It was quiet. Complete Silence...

  Not the peaceful kind. Not the kind that whispered comfort in the dark.

  I tried to open my eyes, but my body refused—chained by the weight of my own limits.

  This silence was… heavier. Like the world had forgotten how to breathe.

  I could barely draw in air. Each inhale scraped through my lungs like shards of broken glass, my chest rising and falling with an uneven rhythm. Slow. Ragged. Desperate. Blood stuck to my skin—warm at first, but already cooling. My fingers trembled. I wasn’t sure if it was from pain… or the fear trying to claw its way in.

  I stared up at the night sky—fractured, trembling, distant.

  Is this it? Is this how I die?

  The thought floated through me, calm in its own way. Not panicked. Not angry. Just… there.

  Faint sparks of movement danced around the edges of my vision. Smoke, maybe. Or memories I was trying to forget. My body was giving out. Nerves fraying at the seams. But even now, some part of me refused to shut down. The part that clung to the moment, not out of desperation, but out of something else.

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  Curiosity, maybe.

  It wasn’t just death I was feeling.

  It was... something I've never felt.

  Like I wasn’t just dying—but being... erased? Rewritten. Like someone out there was moving pieces on a board I couldn’t see, and I was just the last pawn no one expected to make it across the field.

  You think I don’t know? That I haven’t seen the strings?

  They killed my family right in front of me. They weren't... humans. Not even close. Whatever they were, they moved like whispers through fire—inhuman shapes with hollow gazes and silence that cut deeper than screams. My world didn’t crumble. It shattered. Buildings collapsed like dominoes, streets ran red with blood, and the sky was ash and sorrow.

  They didn’t come to conquer.

  They came to erase.

  And I was the final mark.

  I ran. Not out of cowardice. Out of instinct. Out of the quiet understanding that I couldn’t stop what was coming. Not yet. I wasn’t strong. Not then. I was just a boy whose world was burning, trying to outrun something that didn’t need to chase.

  Because it already owned everything.

  Even me.

  ———

  They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die.

  But mine didn’t.

  All I saw was silence. Not memories. Not regrets. Just the absence of meaning.

  Silence...

  A hollow stillness—like nothing had ever truly mattered.

  Like I’d never really lived.

  Like everything until now… was merely a prologue.

  Penned by hands that were never mine.

  But that ends here.

  From this moment on—I write the story.

  And this… this is where it truly begins.

  Chapter 1: Azrion Varkros