There was no sunrise on the corpse-world.
No sun, no stars—only the charcoal crust of a planet long abandoned by the divine. Jagged spires pierced the dead skies like the ribs of long-fallen titans, and ashes danced through the black winds like mournful prayers no one would answer. Mountains floated in the distance, crumbling under their own forgotten weight, orbiting nothing. Time here had withered. Even decay seemed to tire.
And at the heart of this celestial graveyard, he sat.
Not upon a throne. Not on a pedestal. But on the broken edge of a shattered obelisk once carved with godscript, its runes long since worn away by time and silence. He sat motionless, one leg stretched out, the other bent, arm draped lazily across his knee. His gaze—silver-black, depthless—stared forward into the nothing.
He had no name here.
He had no name anywhere.
No parents. No home. No memory of birth, no lineage, no language carved from love or legacy. Only the present. Only the instinct to survive. And he did.
Every time.
---
Above him, something moved.
The sky split—not like a wound, but like a slow blink. From that fissure, a cluster of spectral entities tumbled forth, trailing embers. They were malformed, like gods who had been forgotten midway through their creation. Six-limbed, eyeless, whispering. And hungry.
He stood.
A single movement. No war cry. No preparation. The air around him shifted, compressed, as if reality itself knew he no longer needed permission to act.
The first creature dove toward him, shrieking in a language not meant for ears. Its claws shimmered with the memory of starlight.
He stepped once.
The beast imploded—not from force, but from absence. Space folded where he had stood, and when he stood again a few paces away, the beast's body spiraled into motes of dissolving matter. Its form had been erased, not destroyed.
The others hesitated.
He didn't.
His body blurred—a movement without motion. Four more creatures vanished, either flayed apart by soundless pressure waves or reduced to smear-lines across the grey dust. He never summoned a weapon. His hands remained bare. The only thing that shone was his gaze—flickering for a heartbeat with dull orange light.
Fire, ancient and patient, flickered in the iris.
---
After the silence returned, he stood again at the edge.
Watching.
Nothing moved now. The ash resumed its silent waltz. The corpses of the divine trembled again in the distance, but not from life. Only the aftershock of something old stirring.
Then the voice came.
> "Burn them all."
It was not spoken aloud. Not truly. It spoke from within—no, beneath. As though from something slumbering in the caverns of his being, something caged in flame. The voice did not demand. It did not beg. It pulsed.
> "They let rot spread. Burn it."
He exhaled once. Slowly.
The fire in his eyes dimmed.
---
He walked.
Not through lands, but through echoes. Every structure on this world—the dead temples, the shriveled fortresses, the time-frozen war altars—spoke of old gods long extinct. Every few kilometers, he passed the remains of a battle none remembered. Swords embedded in bones the size of buildings. Shields fused with time itself.
But he wasn't searching.
He didn't search.
He only walked when something within pushed him forward.
And it pushed now.
---
Hours—or days—passed in abstraction.
He stood before the Cradle of the First Pyre.
It was not named in this world, but within him, the name echoed. The crater before him pulsed with faint heat. It looked as if the planet itself had once erupted here to birth a fire so ancient, even stars might call it father.
He stepped in.
And the world screamed.
The ash ignited. The air boiled. The sky fractured with red fissures, and the black sunless heavens churned as if trying to swallow him whole. A memory not his tried to consume him.
---
She stood in the flame.
Hair like molten gold, eyes of molten sorrow. SHAEL'YN. Not his. Never his. But seen—somehow.
"You mustn't become him," she whispered, her arms outstretched toward someone else. "But I'll burn if I must."
She walked into the fire. A sacrifice. To stop wrath. To soothe something.
The voice screamed.
"She silenced me."
---
He opened his eyes.
He stood at the center of the pyre.
The flames licked at his skin but never touched him. His presence had silenced them. The crater bowed around him.
From within his chest, something cracked.
A soundless break. Not pain. Not injury.
But awakening.
A mark—unseen—flickered across his spine, just for an instant. A jagged sigil formed of two curved blades crossing beneath a dying sun. It vanished as soon as it appeared.
He turned from the crater.
The path ahead was clear.
---
Far away, in a realm that no longer spoke in time, a shadowed throne pulsed once.
And within the Midplace—between the core of his existence and the fracture of his being—a throne formed from black flame and fractured bones took shape.
It waited.
Not for a king.
But for a fury.
---
The fire within had not dulled.
As VAREON moved across the jagged terrain, the scorched winds behind him refused to settle. The pyre he had walked from—the Cradle of the First Pyre—still glowed red across the dead continent's spine. Yet he did not look back. He never did.
He was not made for reflection.
He was built for continuation.
And now, something deep within the Midplace stirred. A place that did not exist in the physical realm but hovered between the layers of his fractured consciousness. It had always been there—quiet, sleeping, shadowed. But the moment the sigil awakened on his back, that place had gained structure.
A throne, forged of fury and bone.
A circular chamber suspended in nothingness.
Seven other thrones—empty. But one now pulsed.
---
In the Midplace
VAREON appeared without walking. He did not question it. This realm obeyed no physics, no divine system, no law of existence. It bent only to him and those things tied to his essence—the Seven Shards.
He stood before the first throne.
Its surface shimmered, dark steel etched with flame-tongue. It was not empty anymore.
A figure sat there.
Clad in scorched plate armor, its edges jagged like torn volcanic rock. Crimson runes flickered across his gauntlets. His face was obscured by a half-mask, and behind his shoulders flared wings of smoke and ember—wrath given form.
He did not rise.
He simply opened his mouth.
> "You opened the gate," the being said. His voice cracked like a smothered blaze.
"Now I burn with you."
VAREON said nothing.
They simply stared at each other, as equals. Or perhaps not. This was his throne. This was his fragment.
But the fragment spoke again.
> "I am the Wrath you refused. The fire she died to seal. The fury that never asked why. I am—"
"ASH'RAK."
The name fell from VAREON's lips like a command—and a memory.
The figure nodded once. "Then you remember."
"No," VAREON said. "I just know."
A silence followed—thick, coiled with unspoken scars.
ASH'RAK stood, wings unfurling. "You cannot fight without me anymore. This world will wake others. Creatures drawn to the fracture. I must burn them."
VAREON turned away. "I didn't survive to be consumed by my own pieces."
"You didn't survive." ASH'RAK's voice dropped. "You were forged."
---
Back in the physical realm, VAREON's eyes snapped open.
The Midplace faded.
But something had shifted.
His body no longer walked alone. He could feel the heat now, always just beneath the skin, radiating in his breath, behind his eyes. The planet's surface seemed to pull away from him slightly, as if aware.
Aware that the first Shard had awoken.
---
Far above the atmosphere of the dead world, something else stirred.
A ship—massive, broken, scavenger-made—descended through the black clouds.
Its scanners searched for the source of the anomaly.
They had come seeking salvage.
They would find a warrior.
They would not leave alive.
---
The scavenger ship, KAVAX-IX, had seen hundreds of broken worlds. But none like this.
Inside its rust-cloaked hull, a dozen Void-Tech Raiders prepped for descent. Armored in hybrid gear, part cosmic alloy, part black-market exoskins, their helmets hissed with malice. Most had cybernetic limbs. All had blood on their hands.
> "Signal's coming from the planet's equator. No life signs—but energy readings are spiking."
"Could be a buried godcore. We crack it fast, we sell it faster."
They didn't know.
They weren't meant to.
Not until the hatch opened.
Not until they stepped onto the Ash Plains of Varnoss—the name lost to every tongue but one.
And not until they met him.
---
VAREON stood barefoot on the iron-charred ground, cloak trailing behind him like a shadow that disobeyed gravity.
He didn't summon his power.
It was already awake.
ASH'RAK pulsed inside his chest—heat rising in waves, but contained, as if daring the world to beg for release.
The raiders surrounded him in a semi-circle, weapons drawn. Plasma blades. Cryo-rifles. Energy stakes.
> "You alive or just standing, freak?" one barked.
No answer.
Another raised their cannon. "Last warning."
Still, silence.
They fired.
The bolt cracked across the field—fast, bright, clean.
It never reached him.
A shimmer of air. A flick of a hand.
The plasma disintegrated mid-path, folding into a spiral of flame that licked the dirt and died like a match smothered in eternity.
Then VAREON moved.
No technique. No battle cry.
Just motion—swift, devastating.
He grabbed the nearest raider by the faceplate and lifted him off the ground. There was a flash of emberlight from VAREON's palm—then the man screamed, armor melting into his flesh like it belonged there.
He dropped him.
A pile of fused bone and slag.
Now the others understood.
They fired all at once.
---
But ASH'RAK was laughing now, inside VAREON's mind.
> "Burn them, like they burned her."
The words cracked lightning in his skull.
He didn't resist.
A column of fire erupted around him—no flame of physics, but something older, birthed in the soul of stars before the first gods wept.
Weapons melted.
Armor turned to steam.
One by one, they fell—silent in death, as if the flames consumed even the concept of noise.
And when it was over, the ashes didn't scatter.
They sank into the ground, as if this planet remembered its dead.
---
VAREON stood alone again.
But not unchanged.
The Shard had proven itself. It had acted. But VAREON knew this was only the beginning.
One throne was no longer empty.
Six remained.
And this world?
It had called them.
Not just ASH'RAK.
The others would come.
---
In the Midplace, six thrones now flickered—dim, but not dead.
Whispers passed between them.
Not words.
But promises.
Of struggle.
Of hunger.
Of war.
---
End of chapter 1