For a time, there was only silence.
No whisper. No breath.
The fortress had gone still—
as if the world itself had turned its face away from sound.
Even the air refused to move.
Dust hung in the shafts of crimson light like suspended time,
and beneath the cracked marble beneath my boots,
I could feel a faint rhythm—
a heartbeat buried deep in the bones of the earth.
Then, faintly at first, the air began to stir.
A sigh rose from the stones, slow and weary,
as though the fortress itself were exhaling after a thousand years of sleep.
The moss along the walls shivered,
and from somewhere unseen came a low, tremulous murmur—
a voice too vast to belong to anything human.
And then, I heard them.
Thousands of whispers, distant yet near,
sliding through the cracks of stone like breath through a corpse.
They were not echoes, but memories—
the residue of voices long dead,
woven into the mortar of this place.
They murmured my name.
Not in sound, but in thought—
a resonance in the marrow,
a forgotten language awakening inside me.
I followed.
I don't remember deciding to, only that I had to.
The corridors grew narrower, the ceiling lower,
as though the fortress itself were folding inward, drawing me to its heart.
The torches on the walls burned with a sickly green flame,
their light too weak to reach the corners.
Carvings covered the stone—
not runes, but faces:
hundreds of them, carved in anguish,
their mouths open in eternal cries that had long since turned to dust.
With each step, the air grew colder.
I could taste iron on my tongue,
and somewhere above, the wind moaned through the hollow towers like a grieving god.
At last, the path ended in a vast circular chamber.
Here, the walls were alive with light—
runes pulsing in slow rhythm, veins of emerald energy crawling through the stone.
They seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting,
as though the entire room were the lung of something slumbering.
I realized then that I stood inside the heart of the fortress.
At its center rose a long, narrow stairway,
winding upward toward a throne of obsidian and bone.
It was not a seat of kingship, but of judgment.
The carvings at its base showed figures kneeling before it—
their bodies twisted into shapes that defied flesh,
their souls etched into the walls as pale silhouettes.
Upon that throne rested a single fragment of a mirror.
Small. Cracked beyond repair.
Yet radiant—
its light neither reflection nor flame,
but something deeper, older,
as if it remembered the sun that first rose upon the world.
It called to me softly,
like a pulse under the skin of reality.
I stepped closer.
Each footfall echoed too long,
as though the sound had to travel through ages before reaching the ground again.
When my fingers brushed the mirror's edge,
the cold sank into my bones.
It wasn't the chill of death,
but the void between beginnings—the place before names.
Nothing happened.
No vision. No pain.
Only the slow hum of something vast, ancient, and waiting.
I turned the shard over.
Etched into its back, in what might once have been blood,
were words half-devoured by time:
"He who gathers the fragments shall uncover their—"
The sentence ended there,
as though the mirror itself had refused to remember the rest.
Beneath it, another line remained, untouched by decay:
"You were never chosen.
You were written."
The light dimmed.
The runes along the walls faltered,
their glow collapsing into darkness.
And in that silence,
I felt something awaken beneath me—
a pulse in the stone, faint but steady,
as if the fortress had recognized my presence.
Somewhere in that unseen depth,
something immense turned its gaze toward me.
The words of the little girl came back like a whisper in the marrow of my mind:
"Find the Eternal Truth of the world…"
But as I stared into the blackened shard,
I understood that the truth was never meant to be found.
It was meant to be remembered.
And remembrance, I feared,
is the cruelest form of awakening.
The fragment, It pulsed faintly, its glow breathing like a dying ember in my palm.
For the first time, I felt I was stepping toward the truth—
and yet, beneath that fragile hope, a dread stirred,
whispering that I might already be too late.
I descended the cracked stairway, each step echoing in the hollow dark.
When I returned to the hall, the fire I had left burning was gone—
smothered, as though the night itself had swallowed its flame.
All around me stretched a silence so dense it pressed against the skin.
It was not absence. It was listening.
Then… two eyes opened in that darkness.
They shimmered faintly—reflections caught in something unseen—
and stared directly at me, unmoving.
A faint hum followed, low and resonant,
a sound less heard than felt,
like the trembling of the earth before a storm breaks.
The air itself seemed to tighten,
as if the fortress were holding its breath.
From the void between shadows, it emerged.
Not walking. Not crawling. Not flying—
but unfolding,
as though the air cracked to let it through.
Its form was made of fragments—
glasslike shards suspended weightlessly,
each one reflecting a different face:
some screaming,
some silent,
some praying for mercy that never came.
And all those faces turned toward me.
It was beautiful in a way that sickened me—
a reflection of death so perfect it felt divine.
The air quivered around it,
and each shard sang softly,
a choir of faint, trembling tones,
as though every piece remembered the moment it broke.
I could feel it pressing against my mind,
sliding through thought and memory,
tasting what I feared, what I had forgotten.
My heart pounded—not in terror, but in recognition.
Then, without sound, a word surfaced inside me.
Not spoken.
Not remembered.
Revealed.
"Shadowwrath."
The name split through my skull like lightning.
I didn't know how I knew it—only that it belonged to this thing.
Or perhaps, I realized with a shiver,
it once belonged to me.
The Shadowwrath did not move closer, nor did it retreat.
It only watched.
Its thousand mirrored faces shimmered in the dark,
and among them—I saw one that froze my breath.
My own.
The fragment in my hand flared,
its green light slicing through the gloom.
The creature's reflection fractured,
each shard rippling like disturbed water—
yet its eyes never left mine.
The air between us trembled.
Dust drifted from the ceiling in slow spirals,
and the faint hum of the creature merged with the heartbeat of the stone beneath my feet.
Man and monster.
Memory and shadow.
Bound by something older than either of us could name.
Though it made no sound, I felt it speak—
a voice that did not enter through the ears,
but through the bones.
You were never chosen.
You were written.
The words echoed through the marrow of the world.
The green light in my hand faltered.
The shadows deepened,
and the ruin itself seemed to shudder,
as if the walls understood what I did not.
I stood there, motionless,
the silence closing around me like a slow tide.
And somewhere deep within that stillness,
I felt the faintest shift—
as if the page of my existence had just been turned.