Perfect—this is exactly the kind of refinement that builds a legendary saga. You're right: we need to slow the pacing way down and truly develop Vael before he ever becomes a conqueror.
He's not yet the Black Sun.
He's still a scarred survivor with ambition, pain, and a mind that sharpens in silence. Let's fully explore his early life—after escaping the mines but long before raising a sword. Let's paint every stone, every breath, every moment that forges the villain he becomes.
Here is the new and proper Chapter 2, rewritten to focus on Vael's life immediately after escaping the mines, setting up his inner world, environment, trauma, and the quiet hunger growing within him.
ASH OF THE LAST DAWN
Chapter 2: The Scarred Quiet
(Early Life – Slow Development – 3000+ characters)
The wilderness did not welcome Vael.
It tolerated him — as it might tolerate a fox with a limp or a snake too cold to strike.
He left the mountain mines of Dar-Khazul with the broken iron shackles still on his wrists and dust so deeply embedded in his skin that it seemed part of him. His clothes were tattered rags. His breath wheezed from lungs accustomed to stale, mold-ridden air. The light — real light — seared his eyes. It felt… unreal. Like a dream too bright to trust.
The world above ground was impossibly vast. The sky wasn't a ceiling — it was a void, a silence more terrifying than the screams below.
For three days, he wandered.
No food. No water. His legs moved not from strength, but from spite. He passed through gray forests, their trunks gnarled and twisted like the fingers of sleeping giants. He saw no people. Only the bones of old camps, long cold fires, and the occasional blood trail that led somewhere he didn't follow.
Finally, he collapsed in a thicket of thornbrush beside a stream.
He would have died there.
But something came.
It wasn't human. Not exactly. An old woman — or something that wore the shape of one — emerged from the shadows. Her face was hidden beneath a hood made of raven feathers. Her eyes were white, pupil-less, but sharp. She did not speak. She did not ask. She simply stood, looking down at the boy who would someday be Vael.
Then she dragged him — not with grace or care, but with purpose. He remembered the thorns cutting his back, the stone scraping his skin, and her breath. It smelled of pine sap and burnt iron.
When he woke, it was inside a hut. Not a house. Not a home, but a hut!
Its walls were stitched hide and cracked stone. The roof was a dome of thatch bound by twisted bone. It had one room. One stool. One shelf. One corner for sleeping — nothing more than dead moss and tanned wolfskin.But to Vael, it was vast.
He had never seen a roof that didn't drip. Never breathed air that didn't stink of mold and smoke. Never slept without the scrape of rats against chains. There were no chains here. For the first time in his memory, he slept a full night — and when he woke, the woman was gone.
Only a bowl of dried root sat beside him. And silence. Years of Silence! Vael lived there, alone!
The woman — whom he would never name, nor see again — never returned. Or if she did, it was only when he slept. Sometimes the roots changed. Sometimes water appeared where none had been.But mostly, he was left to survive and so he did.
He hunted. Poorly, at first. He bled. He learned. He fashioned tools from bone and flint. He bound wounds with spider silk. He scraped moss from trees and tested bark for poison. He found a river two miles east and watched the black fish swim like shadows beneath the current.
In the winter, he nearly froze. But he burned books he found in a collapsed cottage nearby — old religious texts written in a language he couldn't read. He watched the ink melt and imagined the words screaming.
He spoke to no one. There was no one. But he listened.To the trees.To the wind.
To the silence.
He began to hear patterns in it — rhythms. Breaths. Like the land itself was alive, and whispering.
In the third year, he found a leather journal buried in a hollow tree. Wrapped in waxed cloth. Untouched by mold.
It belonged to a man named Halric Tovann — a traveler, once a scholar, who had abandoned his life in the city to "find truth in the bones of the world."
The journal was not madness. It was clarity.
Halric wrote of hidden forces, forgotten gods, and rituals of silence. He spoke of power not in incantations, but in attention — the kind of knowing that could bend the world if one listened long enough.
Vael read the journal so many times that its words lived behind his eyes.He built a shrine. Not to Halric. Not to any god.
To silence.
To control.
He arranged stones in perfect circles. He scraped symbols into tree bark. He boiled moss into ink and marked his walls with sigils he didn't understand — not yet. But he felt their weight. They weren't decorations. They were beginnings. He began dreaming. Not of fire, or screams, or chains — those came in waking memories.
In dreams, he saw a throne of black glass in a skyless void. A voice with no sound spoke from behind it, and though Vael could not remember the words, he woke each time with blood at his nose and new runes burned into his memory.
One night, he whispered one aloud. The fish in the river floated dead by morning.
Another night, he whispered two. A fox was found flayed clean, still breathing, eyes wide with terror.
He did not feel fear. He felt order.Something ancient lived beneath the world. And it had found him. Or perhaps… it had always been with him, waiting.
Not as a friend.
Not as a master.
As a mirror.
Vael would stay in the forest five years. Five years of silence. Study. Ritual. He did not age like others. His body grew, yes — lean muscle, sharp shoulders, black hair that fell to his jaw. But his mind aged faster. Sharper. More still. Like a blade cooling in oil.
He did not leave because he was done. He left because the world had forgotten what it meant to fear and he was ready to remind it.