The house was silent after the storm.
Too silent.
John's body had been taken away without ceremony, without tears. His parents didn't speak of it. They never did. To them, his death was just another inconvenience, another weakness to be scrubbed from their household.
But Ace couldn't forget.
Everywhere he turned, he saw John's smile—bright and stubborn, a light that refused to die even when surrounded by darkness. He could still feel the warmth of John's hand in his own, the cold weight of the ring pressed into his palm.
The ring.
Ace sat alone in his room, the black band clenched so tightly in his fist it left deep marks on his skin. Veins of faint color pulsed along its surface, almost like living veins. Sometimes, in the dead of night, he thought it hummed with sound too low to be heard—like a voice caught in silence.
But when he held it, he remembered John's last words.
It's not your fault.
That was a lie. Of course it was. John had died because he protected Ace. If Ace had been stronger, braver, anything other than weak… John would still be alive.
The thought carved itself into Ace's bones.
From that day forward, he stopped crying. Stopped reaching out. His laughter vanished with John's last breath. The boy who once dreamed of escape learned instead to build walls, each brick made of silence and suspicion.
When his parents struck him now, he no longer begged them to stop. He simply endured, retreating deeper into himself, retreating into books.
He devoured them—histories, myths, the dust-covered texts no one else bothered to read. He read until his eyes burned and his fingers turned the pages raw. Knowledge became his only companion. Unlike people, books did not betray. Unlike promises, ink did not break.
And always, the ring was near. He wore it sometimes, hidden beneath his sleeve, a secret no one could take from him. The colors in its veins seemed to glow faintly brighter as the years passed, as though the ring was waiting—for him, or for something he could not yet name.
But one night, as he traced the lines of an ancient text beneath the dim glow of candlelight, the letters shifted. The neat carvings of history melted into strange runes that bled across the page. His heart thundered, his hand trembling as he blinked, certain he was seeing things.
Yet the words did not vanish.
The ring on his finger pulsed, and for the first time, Ace realized the truth.
John hadn't just left him with a memory. He had left him with a key.
A key to something far greater—and far more dangerous—than Ace could yet imagine.