Prophecy Fragment:
"They spat his name into the dirt; the heavens laughed. Let a demon name him, and the world will learn the taste of sorrow."
The hut still smelled of iron and rain. Straw lay matted with blood; a torn cradle rocked on a single splinter; the moon peered in through the broken rafters and seemed embarrassed by the sight it found. The villagers had fled or died—somewhere beyond the hills a dog mourned; the wind carried a low, animal howl. Inside, the child sat amid ruin, small hands sticky, eyes like embers shaded by the smoke. He chewed at something—cloth, bone, the cracked shell of a thumb—and hissed when the embers of his hunger met the chill of night.
He had been born to scorn. The constellations had turned away; their light had not blessed him but mocked him, pricking his skin with cold. They had hissed prophecies and curses in a language older than grief. Around him, the rafters still bore the ghostly trace of those whispers. He had no name that a man would keep. He had no lullaby that would soften his teeth.
Something watched.
It did not come like a visitor, but like a verdict. The shadow that fell through the doorway was thick and smelled of sulfur and old iron. It moved with a terrible deliberation, and when the demon stepped into the hut the air folded back from him as if in fear. Horns scraped the beams; something like a tide of cinders and dying night fell at his boots. He was vast—more a rending of the dark than a being—and where his shadow pooled the straw steamed and the blood blackened.
Zorvak bent his head. The child, who had not yet learned to trust, who had learned only to eat, looked up. There was curdled joy in the eyes that met the demon's. The demon's grin was many-toothed, like the close of a trap.
"Tell me," Zorvak said, voice that could make stone crack, "what do the stars call you?"
The boy answered with no tongue at first: a soft, amused sound, a small throat clicking like a crow. Then he shook his head, a tiny, stubborn motion.
"No name," he said. The sound came like a scrap of leather being torn. "No name for me."
The demon laughed in a way that shook the rafters and made the dead rattle. "Good," he said. "Names given by gods bind you to their lights. A name from me will tie you to something richer."
He reached down, and the air went colder than grief. His claws—black, ridged, wet with the residue of hellfires—closed around the infant's shoulder. For an instant the child flinched, gurgling blood. For an instant the world held its breath.
Zorvak pressed a talon into the child's breast. Flesh split with a sound like brittle rope; heat and shadow bled from the wound. He did not withdraw his hand. He dug. The child did not cry. He laughed—bubbling and bright with hunger. In the wound Zorvak scratched symbols that seared bone and marrow, letters older than reason. The mark glowed like an inverted star.
"From this night," Zorvak intoned, the syllables heavy as anvils, "you shall be called Azkarel—Ash-born, the breaker of angels, the mouth that swallows dawn. Let that name be a blade, and let it sing."
The word tore through the hut. Something in the heavens recoiled; one star guttered as if burned by the syllable alone. The child lifted his face. Where his mouth opened, the sound was not a baby's cry. It was a pronouncement.
"…Azkarel," he breathed, and the name sat in the air like a cocked blade.
For a trembling heartbeat the world was a place of silence and ashes. Then the sigil on his chest flared, and a voice—not spoken with breath, but felt—inked itself into his marrow.
[SYSTEM: THE CHAINS] — Initiated.Status: Bound. Whisper:Your birthright denied by light. Reclaim it in blood.Prompt:Accept covenant? [YES / NO]
Azkarel's tiny fist closed around nothing and tightened. He did not know such words, did not know understandings laid by men with parchment and oath. He only knew the bright arrow of hunger that had never been satisfied. He flung his head back and laughed, the sound like a blade being unsheathed from skin.
He pressed a grubby finger to the glowing mark. The light stung—no, not stung; it filled him, like a fireworm slipping through bone. The Chains did not weigh; they became limb. They knotted into his tendons, threaded his marrow with black. They whispered names in his blood: Glutton, Tongue, Maw. They offered him lists and measures and cruel economies.
A window opened before him—not a window of glass but a curtain of cold flame, letters rearranging in smoke.
[COVENANT ACCEPTED — AZKAREL, DISCIPLE OF ZORVAK]Level: 1 Core Skill:Hunger EternalPassive:Despair Rings True — Witnesses' sorrow amplifies gains.Quest:First Taste — Claim your first kin's blood. Consume. Grow.
Zorvak watched with a patient hunger, as one watches a smith test whether newly forged steel will hold under blow. "Names and marks are the beginning," he crooned. "The first chains teach you grammar. Language is power. Slaughter is fluency."
A small thing happened then. The midwife who had not fled—pale, hands trembling, eyes huge with prayer—crept back into the doorway, clutching a bundle of cloth she had thought to gift the infant. Perhaps she intended charity. Perhaps she intended atonement. A human's mercy has always been the softest point of any miracle.
She could not meet Azkarel's eyes. "Child," she whispered, voice a broken reed. "Little one… we—"
Centimeters of distance closed in the span of a heartbeat. The child blinked and in that blink was a predator: the way his mouth opened and his jaw flexed was not natural for one so small. He rose with an ungainly agility, hair and straw clinging to his knees, and walked like a thing that had practiced hunger for a long time.
Before her prayer could finish, Azkarel's hands were around her throat. Flesh capitulated to nails like paper. Her scream was not more than a sputter before his jaw locked on and the taste of her—warm, salty, the specific metallic tang of frightened blood—flooded his senses. He chewed methodically, as if savoring a flavor he had been denied in the womb.
The System sang.
[FEEDING]Target: Human Midwife — State: Consumed. Reward: +6 CONSUMPTION; +4 VIGOR. Unlocked:Skill Window — Gluttony of the Void (Active).Note:Memories ingested: Two. Fear: amplified. Name: remembered.
With each swallow, images flared in his mind: the midwife's small boy laughing in a summer field, the woman's mother's face folded in sorrow, a lullaby sung badly to keep a baby calm. Emotions, tastes, the ache of losing one's mother, the smell of curdled milk—all folded inside him and curdled into strength. Each memory sat in his gut like a coal. They were his now; they were knives.
Zorvak chuckled, a dry sound that shook pebbles loose. "See how it teaches you? Not merely muscle. Not merely a hunger for flesh. The data feeds the soul. Eat their pasts. Fold their fears into your marrow."
Azkarel spat. The midwife's voice—her last chant—echoed within him. He tasted not only blood, but the particular grief of one human life, and it amplified his cruelty. The Chains shimmered to life across his vision, baring other things: a ledger of sins he could spend, a tally for broken families, a scale measuring how much despair a household might yield when undone.
Zorvak cupped his chin between claws and regarded him like one considers a new instrument. "You have the name," he said. "You have the hunger. Now you must learn the economy of ruin. The heavens will cluck and send champions. They will try to mend what you break. Their mending will feed you more."
The child—Azkarel—played with a length of intestine as if it were string. He plucked it and made it snap like a chord. He listened to the sounds that rose from the charred rafters: the sky's faint murmuring of contingency; the constellations' distant hiss, like teeth brushing.
"Teach him carefully," said a voice from within the shadow, older than the demon himself. The hut's corner rippled—some memory, some thing that watched through the wall. "Names erode. Power must be given shape: a blade, a ritual, a taste."
Zorvak's smile widened. With a sweep of his talon he drew from the cavern a little token—nothing more than a dark scrap of metal, molten and singing, but when he laid it near the child it exploded with a hunger that matched the baby's.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: VYTHAR SPRING]A seed of blade. Cools to an edge only when soothed by blood.Can be reforged into weapons; currently inert.
The child's fingers closed on the scrap as if it were a talisman. He felt the potential of a sword forming under his nails: the heat of a star extinguished and the sharp taste of promises.
Zorvak watched, pleased. "We will name the method with which the heavens bleed," he whispered. "Not merely slaughter. Mockery. Not merely murder. Performance. You will not strike in the dark. You will cut in the daylight, laughing while they watch, and you will teach the cosmos that mercy is a lie."
Azkarel's laugh was a sound like water dragging bone. He crouched, eyes glittering, and in the dark where the hut's doorway swallowed him, the sigil on his chest shimmered, announcing to no one but him a ledger that had opened: First Taste: Completed.Next: Break a family bound to a single star. Reward: Title — Kin-Slayer. Unlock: Tongue of Lies.
He rose on uneven legs, gait swayed by newfound vigor. Somewhere the constellations trembled, and when the heavens flared with a flicker of alarm it felt to him like applause. He stepped over the limp body of the midwife, lifting one small hand and tasting the midwife's hair like a child sampling sugar.
Zorvak's shadow wrapped him then—not to suffocate but to sheath. "Remember, Azkarel," the demon said as they walked into the night, "a name cuts both ways. Yours will cut the sky. It will make the stars weep. And when they weep, the world will make a feast."
Beyond the hills, the first true star shrieked—a thin, high sound like the breaking of glass—and the constellations began to rearrange themselves with purpose. A ledger thudded in Azkarel's mind, the Chains pulling taut, promising many things. Hunger thrummed at his ribs like a second heart.
He looked up once, at the streaked sky—the stitches of light that had once judged him—and the laugh that came from his small, dark throat was full of patience and promise.
Let them watch, he thought, and the Chains smiled back in black fire.