The first rule of the Dusklands was simple: Don't look too long at what shouldn't be there.The second was simpler: Don't die.
Rain hissed against broken glass and rusted steel, turning the ruins of Old Serath into a graveyard of dripping bones. Half-buried towers leaned like drunk giants, their hollow eyes watching scavengers crawl through their corpses. The ash never stopped falling here. Not snow, not dust—ash. Gray, warm, and endless.
Kale didn't remember what warmth felt like before it burned.
He moved through the wreckage with practiced steps, feet wrapped in scavenged rags. Every noise mattered: the whistle of wind through a shattered vent, the distant creak of something shifting above, the crackle of a dying fire too far to be his.
He paused.Listened.
Scrape. Drag. Sniff.
Something was following him.
Kale gritted his teeth. He reached into his coat—patchwork leather, reinforced with scavenged plating—and tightened his grip on the jagged iron knife. It wasn't enough. Not against what crawled in the dark.
But it would buy him time.
He ducked into a hollowed-out metro entrance, the old world's language long-since erased by acid rain and fungus. Flicked on the glowshard — a pale, flickering stone that bathed the stairwell in cold light.
The creature stopped following him.
They always stopped at the edge of light.
He found the vault two hours later, buried beneath old soil and broken bones. The air was thick with something wrong. Not rot. Not mold.
Memory.
The moment he stepped inside, he felt it — a pressure behind the eyes, like something enormous was watching from behind a curtain of time.
"Jackpot," Kale muttered. His voice didn't echo. Nothing ever did in these places.
He picked through the vault slowly. Old relics. Broken tech. A cracked mask, etched with symbols that shimmered when he blinked. A mummified corpse in ceremonial armor. Most of it worthless.
Until he found it.
At the far end of the chamber, encased in blackened glass, pulsing faintly with a sick red glow—
A heart.Still beating.Not human.
He should've left it.
He should've run.
But Kale's fingers moved before he could think. He cracked the seal, tore the artifact free, and the instant he touched it—
Everything broke.
The world screamed.
His vision went white, then black, then something else. He was no longer standing in the vault. He was nowhere. Floating in a void of whispering voices and distant stars.
"You are not worthy."
The voice wasn't sound. It was weight. It pressed against his chest, digging into his bones like hooks.
"But you will do."
Pain exploded behind his eyes. Fire, ice, light—all at once. His body convulsed. His scream echoed through the void and was swallowed whole.
And then, silence.
When he woke, the vault was gone.Only ash remained.And in his mind, a presence, coiled like a serpent made of shadow and memory.
"Hello, thief," it whispered."Let us begin."
End of Chapter 1