They told me that my name was Kevin.
I never gave it a name. Someone gave it a name, and it stuck. Perhaps a priest. Perhaps a corpse. I was too young to recall, and too old now to worry.
Names don't matter where I come from. The only names that remain are the titles etched into the walls of the dead. And even those erode with ash and moss.
I was born during a storm. Not the kind with rain and thunder. The kind that had come from the heavens in fury, as if it despised the world. The kind that could melt steel and glass mountains. They referred to it as a Skyfall. Spoke of it in tales as the anger of the Primordials.
My mother passed away from it.
They told me when I was taken out of her body, I was not crying. I was looking.
Wide eyes. Silent. Staring at the curl of smoke in the air as though I'd seen something the others hadn't.
Then they saw the mark.
A line blackened from the top of my throat to the center of my chest. Not carved. Not burned. Branded from within. Like something from within had reached up and put its handprint on me.
They didn't talk about it. Didn't attempt to explain it. They did what they always did with accursed children:
They threw me into the fire pit.
It's not half as exciting as it sounds. The pit was in the back of the shrine, covered in soot and bones. It wasn't designed to burn you to death—it was designed to find out what wouldn't burn.
If you were under a curse, the flames would engulf you. If you were blessed, the flames would pass you by.
I didn't burn.
The flame recoiled.
The lone priest who witnessed it fled from there that evening and never came back. The shrine-maidens stopped calling me by name. And the others. they stopped looking at me.
I grew up in silence.
---
The orphan barracks smelled of iron and mildew. No blankets. No pillows. Just lines of stone slabs and one shared bowl of water between thirteen other rejects, each of whom had something wrong: crippled hands, extra fingers, too much shadow in their breath.
They never spoke to me. Not out of malice—but out of terror. If you stared too hard, they said to me, my mark would shift.
I didn't fault them.
I kept my shirt up and long sleeves. I did not want to even look at the mark. Not because I was scared of it…. but because I did not know what it wanted.
Sometimes I woke up panting, my skin clammy and cold, my chest burning as if the mark was trying to communicate with me. I'd scratch it. Bleed. Didn't help.
And then there was the Night of Culling.
Each year, the Iron Circle, who guarded the shrine, imposed a test. Not written. Not ritual. A battle.
The sickliest of the orphans were "culled," taken to the mines under the eastern cliffs, where no light fell on the stone and no one came back.
The strong were marked and kept alive. Not preferred—merely… tolerated.
I was thirteen. Thin, small, quiet.
They thought that I'd break in seconds.
They pitted me against Garrik to begin with. Sixteen years of age. Twice my size. Already bruised from past fights. He did not hate me. He merely wished to survive.
He charged with a bloody, blunt-tipped wooden spear. I didn't budge.
I should have. I knew so.
But something whispered.
Not words. Just. feeling. Cold. Clear. Final.
As soon as the spear descended, my left hand acted involuntarily.
I don't know what came next, precisely. Only that his spear snapped. That his body twisted in mid-air as if he'd been hurled by the fist of a giant. He crashed head-first into the ash circle, not getting up.
The audience fell silent.
I slowly turned my head, as in a dream, and gazed towards the fire pit on the other side of the arena. Embers there glowed faintly… in harmony with the brand on my chest.
They didn't cheer. They didn't say I was blessed.
They named me Hollowspawn.
Then they locked me inside underground.
No trial. No explanation. Simply a cell hacked out of the cliff face and a bowl of half-frozen rice tossed through a slit every day.
I kept time in water drips. Forty-six thousand by the time they opened the gate again.
When they came for me, I did not resist.
Two helmeted and armored Iron Circle guards of reflective steel said nothing either. They dragged me along chains around my throat and wrists. I was stumbling on rock. I had bitten my mouth and it was bleeding.
They led me to the inner sanctum.
Somewhere I never knew existed.
Within, dripped old stone from the walls as if the mountain was crying. Candles illuminated the space, blue flames dancing. And in the center. a pool.
Not of water. Not entirely.
The air hovering above it glimmered. The surface undulated in patterns that stung the eyes.
A priest stood next to it. Old. Barefoot. Blindfolded.
He never asked questions.
He simply said to him: "You are not meant to exist."
Then he pushed me in.
---
Falling did not feel like falling. It felt like forgetting.
I couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. The mark on my chest seared like fire and ice blended together. And then I heard the voice—not a word, not a whisper, but. truth.
You were never meant to serve. You were meant to destroy.".
I woke up on the other side. Starving.Alone. And the world was never quite the same again.