He awoke to silence. Not the peaceful kind—but the kind that pressed against the skull, as if the world itself had stopped breathing.
Snow fell in spiraling slow motion. Not flakes—shards, glinting with the colors of shattered glass. Around him, endless plains of cracked ice stretched toward a fractured sky, where auroras pulsed like bleeding wounds.
He did not know where he was. He barely knew who he was.
"Name: …"
He blinked. The thought came like static across the back of his skull. A voice? A system? A memory? He couldn't tell.
His breath fogged. He was shivering, kneeling on uneven crystal ground. No coat. No bag. Just the strange feeling of pressure in his chest—like something slumbered there. Waiting.
Then the pain hit.
A burning pulse in his heart, like liquid fire… and then:
[Essentia Detected. Initialization Incomplete.]
[Void Signature: Anomalous. Unstable.]
He screamed as the world seemed to warp. Ice beneath him folded, refracting light as if it were glass under stress. A black tendril of nothingness snaked across the plain and vanished.
Then it was over. The wind returned. The silence stayed.
He staggered to his feet.
In the distance, towers of jagged ice stood like teeth, and beneath one, something glowed. A soft, violet shimmer—not ice, not snow, but something deeper. Calling.
He began to walk.
Hours passed. Or minutes. Time meant nothing here.
He found the glow nestled in a fractured sigil, part of a broken ruin buried under crystal. His fingers brushed the stone—and the world shifted.
"…do you seek truth?"
The voice wasn't spoken. It was carved into his thoughts. It came from below—from beneath the ruin. Buried deep. Locked.
"Then bleed for it."
Suddenly, the ground cracked. He fell—tumbling through layers of ice and memory—and landed hard in a frozen chamber. Dim lights hummed, ancient. Walls pulsed with symbols that twisted the mind.
And in the center floated a fragment.
Small. Violet. Humming with impossible silence. It was shaped like a heart, cracked and bound in runes that flickered with Voidlight.
[You have found a Relic: Shard of Bound Knowledge]
[Essentia Link Established]
The shard flared—and his vision filled with stars, glyphs, equations not yet invented. He saw a world breaking. A man holding it shut. A choice.
And then nothing.
He collapsed to the floor, the shard hovering beside him.
Somewhere above, the sky fractured a little more.
And far away, something began to watch.