Ash and dust fell across ravaged stone, churning lazily through the heavy, smoke-choked air. sanguine trails flow from mangled piles of flesh, too broken to be called corpses, too visceral to be ignored, gruesome reminders of lives lost. Velon's breath hitched as the smell of burnt flesh rent his nostrils, acidic and suffocating. He curled his nose upwards, desperate not to choke on the bitter taste of his own blood.
The air was thick with the filled with the screams of those he loved most, twisted by pain into wails of despair and terror. Their voices tore into his soul, memories of smiles, warmth, laughter now drowned beneath the overwhelming tide of destruction. The ground beneath his feet was burned with ash and entrails, a dismal mixture of earth and pain.
Velon's heart pounded, a frenzied drumbeat that drowning out the roaring flames . 'What was that thing', 'Where did it come from', 'Is dad okay'. His head is a mess of thoughts, as he slips in and out of consciousness, his vision fading he thought back, his life flashing before his eyes.
He recalled the sunshine pouring through shattered windows of their modest home, wood smoke in the air melding with the smell of his mothers stew. His father's voice was level but authoritative.
"Velon, promise me," his father asked, kneeling to meet his gaze. "No matter the darkness that would befall you, don't forget who you are. Principles make a man great."
the gravity of those words sank deep into his soul, the next time he thought of them, he would truly need them.
The icy wind whipped through the crowded village square, carrying with it the muffled sobbing of the villagers. Velon stood unmoving among them, twelve years old now, his small fists clenched at his sides. His mother's simple wooden casket rested before him, unmarked and covered in worn fabric and the scent of the soil.
He watched as faces blurred through the fog of grief friends, neighbours, strangers all lost in memory and sorrow. His father stood, stoic and yet shattered, a man aged beyond his years. Velon's head rang with those words of so many years before: "Principles are what make a great man." Those words were his lifeline now, a weak shield against the tide of loss.
Velon looked around, people's faces were distorted, almost hidden, he could not remember them, the people his mother met, loved and fought, those who were here to meant to be here , the people told him stories about. were nowhere to be seen. Everyone had forgotten her.
As the first spadeful of dirt hit the coffin, Velon's heart contracted a seed of horror was sown: the horror of being forgotten, the horror that this moment, this grief, would someday melt away into the silence of forgotten memory.
That fear ran beneath his skin, a torrent that would not subside. It pushed ahead now, seeping from the depths of his mind, pulling him back to the present where everything familiar was crumbling once again, slipping through his fingers like smoke.
Limbs trembling as frozen fear seeps through his veins, whispering that everything he ever loved was slipping out of reach vanishing like being swallowed by some unseen void. The world distorted around him, boundaries melting into shadows, and in that spinning haze, the smothering fear began to unravel.
The fear of being nothing.
The fear of being forgotten.
Then Velon's vision dissolved like shattered glass, shards of reality peeling away until there was nothing ,just a void. A strange silence occupied a place beyond the world he knew, full of whispers and a darkness that seemed to breathe, surrounded by a thin mist Velon felt true terror.
He was falling, weightless, drifting through endless levels of mist and silence. A myriad of shapes sketched in grey and black flashed at the edge of his peripheries, twisted and yet familiar, like lost memories struggling to force their way back. Then the air thickened with a freezing presence, as if some primal eye was watching, waiting.
A voice not quite heard, more a sensation ,raw emotions stimulating his psyche calling to him, harrowing and tender. It spoke to him not in words but in emotions, and his stomach dropped to the floor, every fibre of his being screaming for help as his hair stands to attention, the fear almost pulling him closer to something vast and incomprehensible.
There was a current, unlike anythig he had ever felt before, no this was raw, a rhythm echoing from deep within his soul. instinctively he reached inward and saw a faint glimmer, a veil, fragile and shimmering, forming itself into reality stretching across his mind like a curtain, shielding his mind from the horrors beyond it.
His breath stopped as the veil shuddered, parting to reveal to him visions of his deepest fears: darkness of nothingness, being forgotten, annihilated without trace, true oblivion. And yet, beneath the fear, there was a strange clarity, a thread of power weaving through the darkness. suddenly sealing his mind once again, the veil tempts him as if to show him what lies beyond.
Overwhelmed by everything velon shifts or , at least tries to. He cannot move ane he did not know where he was but somehow he knew what it was called, perahps this was even more unsettling , a name echoed in his soul - Okulila- mourning, the womb of tears.
It was his first contact with the Oku, and it has claimed him as its own.
Velon did not understand what he had become, only that something in him was forever altered. The horror was no longer just an echo; it was alive, attached to his very soul.
Within the darkness, there was a whisper in his probing into his mind, again not with words or anything that he could possibly understand, but he felt it, he was seen, he was marked.
At that moment, the world returned. The smoke, the ash, the pain and Velon's heart pounding with uncertainty. 'What is going on?!', 'Is this death?'
His blurred vision finally surrendered, engulfed by the darkness creeping in at the edges of his tattered mind. Broken, bleeding, and drained beyond fatigue, the boy collapsed into a pool of his own blood waiting for death, unaware it was only the beginning.