"Not everything that is forgotten is dead. And not everything that has a face… is human."
Before there were heroes. Before swords, schools, and secret orders, there were masks.
No one knows who forged the first one. Some say it fell from the sky, a fragment of the face of a mad god. Others whisper that it was born from a crime so ancient that the Earth itself tried to hide it. Whatever the truth, one thing is certain: The mask chose someone. And when it was put on, the world changed.
Inside the Velum, a dimension that lives parallel to the human world, rises Nakarith, the forgotten city, where every building seems to have been shaped by sick dreams and every shadow murmurs names that should not be remembered.
The streets are covered by ashes of memory. The towers, crooked and endless, were built with fragments of ancient faces. And the skies? They do not exist. There is only a thick, purple, eternal mist, as if the world there breathed suffering.
There, every mask that was born awaits a face. Each carries a dormant weapon, shaped not by metal, but by repressed emotions, lost memories, denied sins. And when worn… they open portals between worlds.
Far from there, the human world lives, ignores, forgets. Modern cities grow. Students go to school. Adults live between routines and cold coffees. But on certain nights, when silence weighs and dreams become too real, the Velum tunes itself. And sometimes… it breaks.
Masks appear in abandoned places, hanging from trees where there were never any branches, buried in sidewalks without cracks. Those who find them, by chance or fate, feel the call, a whisper without a mouth, a promise without language.
"Use me... and I will turn your fear into a blade. Your emptiness into strength. Your face... into a lie."
On the border between two worlds, between the visible and the veiled, he is on his knees.
A boy.
His hair wet from the black rain of Nakarith.
Surrounded by fragments of other masks that have failed, broken like glass bones.
In his eyes, there is no courage. No hope.
Only will.
The mask in front of him hovers in the air, cracked, alive, vibrating with his soul. It doesn't just wait for him... it calls him. Its voice pierces flesh and thought.
"Accept me... and you will be strong enough to never fall again."
The boy reaches out his hand. It trembles. He knows what he is doing. Or maybe not. But he does it. And the moment he puts on the mask, the human world trembles.
That same night, in distant schools and ordinary homes, mirrors crack. Doors creak. And children cry from nightmares they never had.
"Your name was Arata Renjiro. Now... you are just another shadow between two worlds."
With that choice made, the story you are about to read begins, Vultus.
Enjoy.