Chapter 1: The End is the Beginning

Chapter 1: The End is the Beginning

The dust of forgotten ages tasted like failure.

Kaelen coughed, a dry rasp that barely disturbed the motes dancing in the single beam of moonlight piercing the Great Library’s high arched window. His fingers, stained black with ink, trembled as he unrolled another brittle scroll. The parchment crackled in protest, its arcane script blurring before his exhausted, silver eyes. For seven days and seven nights, he had been entombed here, surrounded by the ghosts of history, searching for a single ghost of his own.

Arch-Scribe Elara. His mentor, his guardian, the closest thing to a father he had ever known. Gone. Vanished from his locked workshop a week ago, along with his daughter, Eliana. They were Kaelen’s only family.

The City Guard, led by his oldest friend, Captain Rhys, had found nothing. No signs of struggle, no forced entry, no ransom note. It was as if the two most important people in his life had simply ceased to exist. Rhys had clapped a heavy, armored hand on his shoulder and told him to have faith, to let the professionals handle it.

But faith was a currency Kaelen couldn't afford. Knowledge was his coin, and right now, his pockets were empty.

He glanced at his left arm, propped uselessly on the ancient oak table. The sleeve of his scribe’s robe was rolled up, exposing the gnarled, withered limb. A latticework of pale scars, a testament to the day his magical core had not just failed to awaken, but imploded. A ‘Muted Core,’ the magi-physicians had called it. A magical cripple in Aethelburg, a city that breathed mana, its towers etched with glowing runes and its streets patrolled by arcane constructs. He was a bird with a broken wing in a city of eagles.

All he had was his mind. And it wasn't enough.

He rubbed his temples, the phantom scent of Elara’s pipe tobacco—a mix of sun-dried herbs and something faintly metallic—teasing his memory. He had to be missing something. A forgotten passage on translocation rituals, a footnote on ethereal abductions… anything.

That’s when the first sound came.

It wasn’t loud. It was a deep, resonant thrum, a vibration that seemed to travel not through the air, but through the bone. Kaelen froze, the scroll slipping from his grasp. The ink pots on his desk rattled, sending concentric ripples across their dark surfaces.

Then came the second sound. A crack.

Not the snap of wood or the shattering of stone. It was a sound like the sky itself, a pane of infinite obsidian glass, had been struck by a hammer the size of a mountain.

He stumbled to the window, his heart hammering against his ribs. The view of Aethelburg was one he’d known his entire life: crystalline spires scraped the clouds, mana conduits pulsed with soft blue light, and the twin moons cast a serene glow over the city’s silver-and-blue banners.

But the sky was wrong.

A hairline fracture of impossible, violet light split the heavens from horizon to horizon. As he watched, breathless, more cracks splintered outwards, a spiderweb of pure, sickening energy. The moons seemed to recoil. The air grew cold, thin, and tasted of ozone and deep, chilling dread.

Then, the screaming began.

It started as a distant chorus, the sound of a festival turned to terror, but it swelled in an instant into a tidal wave of raw panic that washed over the silent library. From the crack in the sky, things began to fall.

They weren't creatures of flesh and bone. They were violations of geometry, all sharp angles and fluid, oily shadows, descending on the city like shards of a shattered nightmare. Their cries were not sound, but psychic static that clawed at the inside of his skull, whispering of empty voids and endless hunger.

Void Walkers. The name bloomed in his mind, dredged up from some forbidden text he’d once read, a text Elara had warned him never to open.

His desire to find his family was instantly suffocated by a more primal need: survival.

Kaelen scrambled from the window, his useless arm banging painfully against the frame. He had to get out. To the barracks. To Rhys. Rhys would know what to do. He always did.

He burst from the library’s grand doors into a scene of utter chaos. The once-orderly plaza was a slaughterhouse. A City Guard patrol, their enchanted armor glowing defiantly, was swarmed by a whirlwind of shifting, multi-limbed darkness. Their silver-blue plate buckled and tore like paper, their screams abruptly silenced. One of the Void Walkers turned its… Kaelen couldn't call it a head… towards him. There were no eyes, only a shimmering emptiness that promised utter annihilation.

He ran.

Logic and reason, the twin pillars of his Scribe training, crumbled into dust. His only guide was instinct. He dodged falling masonry from a spire that had been sheared in half. He vaulted over the still-flickering form of an arcane automaton. The city’s defenses, the pride of Aethelburg, were failing. Wards shattered like soap bubbles. Powerful Battlemages hurled bolts of pure fire that were simply… absorbed by the shadows.

He was a hundred yards from the Guard barracks, its stone walls seeming like the only sanctuary in a world gone mad, when it dropped from the sky in front of him.

This one was different. Larger. It flowed and reshaped itself, a living stain of nightmarish ink against the violet-streaked sky. It blocked his path, its form coalescing into something vaguely humanoid, but with too many joints and limbs that bent the wrong way.

Kaelen skidded to a halt, his boots scraping on the rune-etched cobblestones. He was trapped. There was nowhere left to run. All his knowledge, all the languages he could speak, all the histories he had memorized—they were worthless. He was just a boy with one good arm and a dead core, facing the end of the world.

He thought of Elara’s kind smile and Eliana’s mischievous laugh. I failed you.

The Void Walker extended a tendril, a ribbon of solidified nothingness. Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut, a pathetic whimper escaping his lips. He braced for pain, for oblivion.

The touch was worse.

It wasn't hot or cold. It was… an un-making. He felt his very essence, his memories, his soul, being siphoned away, dissolving like salt in water. The agony was absolute, a fire that burned not his flesh, but his existence. His last sensation was of being pulled apart, atom by atom, into an endless, silent void.

…

A gasp tore from his throat.

Air. He was breathing air. It was cool and smelled faintly of old parchment and floor wax.

His eyes snapped open.

He wasn't in the plaza. He wasn't being unmade. He was in his bed, in his small, spartan room in the Scribes’ Quarters of the Great Library. The morning sun, warm and ordinary, streamed through his window, illuminating the familiar stacks of books and the half-finished letter on his writing desk.

A dream? It had to be. A nightmare, born of stress and sleepless nights.

But the pain… the memory of it was seared into his soul, a phantom agony that made his every nerve ending scream. He sat bolt upright, drenched in a cold sweat, his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest.

His gaze fell upon his left arm.

He always slept with it resting on the covers, a subconscious habit to keep from jarring the deadened nerves. But something was wrong. The sleeve of his nightshirt was pushed up to his elbow, and the skin beneath… it wasn’t the pale, scarred, withered flesh he had despised his entire life.

It was whole. Healthy. The scars were gone.

But that wasn't the most impossible part.

Beneath the smooth skin, faint, intricate lines of silver-blue light pulsed with a gentle, rhythmic energy, like a captured constellation breathing in time with his frantic heartbeat. He lifted his hand, flexing fingers that had not properly moved in over a decade. They obeyed instantly, perfectly.

And there, on the back of his hand, a place that had been bare his entire life, a new symbol glowed with a soft, internal luminescence—a complex, shimmering glyph of an open eye surrounded by a broken circle.

Kaelen stared, his mind, the only tool he had ever been able to rely on, shattering into a million pieces. The memory of non-existence, the sight of the violet-cracked sky, and the impossible, vibrant power now thrumming through his once-dead limb all crashed together.

This was not a dream. He had died.

And now, impossibly, he was alive. And he was no longer powerless.