The disturbance did not arrive with thunder or flame.
It arrived with wrongness.
Aren felt it before he saw anything unusual. He woke in the dead of night, breath shallow, heart racing as if he had been running. The room was dark, but not in the comforting way darkness usually was. This darkness felt strained, stretched thin, as though something pressed against it from the other side.
Beside him, his father slept on, unaware.
Aren sat up slowly. The unease from the past two days had sharpened into something cold and deliberate. It was no longer a vague sense of anticipation—it was a warning.
He stepped outside.
The village lay smothered beneath fog thicker than any he had seen before. It swallowed sound completely. No insects chirped. No dogs barked. Even the wind had vanished. Kharrow felt sealed off from the rest of the world, like a place cut out of reality and forgotten.
Then Aren noticed the sky.
The stars were wrong.
They were still there, scattered across the heavens—but one of them did not move. While the others slowly wheeled in their ancient patterns, this single point of darkness remained fixed, devouring the light around it.
The Black Star.
Aren's chest tightened. He knew, without understanding how, that it had been there before. Watching. Waiting.
As he stared, the pressure in his chest intensified. His thoughts slowed, each one dragging through invisible resistance. A faint ringing filled his ears, growing louder with every heartbeat.
Somewhere in the village, a door creaked open.
"Aren?" someone whispered.
He turned to see Elder Meret standing at the edge of the square, her face pale beneath the lantern glow. Others began to emerge from their homes—drawn by the same instinct, the same silent alarm.
"What is it?" a man asked.
No one answered.
Because the world chose that moment to blink.
For a fraction of a second, everything vanished.
The fog. The sky. The village.
Aren felt himself fall—not downward, but inward. Memories flickered past his mind in violent flashes: childhood laughter, the weight of an axe, his mother's voice long gone. Then came something else—visions not his own.
Cities burning.
Crowns shattering.
A figure standing beneath the Black Star, unmoving as gods fell around him.
The world snapped back.
People screamed. Some collapsed, clutching their heads. A few did not move at all.
Above them, the Black Star pulsed once—slow and deliberate.
Aren dropped to one knee, gasping, his vision swimming. For the briefest instant, faint lines of light traced themselves across his sight, too fast to read, too precise to be imagined.
The System had noticed.
Far away, forces older than nations adjusted their plans.
In Kharrow, bells began to ring—too late, too panicked.
Aren forced himself upright, dread settling deep in his bones.
This was no storm.
This was not a rumor.
This was the moment the world stopped pretending Kharrow did not exist.
And somewhere beyond the fog, something was already on its way.