The skies above the Empire were dead.
Where once constellations charted the heavens like ancient songs, there was now only the black sun—a seething orb of flickering voidlight that hung frozen on the horizon, never rising, never setting. It bathed the world in a constant dim twilight, and beneath its cursed glow, nothing truly lived. Things merely endured.
The Empire of Starfall had not always been like this.
Scholars in shattered towers whispered of a time before the Descent, when the stars still burned, when machines spun cities in the air, when magic and logic walked hand-in-hand. But those were myths, drowned long ago in ash and blood.
Now, the Empire was a graveyard.
Its cities were broken husks, its mountains mined hollow by slaves, its rulers masked tyrants whose bloodlines were long diluted with madness and godhood. And in the east, where the empire's light bled into the Wastes, there stood Hollowreach—a pit of stone and iron, dug deep into the bones of the world. There, Kael lived.
If breathing and bleeding could be called living.
He was a slave. One of thousands. Property.
No name, just a brand scorched onto the side of his neck: #C7-821-KL.
Seventeen hours of labor. Two hours of sleep. One hour for forced prayer. No questions.
The days blurred. They always did. The calendar meant nothing here. Time was measured in lashings and bones broken. Kael had counted the ribs he'd broken—five. Teeth lost—four. Whippings—too many. Every morning he awoke in the bunk carved into cold stone, shoulder to shoulder with other hollow-eyed men who barely remembered the sun. Every evening, he dragged iron ore carts from the depths to the surface, always under the watchful gaze of the Warden's black masks.
Hope wasn't forbidden. It was irrelevant.
That was the cruelty of Hollowreach. Not the chains. Not the hunger.
The fact that no one even bothered to lie to you.
Kael used to fight back. Long ago. When they killed his sister in the pits, he tried to slit a Warden's throat with a rusted nail. They crushed his arm for that—broke it in three places. Since then, he spoke little, listened less. He'd become just another body, walking to the sound of the whip.
But some nights...
Some nights, he dreamed of fire.
And stars.
The day it began, the sky bled silver.
Kael was hauling ore carts through the upper tunnels, breathing in dust thick enough to turn spit into mud, when the ground began to tremble—not the usual rumble of distant mining blasts, but something deeper. Wrong.
Then came the sound.
Not thunder. Not stonefall.
A scream, from the sky itself.
The overseer barked something. The guards reached for shock-lances. But they were too slow.
The ceiling erupted.
A streak of searing white tore down from above, slicing through layers of rock like paper. Light consumed everything—carts, slaves, the iron scaffolding—and Kael was flung backward, the air punched from his lungs.
Then silence.
He woke, half-buried under debris, coughing blood and stone dust, deafened by the blast. One eye swollen shut. Ribs on fire. Everything around him was ash and ruin.
The upper section of Hollowreach was gone.
Wiped clean.
Kael tried to move. Couldn't. His leg was pinned. He could feel wet warmth pooling under him. Too much blood. His breath rasped in his throat.
This is it, he thought. This is how it ends. No gods. No glory.
Then… it pulsed.
Under the rubble, near his left hand, something glowed faintly. A shard of stone—jet black, perfectly smooth, yet humming with heat.
Not warm. Alive.
Drawn without understanding, Kael reached out. The moment his fingertips brushed the surface, his vision blurred.
The stone vanished into his skin.
A sharp intake of breath—then a scream. Not from his mouth, but from inside his skull.
[ SYSTEM INITIALIZING… ]
[ Host vitals: unstable. Trauma detected. ]
[ Emergency integration commencing. ]
[ Protocol: SURVIVAL OF THE EXILED. ]
Kael convulsed. Light spiderwebbed across his veins, crawling from his palm to his chest. The pain was not pain—it was rewriting. Every cell, every nerve felt like it was being shattered and reforged. His mind flashed with images: stars collapsing, cities falling in reverse, a spiral of symbols no human had ever written.
He was being rebuilt.
[ Fate-lock override: IN PROGRESS. ]
[ Memory anchors: PARTIALLY INTACT. Access restricted. ]
[ Binding successful. Welcome, Kael. You are now... Unwritten. ]
He collapsed onto the rubble, gasping. Steam rose from his skin.
The wounds—gone.
The pain—silent.
His eyes snapped open, and the twilight sky above looked sharper than ever before. Colors bled at the edges of his vision. His heart beat once—and the world pulsed with him.
Something had changed.
Something ancient.
Hungry.
He didn't have time to question it.
A distant howl echoed through the ruins.
Kael froze.
Not a wolf. Not a dog.
Something worse.
Gravemares. Flesh-stitch beasts crafted by the Empire's Inquisition. Seven eyes. Iron-tipped claws. Each one trained to sniff out fugitives, rebels, and anything that didn't bleed by imperial law.
They were coming.
He could hear the clicking of their plated feet across the shattered iron. Three… maybe four. Moving fast. Too fast for a normal man.
Kael looked around. No weapons. Just broken stone, warped steel.
And then—his hand twitched.
The black markings along his forearm shimmered, glowing faintly beneath the skin like embers in cooling ash. When he focused, they pulsed—once, twice—responding to his breath, his thoughts.
He stretched out his hand.
The rubble shifted.
A whisper, not from outside but within, hissed through his mind:
"Everything breaks. You just have to want it hard enough."
The largest Gravemare rounded the corner of the ruin, its metal mouth clanking open, breathing in steam.
Kael didn't run.
He let go.
A surge of heat slammed through his chest and down his arm. The broken steel at his feet lifted—trembling in place—then shot forward like thrown spears. Two of the creatures went down, impaled.
The third leapt.
Kael pivoted, too slow—
The beast slammed into him, claws slashing.
He rolled with the blow, blood blooming along his ribs, and brought both fists up. Something cracked in the air—pressure collapsed inward.
A boom of invisible force knocked the Gravemare off its feet. It landed hard, limbs twitching.
Kael stood over it.
His breath ragged. Muscles shaking. The glow in his skin beginning to fade.
But he was alive.
No.
He had won.
For the first time in years, he'd fought back—and not with a nail, or a whispered prayer to forgotten gods—but with something real.
He looked down at the smoking carcass of the hound. At the blood drying on his hands.
Then up, at the dark horizon where the black sun bled its eternal twilight.
And he smiled.
Not with joy. Not with madness.
With purpose.
"You tried to kill me," he muttered. "You should have tried harder."
Above, the clouds shifted.
Below, in the dust, the system hummed again.
[ LEVEL: 1 ]
[ TITLE UNLOCKED: SURVIVOR OF ASH ]
[ DESTINY TREE AVAILABLE. CHOOSE YOUR FIRST PATH. ]
Kael didn't hesitate.
"I choose to fight."