The darkness was absolute. A void without shape or sound, pressing in from all sides like a living shroud. Rayan blinked into the black, but the world remained sealed from his sight.
"I… I think I'm blind," he whispered, his voice barely louder than his breath. "I can't see anything."
Malrick and Orien stood beside him, equally disoriented, their forms swallowed by the pitch. The silence among them stretched, uneasy and suffocating, until it was broken by a voice low, cold, and edged with quiet menace.
From within the shadows, a figure stepped forward.
He appeared to be a man, young in form, with hair as dark as night and eyes that caught the unseen light like shards of obsidian. Yet there was something deeply wrong about him. The way the darkness clung to his frame, the stillness in the air around him, the weight of his presence. It all whispered of something unnatural.
"Who dares walk this path?" the stranger said, his voice like rusted iron drawn across stone. "Who gave you the right to cross into my domain?"
Rayan felt his chest tighten. He glanced toward Malrick, and toward Orien, whose fingers flickered faintly with the signs of summoning. None of them answered. There were no words that would matter.
The stranger raised his hand.
"You will taste my darkness," he said, his voice rising as the shadows behind him twisted like smoke, coiling into serpents and claws and shapes too terrible to name. "Let it consume you. Let it strip you bare, until not even your soul remembers the light."
He unleashed his power.
The darkness surged forward, no longer silent or still. It roared like a tidal wave of despair, alive and furious, devouring the ground as it raced toward them. It was not simply an absence of light. It was a force, a will, a curse woven into the air.
In that moment, as the shadows descended, Rayan knew they were no longer dealing with a man.
They had stepped into the realm of something older.
Something cruel.
Something that did not forgive.
Rayan and Malrick vanished in a flicker of shadow and light, leaving Orien momentarily exposed. Reacting instinctively, he raised a barrier of jagged ice around him, its surface glinting coldly in the dimness. A heartbeat later, Rayan and Malrick reappeared at his side, their movements sharp and precise.
The air shifted. The oppressive darkness that had clung to the place like a living shroud began to dissolve, retreating as if in fear. Light returned. Subtle, but natural. The twisted trees and warped stones around them settled back into a more familiar shape, as though waking from a long nightmare.
Then, a figure emerged from the fading gloom.
"I am Zayran," he announced, his voice deep and edged with quiet menace. "Who are you, to trespass in my domain?"
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Zayran "Character Art"
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The three stood in tense silence for a moment, caught off guard by his sudden appearance. Orien was the first to step forward, his hands lowered in a gesture of peace, though his posture remained cautious.
"Listen," he said evenly, "we're not here to cause trouble. We're only looking for a place called Ironspire."
But before the last word left his mouth, Zayran struck.
A surge of darkness shot toward them, sharp and wild. It moved with a mind of its own, like claws made of shadow fast, silent, and merciless.
And in that instant, they knew... Zayran wasn't going to let them leave alive.