Opening the book, the first thing Xenon saw was the header written in faded ink:
"history, Theories and Categories of Shedding."
Below it, the words rippled faintly, as if the page itself remembered what it once described.
He leaned closer.
> "The first Shedded came into existence when Earth faced a great nightmare.
It was during the last astral alignment of the First Age."
It began with the collapse of the heavens.
A rogue star, nameless and wandering, was drawn into the dying pull of the sun. For eons, it had drifted untouched, a silent ember adrift in the black sea. But as it fell toward the swollen heart of the dying star, its core began to hum — not with heat, but with something older. Something that did not belong to creation.
When the two suns collided, light died.
What followed was not an explosion of fire but a swallowing of it — a reverse flame that burned with emptiness. Space tore open like paper, its unseen fabric curling inward. From the wound came the first distortion — a rent in existence that bled absence instead of energy.
Earth, caught within its shadow, screamed.
Seventy percent of all living things perished in the first seven minutes. Seas boiled to glass. Mountains wept molten tears. Cities — what few existed — were reduced to lines of ash too faint to mark maps. Humanity, what was left of it, survived not through strength, but through adaptation born of terror.
The survivors spoke of a sky that hungered. Of nights that breathed. Of shadows that grew teeth.
And when the storm of silence finally passed,
The dawn of the new sun,
Athe world was... different.
---
At first, they believed it was radiation — a sickness from the void. But this sickness did not rot flesh. It unmade meaning. Names forgotten. Memories hollowed out. The people who stood in its path forgot themselves until they were only shapes pretending to exist.
Then came the first of the Shedded.
No one knew what "shedding" meant in those days. It was discovered by accident — a terrified child clutching his dying mother in a crater of pale dust. He screamed until the air split around him, and something fell from his chest like sand .
It was fragments of his core — the essence every living being unknowingly carried. But instead of the remnants dispersing into death, it hardened into a new form inside him.
His eyes turned sharp as blades.
That child was neither alive nor dead. He had shed — cast off the weight of mortality and taken a speck of the void inside him.
They say when he breathed again, the air died for miles.
---
As humanity rebuilt itself, the phenomenon repeated.
Some shed through rage, others through despair, some through sheer will to live.
And though each case differed, the outcome remained: their essence detached from flesh, revealing a fragment of something ancient.
The scholars of the Second Age called this Essence Divergence.
In truth, it was something far worse.
Those who shed found that their bodies were no longer prisons — but cages barely containing what had escaped. Their souls had been rewritten by the very silence that once tried to erase them. And in that rewriting, they gained power. Not magic as the world knew it, but a contamination of existence itself — a power that bent reality by erasing what was real.
One could vanish sound.
Another unmade light.
A third erased pain, and with it, empathy.
The strongest Shedded were called Voidhollows — living paradoxes that consumed meaning wherever they walked. Their mere presence caused words to lose definitions, and even the wind forgot how to move.
In the oldest records, a warning followed every mention of them:
> "Beware the ones who shed too deep, for their essence no longer belongs to them. The void remembers its own."
---
The book grew darker as Xenon read on. The script seemed to change ink midway, as though written by trembling hands:
> "Shedding is not evolution.
It is debt — payment extracted by the unseen forces that first touched this world."
Historians of that age believed the alignment had torn more than the sky — it had linked Earth to something beyond comprehension. They called it the Chasm Realm, a dimension of stillness that predated existence. Every time a mortal "shed," a small wound reopened between the two realms, and through it, something looked back.
Whole civilizations fell trying to harness that power.
Nations of Shedded rose and devoured themselves in silence.
Their cities vanished without fire or war — simply erased, as if redrawn by an absent artist.
Eventually, the phenomenon was classified. Four primary categories of shedding were identified:
1. Surface Shedding – The weakest form, where only fragments of essence awaken. Users could manipulate minor elements or instincts.
2. Core Shedding – A full separation of the soul's core, resulting in great power and the first contact with the void.
3. Essence Shedding – When the self begins to dissolve, merging consciousness with emptiness. Few survived this.
4. True Shedding – The final stage, irreversible. Those who reached it were said to loose all form of humanity, becoming something else entirely,
some addresses it as true perfection,
Others call it the transcendence.
There where legends of a fifth stage ,
It went bybl no classification but those who reached it were said to vanish from the very concept of life itself perhaps taken by the void,or maybe became laws themselves,
---
The last page was nearly unreadable, ink smeared as if by heat.
Only one paragraph remained legible:
> "And among the few who survived the
fifth Shedding, one bore no color, no sound, and no trace of the world's energy. His essence registered as a vacuum. He was said to be the first to embody nothing, the first vessel of the end."
A faint shiver crept down Xenon's spine as he ran his finger over those words.
They pulsed faintly, like veins of light beneath skin — or perhaps like something deep within him was recognizing them.
He closed the book slowly.
The air around him seemed quieter than before, as if the room itself feared to make a sound.