laborers. They scrubbed floors, hauled water, kept their heads down and their mouths shut. When an Elf ranger took pity and taught them basic wilderness survival, they absorbed every word, every technique. Their cursions manifested together—matched short swords that could cut through magical barriers. They kept them hidden, summoning only when alone, practicing in the dark.
A young woman with a cursion of terrifying power—a staff that could reshape earth and stone—accidentally saved a Dwarven caravan from a landslide. The Dwarves, pragmatic as always, saw utility. They offered her sanctuary in exchange for labor. She accepted. She learned their language, their customs, their suspicion. She earned her place one stone reshaped at a time.
Others found different paths. A merchant's cunning. A farmer's patience. A con artist's silver tongue. They scraped, stole, lied, adapted, survived.
But for every one who endured, a thousand had already fallen.
The irony was not lost on the survivors.
They had been summoned to save this world. The prophecy declared them instruments of the Goddess, champions against the God of Darkness, the answer to demonic corruption and monstrous plague.
Instead, they were prey.
Hunted by the creatures they were meant to destroy. Exploited by the people they were meant to protect. Dying in droves while Terraldians watched with suspicion, indifference, or opportunistic greed.
The Outworlders had been promised salvation.
They had received a crucible.
The Emergence was not the dawn the Goddess of Light had envisioned.
It was not the triumphant arrival of heroes, weapons gleaming, righteousness burning in their eyes, ready to cleanse corruption and restore balance.
It was a massacre with survivors.
Millions perished in the first month. Millions more in the months that followed. Those who remained were not the best—they were the lucky, the ruthless, the adaptable, the ones who had stumbled into the right circumstances or possessed the right combination of skills and desperation to claw their way past the death that claimed their peers.
Terraldia did not welcome them.
Terraldia consumed them.
And the world watched—Elves from their ancient groves, Dwarves from their mountain holds, Orcs from their sun-scorched territories, Demons from their corrupted strongholds—waiting to see if any of these fragile, ignorant foreigners could transform from prey into something more.
Waiting to see if any could rise from the ashes.
The answer, written in blood and whispered around ten thousand campfires, etched into the scars of those who survived:
Some did.
Not many.
But some.
And that—that narrow, desperate, blood-soaked some—would be enough to change everything.
Millow Aurum materialized in the cruelest iteration of the Emergence—no sheltering village wall, no startled merchant to offer guidance, no fellow Outworlder nearby to share the bewilderment. Only the shadowed depths of an ancient forest, where light filtered through the canopy in pale, dusty shafts that illuminated nothing useful. The air tasted of damp bark and rot. The silence pressed against his eardrums like water.
And standing before him, inevitable as nightfall: a figure carved from contradiction.
Skin the color of bleached bone. Eyes that held no pupils, no iris—only white that seemed to swallow rather than reflect. Black horns curved from temples like the architecture of some forgotten cathedral. Clothing darker than the spaces between trees, absorbing what little light dared approach. The wrongness of the figure was precise, deliberate, as though the universe had consulted its ledger of terror and produced the exact configuration designed to stop a human heart.
Millow's fragmented memory offered no name for what stood before him. His body, however, understood. Muscles locked. Breath caught halfway. Survival instinct screamed a wordless warning that bypassed thought entirely.
This was death. Death wearing a man's shape. Death patient enough to stand perfectly still and let recognition arrive.
Around them, barely visible through the press of ancient trunks, other Outworlders knelt or stood frozen—perhaps seven, perhaps ten—caught in a tableau of paralyzed terror. Some wept silently. Others simply stared, minds already fracturing under the weight of translated certainty: This is how it ends. Few minutes in a new world, and this is how it ends.
The demon—for what else could he be?—regarded them with the detached curiosity of a naturalist observing insects pinned to velvet. His posture suggested no urgency. No hunger. Only the absolute confidence of a predator so far beyond its prey that the outcome ceased to be interesting.
"What do you think of the dark?"
The question hung in the air, absurd and terrible.
Millow's mouth opened. He had not decided to speak. The words simply... arrived, drawn from some well within him that his missing memories could not reach.
"It's not a savior or an enemy."
Millow continued, his voice surprisingly steady—not from courage, but from a strange, distant calm that felt borrowed from someone he used to be.
"It's a mirror. Showing us what we're too afraid to face. Without it, and without its light, we are all blind minds and would never be the minds that we are now."
The silence that followed was different. Deeper. The other Outworlders sensed the shift—a hairline fracture in the certainty of their deaths. The demon stood motionless, but the quality of his stillness changed. What had been the patience of an executioner became something else.
Consideration.
Neroth Aconite—Demon Lord of Withered Souls, Architect of the Tribunal of the Damned, bearer of titles earned through millennia of flawless service to the God of Darkness—had existed for so long that novelty had become a theoretical concept. He had heard every plea, every curse, every philosophical defense sentient beings could muster when confronting annihilation. Fear manifested in predictable patterns. Desperation spoke in familiar tongues. Even defiance, that rarest and most beautiful of final gestures, followed knowable contours.
This—this was different.
The young Outworlder's words were not a plea. Not a philosophy hastily constructed to delay death. Not wisdom borrowed from books or teachers. They emerged with the quality of observation—a genuine attempt to articulate something perceived, not something believed.
"It's not a savior or an enemy. It's a mirror."
The statement rejected the binary that defined existence itself. For eons, the conflict between Light and Darkness had been framed as absolute opposition—creation versus destruction, growth versus decay, hope versus despair. Even those who sought balance still conceived of two forces in tension. But this Outworlder dismissed the dichotomy entirely, proposed instead that darkness was reflective. That it served not as antagonist but as revealer.
The implications branched like frost across glass.
If darkness was a mirror, then what it showed was not intrinsically evil but true. It exposed what light's brilliance obscured—the shadows within, the hidden architecture of self, the truths too uncomfortable for illuminated examination. And if darkness served this purpose, then Neroth himself—born of the God of Darkness's chaotic essence, shaped into an instrument of annihilation—might be something other than mere destroyer.
The thought arrived uninvited. Unwelcome. Impossible.
Yet there it lodged, a splinter too small to extract but sharp enough to make its presence known.
For centuries—no, for millennia—Neroth had understood his purpose with perfect clarity. Sentient life was the universe's mistake. Beings capable of thought inevitably succumbed to greed, tribalism, cruelty. They warred. They enslaved. They consumed without limit and justified every atrocity through the machinery of reason. The God of Darkness's mandate was not cruelty but correction—the necessary erasure of a failed experiment.
Neroth had executed this mandate without hesitation. Without doubt. He was the scalpel that excised the infection. He was finality made manifest.
But Millow's answer introduced a fracture: "Without it, and without its light, we are all blind minds and would never be the minds that we are now."
The statement acknowledged interdependence. It suggested—impossibly, absurdly—that destruction and creation were not opposites but partners. That to deny darkness was to deny the very conditions that made consciousness possible. That meaning itself emerged from the tension between illumination and void.
Neroth's existence was a paradox: a sentient being created to destroy sentience. For the first time in uncounted cycles of slaughter, someone had not reacted to this paradox with fear or rejection. Millow had not denied Neroth's nature. Had not condemned it. Had simply... acknowledged it. Had placed it within a larger framework where even annihilation might serve a purpose beyond itself.
The young Outworlder had, without realizing it, offered Neroth something no being ever had:
Validation.
Not approval. Not forgiveness. Not absolution. Simply the recognition that Neroth's existence—terrible as it was—participated in a balance he had spent millennia denying.
Most are clutching fragments of their lives like talismans. The Outworlders approached darkness through the lens of Earth's philosophies, religions, fears. They saw it as evil to be vanquished, or power to be harnessed, or in varying perspectives to be interpreted. Their answers bore the weight of accumulated belief.
Millow, however, spoke with the clarity of someone unmoored from such anchors.
Perhaps his fractured memory was not curse but liberation. Where others defaulted to inherited frameworks, he offered raw perception that bloomed from a creative insight. His answer held no theological baggage, no cultural conditioning. It emerged from direct observation—the recognition that minds required both light and darkness to function, that without shadow there could be no depth, no definition, no self-awareness.
The honesty of it was almost painful in its purity despite embracing different possibilities. As if Millow from the past had known true darkness, only to forget it all now in unknown reasons of amnesia.
Neroth had posed his question to different beings across multiple encounters. He had received answers ranging from the expected ("Darkness is evil incarnate") to the pragmatic ("A resource, like any other") to the desperate ("Whatever you want it to be—please don't kill me").
None had disrupted his certainty.
Until now.
The Goddess of Light's mysterious unprecedented move—pulling billions of souls across the veil between worlds—had piqued Neroth's attention. For the first time in living memory, something changed. After millennia of monotonous execution, of fulfilling the same mandate against the same flawed races, the Emergence introduced a variable.
Were these new humans different? Did minds shaped by a world without inherent magic perceive fundamental concepts differently? Would they bring fresh perspectives to ancient questions, or simply repeat the same errors in novel configurations?
Neroth had designed his test accordingly. Rather than slaughter the Outworlders immediately, he posed a question that cut to the core of his own existence: What do you think of the dark?
Most failed the test through predictability. Their answers confirmed his thesis—sentient beings were shallow, reflexive, incapable of genuine insight.
But Millow...
Millow answered with something Neroth could not dismiss. Not profound in the sense of complexity or eloquence, but profound in its honesty. The young Outworlder had looked at darkness—at Neroth himself, standing there in his terrible aspect—and had seen neither savior nor enemy.
Had seen a mirror.
Neroth did not spare Millow out of mercy. Mercy implied compassion, and demons did not traffic in such weakness. Nor did he spare Millow because the answer was perfect—it was not. The metaphor had limitations. The philosophy was incomplete.
For the first time in uncountable years, he had encountered a mind that made him uncertain.
Uncertainty was intolerable. Uncertainty demanded resolution.
It was all a test to determine whether this glimpse of something different—this hint that sentient life might contain more complexity than he had allowed—could withstand the harsh realities of Terraldia. Whether this unclouded perspective would survive long enough to mature, to deepen, to either prove itself or shatter against the world's cruelty.
What do you think of yourself?
The question hung in the air—unanswered, perhaps unanswerable—as the demon had never answered this contently.