by eternalist
They came on a night like any other. Kael Ashworth had spent fifteen years hauling iron, swallowing his pride, and keeping his family alive in the smog-choked slums beneath Veranthos — a city where neon bleeds through rust, and the powerful crush the weak without looking down. Fifteen years of silence. Of survival. Of a name that meant nothing to anyone anymore. Then the door opened. And everything he had held together with bleeding hands was torn apart in a single night. His sister — gone. His brother — taken. His home — ash. In the wreckage, something stirred inside him. Something cold. Something vast. Something that didn't feel like grief, or rage, or anything human at all. The shadows began to move. Now Kael walks a path no one was meant to walk alone. The deeper he goes, the more dangerous the truth becomes — and the harder it gets to tell whether the darkness is something he controls, or something that is slowly controlling him. He should have died that night. The fact that he didn't may be the worst thing that has ever happened to this world.
