When Royce opened his eyes again, the world itself seemed to recoil.
His breath came out in thin white ribbons, each exhale whispering curses he did not remember learning. He stood at the edge of a desolate wasteland, where the bones of cities lay half-buried in endless grey sand, and crooked towers reached for a sun that no longer warmed anything.
The chains were gone, but their scars remained—burned deep into his flesh, forming sigils that pulsed with a faint, malignant light under his torn skin. Each step he took across the ash dunes left behind footprints that bled black mist, quickly swallowed by the hungry earth.
He was not alone.
Shapes lingered at the edge of vision—some crawling, some staggering upright. Others floated, formless and shrieking in tongues that flayed the mind. Royce felt their eyes upon him, but none dared come too close. Not yet. They sensed what he had become.
A vessel.
A cursed beacon.
The wasteland stretched endlessly, but his instincts dragged him toward a single broken spire far on the horizon, shrouded in storm clouds that wept blood instead of rain. Something waited for him there, something that had called his name even as he lay chained in the cathedral of woe.
He stumbled onward, every mile a torment.
As he walked, visions clawed at the edges of his mind.
A woman with hair like fire, weeping over a broken body.
A child reaching out with hands blackened by flame.
A mirror reflecting not a face, but a writhing mass of darkness.
Royce clutched at his head, a low snarl escaping his lips. Not real. Not real. But deep down, he knew these were not illusions. They were memories—but whose, he could no longer tell.
Suddenly, a scream cut through the dead air.
Not a memory.
Something real.
Royce turned sharply toward the sound, his heartbeat a dull hammer in his ears. In the distance, he saw her—a woman staggering across the dunes, her dress torn, her skin ghostly pale under the crimson sky. Behind her slithered a mass of tendrils, black as pitch and studded with jagged mouths.
Without thinking, he moved.
The creature shrieked as Royce approached, its tendrils writhing in anticipation. It knew hunger. It knew fear. And it sensed something deeper inside Royce—something that smelled of despair and blood.
The woman fell to her knees, her strength gone.
Royce stepped between her and the nightmare.
The tendrils lashed out, but he raised his hand—and the sigils carved into his flesh flared to life. A blast of sickly green fire erupted from his palm, searing the tendrils to cinders with a sound like souls screaming.
The creature recoiled, retreating into the fog of ash, its howls lingering long after it disappeared.
Silence returned.
Royce knelt beside the woman. Her eyes fluttered open, glassy and wild, and for a brief moment, he saw something—recognition? terror?—flash across her face.
"You..." she whispered hoarsely, reaching a trembling hand toward him. "You're one of them."
He froze. "One of what?"
Her lips quivered.
"The Bearers..." she rasped. "The ones who wear sorrow like a crown...the cursed kings of the lost."
Royce drew back, shaken.
The Bearers.
The legends told in dying whispers.
Beings who once tried to save their world...and instead condemned it to endless ruin.
He was becoming one.
The woman collapsed into unconsciousness, her breathing shallow. Royce hesitated only a moment before lifting her into his arms. She was feather-light, as if the world had already begun to forget her.
There was no going back.
With the woman cradled against him, Royce continued toward the broken spire, the storm growing fiercer with every step.
Somewhere within its shattered halls, answers awaited.
Answers...and horrors far deeper than anything he had yet endured.
He would find the truth.
Even if it meant burning the remnants of his soul to ash.
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