Elyndra did not know when the silence between them had stopped feeling threatening and had begun to feel unbearably heavy. Chaos walked ahead, his steps neither loud nor soft — simply inevitable, like something the world had never been meant to contain. She followed, not because she trusted him, but because something in her heart refused to run.
He never looked back. He never spoke. Yet his presence was louder than thunder, heavier than war. And somehow, beneath all that weight, there was something else — something she couldn't define, something that had nothing to do with power.
It felt like grief.
Elyndra had met killers. She had met tyrants. She had faced beasts, soldiers, demons, saints. None of them felt like this. None of them radiated a silence that seemed to come from a soul hollowed out long before the first drop of blood was ever spilled.
She didn't know why she could sense it when no one else could. Maybe it was because she was not a warrior, not a priestess, not a hero — just a survivor with a heart that still hadn't learned to harden.
"Why do you walk like someone who has already died?" she whispered once.
Chaos did not answer.
He didn't even turn.
But something in the air trembled — not magic, not power — something quieter, like breath caught in a throat that no longer remembered how to speak.
Elyndra stopped walking. She stared at his back, unmoving, as if trying to read the shape of a memory hidden in the lines of his posture. She didn't know why she said what came next — only that something inside her demanded it.
"You weren't born like this."
Chaos froze.
Not like a predator sensing danger — not like a monster about to strike — but like a man hit by something he did not know how to bear.
Elyndra's heartbeat quickened. She had seen fear. She had seen rage. What she saw now was neither. It was closer to sorrow refusing to show itself.
"You… were human once."
She didn't mean it as a question.
For a moment, the world did not breathe.
And then — for the first time since she had met him — Chaos turned.
Not fully. Not with anger. Just enough that she could see the hollow shadow of his eyes, and the faintest, broken glimmer of something that did not belong in a being so feared.
Pain.
Not physical pain — something far deeper. The kind of pain that does not heal, because it does not end.
Elyndra felt her throat tighten. She didn't want to pity him. She didn't want to feel anything for the one the world called destruction in a body. But she could not stop the ache rising in her chest.
"You loved someone once," she whispered. "Didn't you?"
The silence that followed was worse than any scream.
And then… he spoke.
Not like a god. Not like a monster. Not like the walking calamity the world believed him to be.
But like a broken human voice, dragged through centuries of ash.
"...I… didn't… want this…"
The words were torn, raw, as if they had not been used in lifetimes. As if every syllable was something he had forgotten how to form — or had been forbidden to speak.
Elyndra flinched, not from fear… but from the weight carried in those five words.
He hadn't said I didn't want to destroy
He hadn't said I didn't want to kill
He had said:
I didn't want this.
Not the power.
Not the fear.
Not the identity the world carved into him.
He hadn't chosen to become Chaos.
Something else — someone else — had forced it.
Elyndra felt something shift in her mind. Like a door she never knew existed had cracked open — and behind it was not darkness, but a boy sitting alone in it.
She didn't see the full memory. She saw fragments — like reflections broken across a shattered mirror.
A child, surrounded by people who looked at him not with love, but with expectation.
A ritual.
A circle of elders.
A voice saying "He is the key — the vessel. He was born for this."
A hand forcing his head down.
A scream, not of rage — but of betrayal.
Light — too bright, too cruel, the kind that destroys instead of saving.
A transformation that wasn't divine, wasn't voluntary… just inevitable.
A life stolen, then replaced with a title:
Chaos.
The one they blamed.
The one they feared.
The one they created.
Elyndra gasped and stumbled back. She didn't know if she had truly seen it — or if she had simply felt it through the hollowness inside him. But it didn't matter.
She understood.
The world hadn't been cursed by him.
The world had cursed him first.
Chaos looked at her. Not with anger. Not with threat. But with the silent ache of someone who no longer remembered the shape of hope.
The wind moved around them. The grass bent. But none of it mattered.
Because the only thing in the world that felt real… was the name she had never been meant to know.
It rested on her tongue like a truth buried under centuries of lies. It felt wrong to speak it — not because it was forbidden, but because it was sacred.
She swallowed, her voice shaking.
"Your name…" she whispered. "Before they took everything from you…"
His eyes widened, just barely — not with fear, but with the painful recognition of a wound reopening.
"You weren't Chaos then."
Everything inside her trembled.
"You were…"
The truth did not roar.
It did not explode.
It simply fell into the air like a candle flame struggling to live in darkness.
"...Mael."
The name hovered there — fragile, human, full of light that should never have been extinguished.
He did not answer.
He did not deny it.
He simply closed his eyes — and in that silence, Elyndra understood:
The greatest tragedy was not that the world feared him.
The greatest tragedy was that the world had forgotten he ever had a name.
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