The world had ended in silence.
Ash floated like frozen rain, drifting over a land where even echoes had died. The last flare of the Eighth Sun sank beneath the horizon, leaving behind a sky cracked with veins of black fire.
Aaryan lay among the ruins of what once was his sect's sacred valley. The stones around him still glowed faintly, their heat searing his torn skin. He could not tell if the pounding in his chest was life—or the struggle of something refusing to die.
His vision swam.
Every breath felt heavy, coated in the dust of the fallen heavens. He tried to move, but his limbs were no longer his; they trembled as though strings of shadow pulled them from within.
A low hum rippled through the air.
At first he thought it thunder, but the sound came from inside him—a pulse that matched his heartbeat, growing louder with each throb. The wound across his chest burned, the flesh turning black around the edges.
> Feed…
A whisper slithered through his mind. It wasn't sound. It was a thought that did not belong to him.
The ground quivered. The blood spilling from his body did not soak into the earth—it crawled back, drawn toward the mark forming over his heart. Threads of crimson twisted into darkness, swallowed by the growing seal of shadow.
Aaryan gasped. His eyes turned hollow, reflecting the last fragments of dying light.
> Who are you? he tried to speak, but the words fell apart.
What are you?
The whisper became laughter—soft, distant, endless.
> I am what was left when light betrayed itself.
Pain followed. It tore through bone and memory alike. His soul convulsed as black veins spread through every corner of his being. He felt his spiritual core shatter, replaced by something cold and bottomless.
Images flashed before him: the sect burning, the eighth sun imploding, faces of people he once called kin dissolving into dust. Then—nothing.
He screamed without sound.
The ashes around him stirred, swirling into a slow, mournful storm. From the horizon, the broken shards of sunlight sank into that storm, feeding it. Every dying ray turned gray, then vanished.
Aaryan's body lifted an inch above the ground. Shadows dripped from him like ink in water, spiraling upward to weave into a cocoon of darkness. The hum deepened into a rhythm that wasn't heartbeat but hunger itself.
Time lost meaning. It could have been a breath or a century before the cocoon cracked.
When it did, the world shivered.
Aaryan fell to his knees. His skin, once burned and scarred, now shimmered faintly with obsidian light. The wound over his chest had vanished, replaced by a black sigil shaped like an eclipse devouring the sun.
He touched it—and for the first time, he heard his own heartbeat clearly.
It didn't sound human anymore.
He looked up. The sky was no longer merely dark; it pulsed, alive, breathing shadows in rhythm with him. Each breath he took spread a faint tremor through the ruins. The ashes obeyed his exhale, moving as though answering to something ancient.
> This power… he thought, trembling. What have I become?
The whisper answered, gentle as a lullaby and sharp as a blade:
> You are the vessel of Sha—the hunger that survives when all else falls.
He remembered the sun's light dying—the betrayal of heaven itself. If light had failed, then perhaps only shadow deserved to reign.
A cold smile touched his lips.
His fear melted into a strange calm, the kind that only the forsaken ever find.
> Then so be it, he murmured. If the sun must die for me to live, let it never rise again.
The sigil on his chest pulsed once, like a heartbeat echoed by the land.
From that pulse, the first Shadow Essence was born—quiet, endless, and hungry.
Far away, unseen eyes opened within the void left by the Eighth Sun. The world, wounded and trembling, began to whisper Aaryan's name.
And as the ashes settled, the darkness bowed to its new heir.
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