Darkness.
An endless, suffocating void where time and space ceased to exist, and the very fabric of reality seemed to crumble into nothingness. In this desolate abyss, a lone consciousness stirred, a flicker of awareness lost in the vast expanse of oblivion.
It was as if he was suspended in a sea of shadows, weightless, with no sense of direction or form. His thoughts were fragments, fleeting and fragile, like delicate glass splinters scattered in the darkness, each one vanishing as soon as it emerged. There was no up or down, no beginning or end—only an endless, yawning emptiness that stretched on forever, swallowing everything in its path.
He tried to reach out, but there was nothing to grasp, his hands—did he even have hands?—fumbling through the void. Panic surged through him, a raw, visceral terror that clawed at the edges of his mind. Was he dead? Trapped in some eternal limbo where existence itself seemed to mock him?
"Who… am I?" The thought was weak, a ghostly whisper lost in the vastness, swallowed up by the oppressive silence before it could even take shape.
The darkness pressed in on him, suffocating, relentless, as if the void itself were a sentient force, determined to smother every last shred of his being. His mind struggled against it, grasping at fleeting memories, faint echoes of a life that felt impossibly distant. But everything was slipping away, dissolving into the black, leaving only a hollow ache where his sense of self had once been.
And just as the final threads of his consciousness began to unravel, a voice—a voice like a beacon of light in the endless dark—rippled through the void, calm and steady, resonating with an ancient power that seemed to shake the very fabric of the abyss.
"Wanderer of the in-between, your journey is not yet ended. Awake, for you are reborn. But heed this: to take a life unjustly is to court destruction. The heavens will not be kind to those who tread upon sacred balance."
The words echoed around him, filling the void with a presence that was both awe-inspiring and terrifying, shattering the suffocating silence. They resonated within him, searing through his mind like a blade of light, cutting through the darkness that threatened to consume him.
Then, as if those very words had torn open the fabric of reality, light erupted—blinding, all-encompassing, a fierce radiance that banished the shadows and swallowed him whole. It was as if the universe itself had taken a breath, and with that breath, he was hurled from the depths of oblivion and into a world of sensation, his consciousness tearing free from the void's grasp.
The first thing Edran felt was the cold. Not the kind that clung to skin, but the kind that curled around the soul — ancient, bone-deep, and patient. It licked at his nerves, tender and razor-thin, as if he'd been carved open and left hollow.
His eyes opened to a ceiling of lightless stone. Damp. Cracked. Familiar, though he'd never seen it before.
His lungs burned as he drew in a sharp breath, and with it came sensation — thousands of nerves screaming into awareness, each one bearing memory and instinct not entirely his own. The body beneath him was powerful. Too powerful. Muscles tense with stored violence. Fingers that could crush stone. A heart that beat not with fear, but with hunger.
He sat up slowly, not because of pain, but reverence. As though rising in a temple. His movements were deliberate, animalistic. The air trembled faintly around him.
A name surfaced.
Ravian.
It didn't sound like his name. And yet, it tasted like blood and ash on his tongue — too familiar, too heavy.
He staggered to his feet. The chamber was circular, carved by hands long gone, etched with sigils older than language. Something pulsed beneath the stone — not magic, not quite. It was deeper. A rhythm. A system. A presence.
He looked down at his body. It was not a child's. Nor a man's. It was something forged. Sculpted muscle, marked with thin threads of black across his skin, as though veins of ink pulsed just beneath. Each beat of his heart echoed like a drum across the chamber. Every nerve felt too sharp. Every breath too full.
This wasn't a blessing. This was a weapon.
What am I?
A whisper crawled through the chamber. Not a voice. A system prompt.
"Vital Stabilization Complete. Conscious Mind Online. Recovery Phase: 91%"
The words etched themselves into his thoughts, not spoken, not heard. Internal. Cold.
His head throbbed. Memories spiraled beneath the surface — fragments of pain, of screaming, of earth-stained hands clawing at stone. A face. A boy. Starving. Alone.
Ravian.
His legs buckled for a moment under the weight of it. Not just the memory — the certainty that it was more than a memory. That he hadn't just dreamed that name.
He had lived it.
Another breath. This one steadier.
The system — if that's what it was — remained silent. But he could feel it in his blood now. Lurking. Watching. Recording. Whatever brought him here, whatever stitched this new body together, it was still active.
He walked to the edge of the chamber. The walls were smooth, but old. Above the arching doorway, a single symbol burned faintly — a spiral pierced through by a fang.
His hand reached out, fingers grazing the stone. A memory surged forward: blood soaking into dust. Bones crunching beneath bare feet. Eyes that did not blink.
He staggered back.
No. Not a memory. A life.
He didn't know how long he remained still after that — minutes, hours. Time bent strangely in this place. But when he moved again, it was with purpose. He began to test the limits of the body he had awoken in. Each movement confirmed what he already feared: this was not his body. And yet, it obeyed him too easily.
He could leap farther than he should. Balance on the thin edge of a broken pillar without thinking. He could hear the hum of electricity far below, deep beneath the stone.
His hands flexed. Callused, scarred. Like the hands of someone who had killed. More than once.
Was this who he had become?
Another prompt, more cryptic this time:
"Cycle Reinitialized. Identity Link: Fragmented. Core Memory Nodes: Inaccessible. Recommendation: Await Synchronization."
"Synchronize with what?" he murmured, his voice hoarse from disuse.
No answer. The system didn't respond to questions.
That flicker of bitterness grounded him. He welcomed it.
He walked toward the exit, barefoot. The hallway beyond the chamber yawned like the throat of some ancient beast, dark and unknowable. He stepped into it anyway.
Because whatever he was now, whatever had made him — it hadn't broken him.
Not yet.
And somewhere, deep inside the violence and chaos of this new body, something still pulsed with memory. With pain.
Ravian.
If that name belonged to him, then so did the rage it carried.
He didn't know what had happened. But he would find out.
And when he did — someone would pay.