Breno12456

There had never been silence like that.

It wasn’t the absence of sound — it was presence.
Heavy. Alive. A stillness that crushed memory, breath, time.

Elías awakens on cracked earth beneath a sky of rotten red and black-blue. The stars above drift like bloated, decaying eyes — floating in stagnant fluid.

There is no sun. No moon. Only a damp, unholy light that seeps from nowhere. The air tastes like ash and burns like guilt — and something inside him stirs.

He doesn’t remember this world, but it remembers him.
He doesn’t know what he lost, but it’s still bleeding.

When the silence finally whispers his name, he understands:

Elías is not alive. Not dead.
He is what remains.

And this world — whether the last, or just the next — will bleed before it forgets him again

Refuge of the Last Name

The wind cut like knives through the skeletal remains of what once was a watchtower. Stones, blackened by fire and time, barely held the structure upright. I stepped over the corpse of an angel—not divine, not radiant, but hollow-eyed and filled with rust. Its wings had been torn from its back. Someone, or something, had done this. The wind carried the stench of old blood and something worse—memory.

"Do you feel that?" whispered Avo, the one who had joined us at the ruins of Valegray. His voice was barely more than breath, but it vibrated with fear. "They were here... recently."

"Who?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

"The ones that crawl beneath the banners of fire," he said, eyes widening. "The Hollowborn."

I had heard of them in broken songs—creatures born not of flesh, but of silence and hunger. Once humans, they had traded their souls for the power to endure the collapse of the First Sun. They weren't dead. Worse. They remembered being alive.

We advanced through the tower's inner sanctum. Burnt relics and shattered stained-glass eyes watched us from the floor. The air was thick with static, as though the world itself was holding its breath.

Not loud. Not even clear. Just… present.

They were speaking my name. But none of the others heard them.

I gripped the handle of the Scythe of Death, and it pulsed once — like a heart recognizing something it had been born to kill. My weapon understood before I did. Something in this tower was watching us.

It was a circle of salt and bone, with symbols I could not read, but I felt them in my teeth, my spine, in the roots of my soul. In the center lay a crown — old, iron, and stained red. But it wasn't blood. It was something older. Something like betrayal.

The others hesitated, but I stepped forward. The scythe grew heavy, as if resisting me. As if it too feared what lay ahead.

Then came the sound: a voice—not from any throat—but from the stone itself.

"He who wears the last name shall carry the last breath."

The crown trembled. And then I saw them.

Dozens. Maybe hundreds. All standing in the dark. Hollow eyes. Mouths stitched with wire. Skin marked with failed symbols of divinity. The Hollowborn.

They didn't speak. They didn't charge.

One of them, taller than the rest, stepped forward and kneeled.

"We remember the name. We remember the scythe."

I didn't understand. Not fully. But deep inside me, something cracked. As if a veil had been lifted for a second.

I didn't know what that meant. I didn't trust it. But I knew one thing with certainty:

This was no longer just about survival.

And I was heir to something terrifying.

Question for the Reader:If you were told that monsters bowed to you because of who you used to be, would you still trust yourself?

Ashes That Whisper in the Wind