First Clash

The first sign wasn't the screaming.

It was the quiet.

Veridian—always buzzing with muted life—fell silent just before the attack. Birds vanished. Beasts cowered. Wind held its breath. Kiran stood on the edge of the northern gate, the glyph on his chest twitching like a wounded eye.

Then came the noise.

Not one scream. Many. All at once.

It began in the outer district—wooden homes split open like eggshells. Black tendrils laced with bone slithered through the cracks of the walls. Beasts wailed in unison as their connections to their humans unraveled—some dissolving into ash, others mutating into uncontrolled horrors.

A breach.

The story had opened its gut, and now something was spilling out.

Leon was already moving.

Kiran spotted him from across the rooftops, his sword drawn, his golden lion-Beast roaring flame into the encroaching dark. With each swing of his blade, a ripple of narrative energy followed—tight, refined, precise.

He was the hero.

And the world still recognized him as such.

Kiran, meanwhile, remained in the peripheral.

The anomaly.

The error.

He moved through shadow—literally. The moment he stepped into the alley, the darkness wrapped around him like muscle. Not comforting. Hungry. But obedient.

He commanded it now.

Not as a partner.

But as a parasite directing its host.

The first creature he saw was malformed.

A Beast turned inside-out. Its jaw was reversed, its spine curled around the outside of its body like a shell. Human hands sprouted from its ribcage, clawing blindly at the air.

It screeched and lunged.

Kiran didn't flinch.

He raised his hand—and the shadow on the ground rose with it, becoming a wall of darkness that cracked like glass as it absorbed the strike. With a thought, he twisted it, impaling the creature with jagged spears of solid night.

The creature spasmed, bled smoke, then shattered.

People saw him.

They screamed—not in relief, but in terror.

To them, he was no different than the monsters.

Kiran moved through the chaos like a phantom.

He watched Leon fight—each blow of the hero's blade matched with a roar from his Beast. The golden lion fought like a god, fangs igniting the air, claws splitting corrupted forms with clean, radiant finality.

It was beautiful.

But rigid.

Predictable.

The story's rhythm still echoed in Leon's every movement.

Kiran, on the other hand, was chaos given shape.

He danced between shadow tendrils, ducked beneath twisted wings, and tore creatures apart by unraveling their silhouettes from the stone.

But it wasn't control.

It was survival.

And his body was breaking.

Each use of the shadow took something from him—memories, sensations, breath. His mouth tasted like rust. His fingers bent wrong. His vision stuttered.

But he didn't stop.

At the temple gates, the largest horror emerged.

It was not a Beast.

It was a carcass of architecture—pillars twisted into legs, stained glass eyes that bled light, a torso made of pews and screaming. Its voice was a sermon of screams.

Leon faltered.

Even the lion recoiled.

And the people panicked.

Kiran stood alone in the shadow of the thing, blood leaking from his nose, darkness dripping from his fingertips.

He raised a hand.

And the creature looked at him.

No mouth. But it looked.

And it recognized something in him.

Not kinship.

Authority.

The shadow beneath Kiran exploded upward, forming a barrier, a claw, a maw—it shifted faster than thought, reacting to the thing's advance. Not protecting him—defying it.

Kiran didn't know what he was doing. He simply willed it.

The creature screamed with light. The glyph on his chest burned. The city shook.

And then—

A fracture split the air beside him.

A literal rip in space.

From it, a hand emerged—fleshless, gold-plated, covered in runes.

It reached toward Kiran.

He couldn't move.

The creature above paused.

Leon shouted something across the battlefield—but the words were lost.

The hand gripped Kiran's arm.

And pulled.

The battlefield vanished.

He was somewhere else.

White.

Endless.

The stitched-eye woman stood before him, now unmasked, her eyes open—revealing nothing but empty sockets filled with ink.

She said one word:

"Run."

And behind him—

A door opened in the void.

The Editors had arrived.