The sky bled red.
Duran had seen flames before. Warm fires in the winter, festival torches, candles lit for prayer. But this…this was different.
This was a sky split by red and black, smoke pouring up like the earth itself had opened to scream along with him.
He lay half-buried beneath the broken frame of his home, the weight of wood and ash pressing against his ribs. Breathing hurt. Thinking hurt worse. Yet it was nothing compared to the pain he felt in his soul.
Screams echoed through the night—too many to count, too painful to forget. They came from every corner of the village. The butcher's stall, the chapel, the central square...and his home. Men, women, and children cried out until they could cry no more. He had told himself maybe they had just passed out. Maybe. But he knew better, they were gone.
It was impossible to tell how long it had been since the attack began—minutes? Hours? Even the sun had vanished behind a thick curtain of smoke, leaving only flickers of orange light dancing over corpses and ruin.
Lethwyn, his home, was dying.
No warning. No mercy. The village had simply exploded into chaos. Duran had been asleep, dreaming of the river and of fishing trips with his father, his late father, when the first explosion struck. Walls shattered. His mother's scream had barely formed before another blast took the room, flinging Duran across the floor like a rag doll. He never heard her voice again.
Now he was laying here. Crushed, bleeding, gasping for air beneath what was left of their cottage. The roof above had caved in, the timbers cracked and blackened, but a small pocket of space had saved his life. If you could call this living. Unless he received medical help, this would truly be the last sight he saw of his home, and the thought of that just filled him with rage and sadness alike.
Through the gaps in the wreckage, he could see parts of the village square. A figure stumbled past, one of the black-armored invaders, dragging a limp body behind him. Another, taller, stood over a row of corpses, chanting a strange spell.
The spell emitted an eerie green light, passing it over each body like they were items on a merchant's shelf. Every few seconds, it would chime, and the body would be tossed onto a cart.
Sometimes, it buzzed with a shrill tone instead, and the soldier incinerated the corpse on the spot with another spell.
Duran wanted to scream.
Not out of fear. That was long gone. What remained was rage. A deep, helpless fury that sat in his chest like a stone. He was sixteen. He should've been training with the village guard. He should've been laughing with his friend Tera over roasted potatoes and sweet ale. He should've done something. But instead, he lay broken, watching everything he loved turn to ash.
Then, through the smoke, he saw her—Tera.
Or what was left of her.
Her hair was stained with blood and dirt. One arm hung at an impossible angle. She was trying to crawl, dragging herself across the stones, face twisted in pain.
One of the invaders noticed and strode over, black boots crunching on gravel. He stood above her, grinning. Then he raised his foot...and brought it down.
Duran turned his face away at the sound.
When he looked again, she was still.
A retching sob clawed its way up his throat, but no sound came out. Only blood. His mouth was full of the taste of copper and ash. Tears ran down the sides of his face, tracing lines as they reached the ground below.
A voice rang out. clear, cold, amplified by something unnatural.
"Secure them. Take only viable specimens. Burn the rest."
The words echoed through the square, followed by the grinding screech of wheels as the carts were hauled toward the center of the village. Figures in heavier armor emerged. taller, bulkier, and utterly silent. They moved with brutal efficiency, carrying corpses like meat, sorting them by age, condition, and other twisted criteria. These weren't raiders. They weren't here to pillage or conquer.
They were collecting.
Durans's mind reeled. Why? What kind of monsters would need bodies? What kind of evil needed corpses, not coin?
Then he saw him, the leader.
A towering figure in a coat of metal armor etched with engravings that pulsed faintly. A cloak of tattered silver trailed behind him like mist. His face was hidden behind a smooth, mask-like helmet with no mouth just a slit for his eyes too see through.
The man raised his hand and made a gesture. Another figure approached him, holding a slate made of black stone and strange metal. They conversed in a language Duran didn't understand, full of harsh syllables and guttural tones. Then the leader turned to survey the carnage.
Duran's body screamed at him to move. To crawl. To do something. But pain chained him to the earth. He clenched his jaw and stared, burning the image of the masked man into his brain. If he died here, at least he would remember the monster who ended it all.
And as quick as they came, they left. Taking along the rest of the village with them. To Duran, they weren't just villagers. they were his people. They were his family that he grew up with, laughed with and cried with...all of that was now ripped away. What was a village without its inhabitants, just nothing more than a ghost town.
He had cried silent tears as he saw their carriages leave in the horizon. He wanted to scream, to yell and to vent but alas his body was in no condition to let him. As tears ran down his face, he couldn't help but think just why.
'Why me, Damn it..why leave me alive. Was it on purpose to further torment me before death, or was I so insignificant...that I...Damn it...Not yet, I want to kill him...that bastard that took them-that took her. Kill...Kill...I want to ruin him...to make him despair...I...'
Duran tried to scream again, but his throat only rattled, air scraping out like a dying whisper. His vision blurred at the edges, and for a moment he wasn't sure if it was tears, smoke, or his body finally giving up.
He blinked, hard.
The world didn't sharpen.
Everything felt…distant. Wrong. Slipping away.
He could hear the invaders' carts grinding over stone, but it sounded like they were miles off. Like he was already sinking beneath the world, the way a stone disappears below a river's surface, swallowed and forgotten.
Is this it?
He wanted to deny it. To fight it. But what was left to fight with? His legs were twisted under rubble, his ribs weren't ribs anymore, they were shattered branches inside his chest, and every breath felt like it tried to carve its way out through broken bone.
His mind clung to anger, but even that was faltering, thinning like smoke between his fingers.
I should've protected them.
He tasted blood.
I could've done something. Anything. I was right there. Gods, I was right fucking there, why didn't I move faster? Why didn't I wake up sooner?
His thoughts began to slide, tumbling over each other, messy, frantic, desperate.
Mother…gods, her scream…
He saw her hand reaching toward him again, except this time, he couldn't tell if it was memory or hallucination.
Father…Tera…
The pain in his chest clenched, but the pain in his head was worse. shame, guilt, the kind that gnawed and gnawed and wouldn't ever stop.
"What good am I…?" His voice never escaped his lips.
"What good was I to any of them?"
His breath stuttered.
The sky flickered above him, red and black swirling like a dying wound. The screams in the village quieted, not because the chaos ended…but because there was simply no one left to scream.
He choked on the silence.
Why me? Why the hell am I still breathing?
He didn't know. It wasn't mercy. It wasn't luck. It felt like mockery.
Like the universe had left him alive just long enough to make sure he saw every last thing he cared about burn.
His vision dimmed again, heavier this time.
A part of him wanted to cling to anger, but something deeper, colder, was whispering that it didn't matter. That even his rage was useless. That everything he was ended here under this broken roof like a crushed animal.
I want to kill him…but I can't even move my damn fingers.
A hollow, broken laugh tried to escape him, but only blood bubbled.
I want to tear them apart…and instead I'm dying like a dog.
He shut his eyes.
What a pathetic end.
His heartbeat skidded, slowed, cracked apart like everything else.
His body now stained with blood and grave injuries could no longer keep up with his fury and his eyes that were bloodshot began closing. Duran tried to resist the pull of death but he was just a mortal in the grand scheme of things.
Fate cannot be Defied.
However as everything began to fade into darkness there was still a faint light. Not from the raging flames, but a faint glow that appeared over a mark on his right hand as his life was coming to an end.
It wasn't anything fancy by far, just the letter "A". Yet the moment it appeared on him, even the concept of death began to shrivel into oblivion.
Alas it was too late as his soul had already left his now lifeless body.
Nevertheless the mark did not disappear, instead it seared into his skin. His body arched, a scream tearing its way free at last. Then came a heat like nothing Duran had ever felt in his life, the heat wasn't just physical, it sank into his bones, his blood, his soul. Something entered him, something foreign. Symbols flared to life across his heart, burning with purpose before fading away.
A Golden pattern began forming all around his body in the shape of ribbons, they glowed bright and shook the air around with such intensity that it seemed his corpse was about to explode. However instead, his tattered body began to heal itself as the debre surrounding him all turned to dust.
And as the world blurred, life returned to his body once more. Albeit unconscious, haunted by a voice that whispered from somewhere far, far deeper than the flames.
"The End. The Last. I Am"