Kayden woke as if every bone had been forged in cold fire. Considering the hell he had just survived, that almost felt like mercy.
His muscles responded better than they should have. His body throbbed with waves of familiar pain, but it was healing at a pace that defied human logic. Wounds that would have taken weeks were closing in hours.
'Damn it...'
He flexed his fingers, tested the strength in his arms. He could move, but his soul still carried the weight of the last battle. He wasn't ready to face another monster so soon.
Hours dissolved into a haze of half-consciousness, but urgency pulsed in his veins. Staying here would be suicide.
He forced himself upright, and the moment he stood, a realization hit him like a punch to the gut.
"Where the hell am I supposed to go?"
The question echoed in the silence of the ruined cathedral. Normally, the answer would have been simple: go home. But what home? He had watched Ashen Falls devoured by the convergence, swallowed by an alien reality that rewrote everything he knew. He had no idea which direction was safe, or if any were safe at all.
'I don't know what's waiting east of this cathedral...' The sigh that escaped carried all his frustration. 'Better to head back toward where Ashen Falls used to be. At least I know that direction.'
***
When he crossed the cathedral's threshold, the outside world revealed itself in all its strange majesty.
The cathedral sat at the heart of a graveyard that defied every notion of sacred ground. Instead of headstones, swords jutted from the earth like iron teeth. Blades of every size and era marked the graves, from Roman gladius to medieval longswords, all corroded by time and stained with rust that looked like it had drunk blood.
The wind howled through the blades, pulling a metallic wail from them that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The smell of oxidized iron filled every breath. Kayden couldn't guess how long this place had existed, but every fiber of his being whispered: centuries. Maybe millennia.
He walked through graves arranged with no apparent order, dodging the gray trees clutching the ground like skeletal hands. Their bare branches bent at impossible angles, as if they had grown in perpetual agony.
But something else caught his attention, something that unsettled him more than the sword-graves or blasphemous cathedrals.
The ashes were still falling.
Heavier than before, more endless. That went against everything he knew about convergences. The stories always said that once the worlds overlapped, the environment became fully part of the Djinn Domain. There shouldn't be any remnants of the old world.
'So Ashen Falls' ashes were always the work of a Djinn Domain?'
The idea made no sense. How could something from another dimension affect the human world before the convergence? It shattered everything he thought he knew about how the two realms interacted.
But this wasn't the first time his certainties had crumbled like sandcastles.
***
The graveyard ended at a gate that looked like it had been forged in the depths of hell. Made of black metal like the absence of light, its twisted bars forming patterns that hurt to look at for too long. Rust and time had turned its surface into a crust of brown and red that looked like dried blood.
Beyond the gate, a gray carpet stretched as far as the eye could see. The road to the old Ashen Falls, now buried under layers of ash that muffled his footsteps like sinister snow.
The cold bit at his skin, making his jaw tremble despite himself. In the absolute silence of that dead desert, a memory struck him.
"The Fragment!"
He closed his eyes and focused his will. Golden letters appeared before his vision, a glowing screen hanging in the darkness behind his eyelids.
Name: Kayden
Lume: [Spark: 5/500]
Contract: [Star Devourer (Level 1) - Primordial]
Attached Fragments: 0/5
Skills: - [Stellar Beam (Level 1)]
Fragments: - [Death Leap (Level 0)]
Artifacts: - [ ]
Oath: Never retreat from a stronger enemy.
His eyes locked on the last line as if it were a death sentence.
"Never retreat..."
His lips curved into a humorless smile.
"So that's it... guess I'm dying young."
The curse of never being able to retreat before stronger foes hung over him like the sword of Damocles. But who decided what counted as stronger? What were the criteria? The questions pounded in his head, because without clear answers, how could he protect himself?
'Screw it... Star Devourer... Primordial... what the hell does that even mean?'
The only explanation the contract offered was as vague as it was frustrating:
[You are the one chosen for the beginning and end of stars.]
"Wonderful. Super helpful."
If he was going to cross this place he needed to know exactly what he could rely on.
'Time to see what these abilities really do.'
Golden letters appeared again before his eyes.
Skill: [Stellar Beam (Level 1)]
Description: Condensed starlight energy that the user can manipulate with their hand.
Kayden stared at the words: condensed starlight energy. That meant it wasn't just a death ray that would alert the entire city and get him killed the moment he used it. He could probably control it in other ways, but how? He didn't have much time to figure it out.
And last, the reward for his deadly duel.
Contract Fragment: [Death Leap (Level 0)]
Rank: Spark.
Description: Blows up the user's legs to perform an extremely powerful jump.
'...'
"It blows up my legs?!"
'Fuck! I almost died, and for what? for this piece of garbage? Will it literally blow my legs off?'
Something told him the contract loved ambiguity, but any situation that would make him accept the risk of losing his legs forever would have to be absolutely desperate.
He sighed, swallowed his frustration, and kept walking. The carpet of ash muffled his steps as he headed toward where Ashen Falls should be. The cold cut at his skin, but something else gnawed at him, a strange sense of familiarity that grew with every step.
His foot hit something buried in the ash. He knelt, digging with his hands until he uncovered a painted wooden sign. The faded letters were still legible: "The Drunken Crow - Drinks and Mea..."
The rest was broken, its edges burned.
His chest tightened. He was standing exactly where his home used to be. Where Rodolph served lukewarm beer to fools like him and told stories no one wanted to hear. The silence around him took on a new meaning, the same silence that used to fill the bar at the dead of night when the town showed its true face.
"You know what's wrong with this place, kid?" His uncle's voice echoed in his mind as if he were right there, wiping glasses behind the counter. "It's not death. Everyone faces death. It's the lack of hope. When you stop believing tomorrow can be different, you're already dead inside."
Kayden pressed the sign against his chest, feeling the splinters through his clothes.
He kicked a rock, watching it vanish into the gray haze ahead. The muffled sound echoed briefly before being swallowed by the void.
Rodolph was wrong. There was something worse than hopelessness: too much hope. Believing you could be stronger, smarter, luckier than everyone else who had tried and failed. That arrogance had cost the life of the only man who ever cared about Kayden.
He remembered his uncle's massive hands teaching him how to hold a knife properly. "It's not about strength, Kay. It's about precision. One clean cut is worth more than ten wild ones." How many times had he repeated those words during training in the bar's basement?
Rodolph never backed down from a fight. Not even at the end, bleeding on the crypt floor, had he shown regret. He died as he lived, standing, facing the impossible.
A tear ran down Kayden's cheek, freezing before it reached his chin. He wiped it away angrily, broke a small piece of sign and shoved into his pocket.
"I'll try to be half the man you were, old man."
***
He left the sign on the ground and forced his legs to move. Each step carried him deeper into what was once Ashen Falls, treading over the ghosts of streets he knew by heart. Right by his side had been the bakery. Farther ahead, the blacksmith's shop. All buried beneath the gray shroud of the convergence.
When he reached what should have been the town square, the Ash Market, Kayden looked up, and reality rewrote itself before his eyes.
Where the heart of Ashen Falls should have rested, the very earth split into a colossal wound. The abyss stretched beyond sight, its edges fading into a thick ash mist. But on the far side, rising as if to defy the violet sky, a city blazed with golden light.
They weren't dead ruins. The city pulsed, breathed, lived with an energy that made the air vibrate.
Black walls like obsidian curved in concentric rings, each taller than the last, forming the illusion of an inverted amphitheater. Needle-like towers pierced the low clouds like spears hurled at the gods. Between the battlements, Kayden could make out hooded figures patrolling with military precision.
But all of it paled compared to the vision at the center.
At the city's heart grew a tree that mocked the laws of nature. Its silver trunk rose far beyond the cathedral, beyond any structure Kayden had ever seen. Its branches stretched like the arms of a titan, and from every leaf flowed dark flames that did not consume, only danced in eternal hypnotic fire.
The ashes were not simply falling from the sky. They were born there, breaking free from the tree like shadow tears that rose before descending, painting the air in a symphony of silver and gray.
'So this is the source of the ashes...'
And for the first time in his life, Kayden felt a fear that went beyond death. A primal terror in the face of forces that transcended his understanding of what should exist in the world.