The Primordial Codex: Book 1
Caelan Voralis woke with a start, his skull feeling like it had been split by a smith's hammer. Phantom pain raced along his spine, evoking fragments of memories tainted with sickness and moral decay. His throat constricted, stealing his breath until, as suddenly as it appeared, the sensation dissipated, leaving behind a faint echo of something terribly wrong.
He opened his eyes to a world of red—the color of fresh blood pooling beneath him. The chamber reeked of iron and death, and around him lay the corpses of what appeared to be servants and guards. Their bodies were twisted in unnatural positions, faces frozen in masks of terror. The marble floor was slick with crimson, reflecting the dying light of overturned candelabras. Smoke hung thick in the air, carrying the scent of burnt flesh and something else... something acrid and wrong.
Not my memory, Caelan thought with strange detachment. But it is my reality.
The dissonance was jarring. He remembered dying—remembered the sterile walls of a hospital, the beeping of machines, the final, rattling breath of a body riddled with cancer. He remembered saying goodbye to a sister who wasn't there, to a life that had already withered. But this... this was different. This body was young, fragile, but not yet finished. It felt like a cage of rotting silk, weak but not broken.
A voice cut through his fog, feminine and urgent. "Your Highness! We must move—now! The assassins may return."
Caelan turned his head. A young woman in black palace livery with gold trim stood over him, silver-rimmed spectacles perched on her nose. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe bun, but several strands had escaped, plastered to her forehead with sweat and blood. Her dark eyes held a mixture of relief and fierce determination. She clutched a slender blade coated in blood that was not her own, and her breathing came in controlled, practiced measures.
"Who..." Caelan's voice cracked. The words felt strange in his throat, thick with disuse and the coppery tang of blood. "Who are you?"
Her expression flickered with pain, as if his question had struck her physically. "I am Seraphine, your sworn protector. And we have no time for this, Prince Caelan. The Kuron family has made its move. Your father is dead, and they mean to end the Voralis bloodline tonight."
The name felt foreign in his mind, like a word in a language he had studied but never spoken. Prince Caelan Voralis. Yet somehow, he understood. He had awoken in a new world, inside a body not his own—a dying prince's body that had apparently been poisoned for years, its vitality drained by slow treachery.
Divine Fodder, his mind supplied unhelpfully, the term emerging from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Seraphine's hand gripped his arm with surprising strength, pulling him to his feet. The world tilted dangerously, his new body's weakness making itself known. Every muscle screamed in protest, every joint felt filled with grinding glass. His constitution was that of a child wasting away from consumption—skin stretched over brittle bones, heart laboring against invisible weights.
But there was something else. Deeper than the weakness, beneath the lethargy and pain, something stirred. A presence ancient and amused, watching his struggles with the patience of eternity.
As Seraphine led him through a concealed door behind a tapestry—its once-vibrant threads now stained with splattered gore—Caelan's hands began to tremble. Not from fear, but from sensation. Aether. The word came to him instinctively. The fundamental energy of existence, invisible to most, but suddenly as clear to him as the blood on his hands.
He could feel it. Flowing through the walls, pooling in the corpses, crackling in the air like static before a storm. And more importantly, he could feel it in him. A trickle, barely a whisper, but where it touched his ravaged flesh, something responded.
The secret passage was narrow and dark, the smell of dust and old stone replacing the reek of death. Seraphine moved with practiced efficiency, her blade leading the way through the blackness. She occasionally glanced back at him, and in the dim light, Caelan saw the worry creasing her brow.
"Your Highness, can you run?"
Could he? His legs felt like water-soaked reeds, but the trickle of Aether was growing stronger with each breath. It filled his lungs when he inhaled, spread through his veins when his heart beat. The weakness was still there, but it was... compartmentalized. As if some part of him had stepped aside from it.
"I can manage," he rasped, and was surprised to find it true.
They descended spiral stairs carved into the living rock beneath the palace. The sounds of slaughter filtered down from above—the clash of steel, the screams of the dying, the harsh barks of commands. The Voralis family was being purged. Seraphine's jaw tightened with each noise, but she never slowed.
"We'll exit through the old smuggler's tunnel in the cliff face," she whispered. "From there, we can reach the Hollow District. The Kuron dogs won't look for you among the war refugees."
Caelan's mind raced, filing away information even as his senses screamed warnings. The Hollow District. War refugees. The Kuron family. Voralis bloodline. Each piece slotted into a growing understanding of this new world.
But the presence within him was growing impatient. It scratched at the walls of his soul, demanding attention. When Seraphine paused at a junction to listen for pursuit, Caelan closed his eyes and looked inward.
The darkness behind his eyelids was not empty. It was a void of infinite depth, and floating within it was a massive tome. Its cover was blacker than the space around it, absorbing light, absorbing thought. When he focused on it, ancient hieroglyphs formed on its surface, then rearranged themselves into words he could understand:
PRIMORDIAL CODEX
The words resonated through his being with the weight of cosmic law. This was not a metaphor. This was not hallucination. This was real, as real as the blood on his borrowed hands.
The Codex flipped open with a sound like grinding galaxies. On the first page, he saw himself. Not as he was—weak, dying, a child prince of a ruined house—but as he could be. The image showed a man with silver hair and eyes of molten gold, his features sharp with power and cruelty and something undefinable. The portrait breathed, its chest rising and falling in time with his own.
Then the pages turned, moving independently, until they settled on a page marked with his current form:
PRIMORDIAL CODEX
Name: Caelan Voralis
Age: 11/11
Strength: 0.2
Agility: 0.2
Constitution: 3.5
Spirit: 1.5
Class: None
Title: Plane Walker
Skill: (None)
Passive: Decipher Language (Complete), Frozen Soul (Level 2)
Records:
- Scion of Dawn - Level 0 [0/5]
- Scion of Dusk - Level 0 [0/5]
- Orochi's Spiral - Level 0 [0/1000]
- Soul Harvester - Level 0 [0/1000]
Soul Point: 0.0000
Remark: Divine Fodder
Caelan's breath caught. Divine Fodder. The term from earlier. According to the Codex's assessment, he had less than a year to live in this frail, dying body. The numbers were damning—normal humans had stats averaging around 10. He was less than half that in most areas, his Constitution artificially inflated by whatever poison had been used to slowly kill the original Caelan.
But more importantly, the Codex contained records. Bloodlines of impossible power that could coexist within him without the need for traditional Pathways. Scion of Dawn and Dusk—opposite aspects that should annihilate each other. Orochi's Spiral of time and eternity. Soul Harvester that gave him dominion over the dead themselves.
And beneath it all, the Soul Point counter. Currently empty.
Seraphine's hand on his shoulder snapped him back to reality. "Your Highness, we must keep moving. I hear footsteps above."
Caelan opened his eyes to the dark passage, but the Codex remained, hovering in the corner of his vision like a persistent afterimage. He could see Seraphine's anxious expression, but he could also see her stats—floating beside her in ghostly text:
Name: Seraphine
Class: Blade-Sworn Protector
State: Mortal (Peak)
Strength: 19.7
Agility: 22.3
Constitution: 17.1
Spirit: 8.4
She was a warrior at the peak of Mortal State, every stat nearly double a normal human's. And she was his.
"Lead on," Caelan said, and this time his voice carried an edge that made her eyes widen slightly. The weakness was still there, but it was being pushed back by something else. Something cold and ancient and hungry.
As they moved through the darkness, the Codex whispered promises of power in his mind. The souls of the dead above, waiting to be harvested. The bloodlines sleeping within him, ready to be awakened. The Paths of Change that he could walk without limitation.
The passage sloped downward, the air growing damp and cold. Behind them, the sounds of the purge continued—the end of House Voralis. Ahead, the unknown.
But Caelan Voralis, who had died once and would never die again, smiled in the darkness. The universe had made him prey, had stamped him Divine Fodder.
Let them come. Let them all come....