Chapter 2: Uncoded — Birth of the Cursed**
The air inside the birthing chamber of the Kurnov keep did not welcome life; it suffocated it.
The atmosphere was heavy, thick with the sharp tang of copper, damp linen, and an unnatural, creeping dread that made the skin prickle. Outside, a tempest tore through the night sky as if nature itself were screaming a warning. Thunder cracked like artillery fire, rattling the heavy leaded windows and sending tremors through the ancient stone foundations. Beneath the guttering, dim lantern light, amidst a final, agonizing scream of labor, Leornars Servs Avrem was dragged into a world that had already signed his death warrant.
The mid-wife—a matron hardened by decades of delivering the high-born and the low—took one look at the newborn and froze.
A strangled, wet gasp caught in her throat. Her eyes dilated in absolute terror as she stared at the infant's hair. It wasn't the soft fuzz of a normal babe; it was a cascade of stark, shimmering, snow-white strands. A forbidden mark. An unholy omen.
Her knees buckled, clattering against the stone floor. Without a single word, she scrambled backward, threw open the heavy oak door, and fled into the corridor. Her frantic, echoing shrieks for the palace knights rang through the cold hallways like a curse.
On the bloodied bedding, Leornars' birth mother lay trembling, her face slick with sweat. She forced her head up, her eyes locking onto the motionless child. In an instant, the exhaustion of labor vanished, replaced by an expression of pure, unadulterated revulsion.
"Why?" she whispered hoarsely, her voice cracking with horror. "Why did the gods curse my womb with this… *thing*?"
She turned her frantic gaze toward her husband, who stood frozen in the shadows of the room. "Is this some cruel jest? What did I do to deserve this stain?"
The lord of the keep stepped forward. His boots clicked sharply against the stone, his face hardening into a rigid, unyielding mask of loathing. He looked down at his own flesh and blood as if it were a diseased rat.
"Only you, I, and that fleeing wretch saw this abomination," he said, his voice dropping to a cold, ruthless whisper. "The only mercy left for our lineage is to erase it. Now."
The mother didn't hesitate. The maternal instinct had been utterly strangled by superstition. "He is a plague. A curse. Take him. Burn him, cut him to pieces, let the beasts of the forest devour him. Just get it out of my sight!"
"Perhaps the old well," the father mused aloud, his hands devoid of warmth as he scooped the silent newborn from the sheets. "The water is deep. No one will ever find the body."
Outside, the storm reached a deafening crescendo. Sheet rain lashed the stone battlements as the lord strode toward the courtyard's abandoned well. Without ceremony, without a single prayer for the soul he had created, the father dropped the infant into the black abyss.
No name was spoken. No tears were shed. The wind and thunder simply swallowed the splash.
But fate, entirely cruel and ever-watchful, refused to let the spark die.
A wanderer—a forgotten soul wrapped in tattered, mud-soaked rags—was huddled beneath a nearby stone archway. His bones ached from the bitter cold, and his stomach twisted with the sharp pangs of prolonged starvation. Yet, through the howling wind, a sound caught his ear. A weak, pitiful cry vibrating through the rain.
Following the sound to the lip of the old well, the old man peered into its dark throat. There, clinging to a rotting wooden beam just above the waterline, was an impossibly pale child.
Using an effort fueled entirely by stubborn human instinct rather than strength, the old man climbed down the slick, mossy stone and retrieved the shivering infant.
When he emerged back into the raging storm, he tucked the babe against his chest, whispering into the wind, "So, the world has already thrown you away, little one."
The old man sought charity. He begged for shelter at the heavy wooden doors of the church, but the priests took one look at the child's white hair and barred their gates. He carried the babe to the local orphanage, but the caretakers recoiled in fear, threatening to call the guard.
In a final act of desperation, the wanderer retreated to a ruined hovel. He chewed a hard crust of stale bread into a soft pulp to feed the starving infant, tearing the cleanest strips of cloth from his own meager rags to wrap the child's fragile body.
"I have not eaten a full meal in two weeks, little one," he murmured, his voice ragged as he rocked the boy. "But I will protect you. Never fear."
Two weeks passed in a blur of survival. Hunger gnawed relentlessly at the old man's insides, yet he kept the child warm with the last reserves of his own fading life.
But in the town square, fear had mutated into a religious frenzy. The mayor, his face flushed red with zealotry, stood upon the brick podium, roaring to a restless crowd: "The white-haired devil still breathes! The mid-wife spoke the truth! Hunt him down! Purge this curse from our lands before the gods strike us down!"
Torches illuminated the dark woods that night.
At dawn, a hunting party found the wanderer. His broken, emaciated body lay deep in the thicket, clawed open by a wild bear. But there was no child. Only a small patch of dirt hastily turned over near a hollowed cliff, and an eerie silence. The townsfolk rejoiced, declaring that nature had destroyed the "demon child" for them. Their hands were clean. Their collective guilt was buried.
But beneath that hollowed cliff, the child still lived.
With his final, dying breaths, the wanderer had hidden Leornars deep within a narrow cavern crevice. For two agonizing days, the boy cried. His voice grew weaker with every passing hour as starvation took hold. The scent of impending death drew the forest vultures; their dark shadows danced across the cave mouth.
Just as a sharp talon reached into the darkness to tear at his flesh, a greater shadow fell over the cavern.
She entered in absolute silence. Her long, silver-white hair shimmered like fresh snow beneath the filtered sunlight. Her deep crimson eyes, cold yet filled with a profound, aching compassion, settled on the trembling infant.
A soft, golden light emanated from her palms as she touched the boy, instantly knitting his blistered skin and soothing his internal pain. She cradled him gently against her chest, feeding him warmth and safety.
Before leaving, she knelt by the shallow grave of the old wanderer.
"You deserved a better end," she whispered to the earth. "But thank you… for saving him."
And with that, Emalian vanished into the deep wild with the child, leaving the village to celebrate a lie.
## **Nine Years Later**
The boy they had tried to erase had not died. But he had not been spared, either.
In the deepest bowels of a hidden imperial fortress, far beneath the reach of sunlight, Leornars sat in heavy, rusted iron shackles. The passing years had changed him into something monstrous. His white hair had grown past his shoulders like a frozen curtain. His skin—nearly translucent from a total lack of nutrients—was stretched so tight over his skeletal frame that his ribs threatened to burst through. His eyes were hollow, bloodshot pools of absolute madness.
"I've been here… for nine years," he whispered, his body rocking rhythmically back and forth against the cracked, freezing stone. "They break my fingers… then they use the crystals to heal them. They crush my legs… then they heal them. They rip my organs out… again, and again, and again."
Suddenly, his voice escalated into a raw, piercing shriek that sliced through the damp dungeon air like a razor blade.
"They made me watch my mother die! Four hundred million times!"
His skeletal fists clenched so hard the nails tore through his palms, weeping fresh crimson down his wrists.
"WHY?! WHY ME?! I DID NOTHING to any of you!"
He slammed his forehead violently against the stone wall. *Thud.* Again. *Thud.* "I don't want to be alone! It's dark! It hurts so much! GODS, PLEASE, HELP ME!"
The screams dissolved into wet, pathetic sobs. Soon, the words began to lose all cohesion.
"I want to go home… I want to tell Mother the academy trip was fun… I want… Mother? Mother! WHO AM I?!"
He screamed until his vocal cords literally shredded, leaving him gasping for air in the pitch black. And eventually, the noise stopped entirely.
The village mayor had spared no expense in his torment. A specialized neural chip had been surgically implanted directly into Leornars' brain, forcing a continuous, inescapable loop of Emalian's horrific execution to play behind his eyelids. Every six hours, the physical torture sessions resumed, calibrated perfectly to keep him on the absolute brink of death before a high-grade healing crystal forced his flesh back together. He was fed a foul gruel exactly once every two weeks.
"He doesn't make a sound anymore," a guard reported later that afternoon, stepping into the mayor's lavish office. "His vocal cords are completely ruined."
"Good," the mayor smirked, swirling a glass of wine. "If the royal inquisitors ever raid the lower levels, the freak won't be able to spill our secrets. How are the supply costs?"
The guard hesitated, shifting his weight. "He is burning through eight high-grade healing crystals a day now, sir."
"Eight?!" The mayor slammed his glass down. "Why the hell are we wasting that many resources on a vegetable?"
"Because he won't stop self-mutilating, sir. The moment the guards leave, he uses his own nails to tear off strips of his skin. He bangs his skull against the wall until the bone cracks. If we don't heal him, the infection will kill him."
The mayor scoffed, a wave of disgust crossing his face. "Let the freak mutilate himself. As long as he loses his mind but keeps his heartbeat, his blood is still an invaluable catalyst. Keep him alive."
Later that evening, the heavy iron door of the cell groaned open. The mayor walked in, standing over the chained, shivering boy. Leornars didn't move, but his bleeding, crimson eyes slowly tracked the man. His lips parted, a rasping, silent whisper forming in the dark:
*"Tar… tour… rou…"*
*(I will take you to the deepest depths of hell.)*
The mayor merely laughed, kicking a piece of loose gravel into the boy's face. "Keep whispering, boy. Soon enough, your shattered soul will join that whimpering witch you called a mother."
The heavy door slammed shut, and the years continued to bleed into one another.
The dungeon walls echoed with nothing but the scratching of famished rats, the soft, rhythmic drips of water, and the dull, maddening *thud* of a child's skull against stone. Leornars lost all concept of time. He forgot what hunger meant. When the two-week rations weren't enough, he caught the rats with his bare teeth. He ate insects. He bit into his own flesh.
*They will just heal me anyway,* his numb, broken mind reasoned.
His internal organs were systematically harvested and regenerated six times a day. For nine agonizing years.
*"I watched her die… five hundred million times now,"* he muttered within the silent, fractured chambers of his mind. *"I don't know what the real world looks like anymore."*
The stone floor was too cold. There were too many sharp edges poking into his rotting skin. He couldn't remember what warmth felt like. He couldn't remember sunlight. He couldn't remember the sound of laughter.
He only knew the frost. He only knew the agony. And he knew, with absolute certainty, that no one—not the gods, not his mother, not the world—was ever coming to save him.