Prologue: ReWritten in Death
Darkness.
Then—pain.
A dagger, slick with his own blood, slid free from his side.
Warmth gushed between his fingers as he clutched the wound, breath shuddering, vision swimming. His knees buckled.
A voice behind him—indifferent. Almost bored. Already forgetting him.
"Nothing personal."
Bootsteps receded into the void. Unhurried. Unconcerned.
He was already dead.
A tremor rumbled beneath him. Stone groaned. The tomb above—silent for centuries—began to stir.
Crack.
A jagged fracture split the ceiling. Light lanced through—brief, blinding—before the void swallowed it whole.
The weight of the world above shifted.
The ground collapsed.
And then—
He fell.
Endless Descent
He should have hit the ground.
The drop was fatal. The depth immeasurable. He should have shattered on impact.
But the fall stretched on—unnatural, endless, wrong.
His body did not flail. There was no wind against his skin, no rush of movement, no sense of weight.
His wound should have burned.
But pain dulled.
His lungs should have seized.
But air did not exist here.
Was he still falling?
Or had he been stolen from reality?
The abyss did not answer.
It only whispered back.
The Impact
Pain returned violently.
His body convulsed as steel tore through flesh.
A **spike—jagged, rusted, unyielding—**pierced through him, skewering him against the cold, unfeeling stone.
A gasp ripped from his throat. Iron flooded his mouth. His vision blurred, pain radiating in waves.
He tried to move—couldn't.Tried to breathe—couldn't.
Something lay beneath him.
Sealed under the weight of time and death.
A book.
Bound in chains.
Its cover—scarred with runes older than language. Its sigils—twisting, writhing, alive. The patterns pulsed, as if waiting.
A drop of blood—**his blood—**slid onto the tome's surface.
The sigils trembled.
The chains rattled.
Then—
They snapped.
The Tome Awakens
The book did not open.
It devoured.
Power surged.
Not a blessing.Not a gift.
A claim.
**Aether—dark, formless, insatiable—**spilled from the tome.
It coiled up his arm, threading into his veins, sinking into his marrow.
It did not grant him strength.
It rewrote him.
His breath hitched.
The corruption reached his eye.
His vision burned white.
The Final Whisper
A voice unbound by time, unshackled from the pages, spoke.
"Weep not for the living… for they are naught but dust ere long."
The abyss shuddered.
Something old. Something patient. Watching. Waiting.
The whisper crawled through his bones, sinking deeper than the wound in his side.
It did not demand. It did not ask.
It declared.
"The throne lies vacant, forsaken one."
"Carve thy fate in the marrow of the world."
The last of the chains fell away.
The tome did not open.
It unraveled.
And something within him broke—
And something else took its place.
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: ERROR DETECTED.][Synchronizing with Unknown Entity... ... ... .][Class Awakening in Progress.]