Author note : when you start reading if you see any fault or anything you don't understand comment about it I will try to fix that 🥹 I am new author that's why I need more and more reviews and practice
The bells rang out across Hallowshade, cutting through the fog with a sound that made people stop mid-step. Deep. Heavy. The kind of ringing that meant something had changed, or was about to. They only rang on nights like this.
Azerath stood on the balcony, wind tugging at his coat and tangling his dark hair. The moon hung overhead—blue, impossibly bright. It didn't feel right. Like it was watching him specifically.
Down below, the city's lanterns flickered in unison, pulsing with that same eerie blue glow.
He'd heard the whispers all week. Everyone had.
"When the moon turns blue, the Depth remembers its debts."
Most people were terrified. Azerath just… wasn't. Maybe it was his father's influence—that unnerving calm the old man had, even when things went sideways. Azerath had inherited that, for better or worse.
Something cracked behind him.
He turned.
The silver prism on his desk—the one his father had brought home last month, the weak Marrow Essence he'd said was "harmless, just for show"—was glowing.
Pulsing.
Like a heartbeat.
The glass fractured with a sharp crack, and shadows spilled out, black and liquid, curling toward him. They wrapped around his arm, almost… gently. Like they recognized him.
But that didn't make sense. He'd never consumed an essence. Only people who'd taken too many would trigger a resonance like this.
Unless the memory wasn't his to begin with.
His stomach tightened.
He walked into the main hall.
Nothing.
No servants bustling around. No footsteps upstairs. Not even the usual groan of the old floorboards settling.
Just silence. The kind that meant something was gone.
His father's sword lay near the stairs. His mother's pendant was shattered by the dining room door. His little sister's sketchbook, torn apart, pages scattered across the marble like broken wings.
No bodies. No blood. No signs of a fight.
Just… absence. Like someone had carefully erased them from the world.
He knelt by the wall where someone—maybe his father—had scratched a message into the plaster with shaking hands.
"Azerath… run."
His chest went cold. Not panic. Just a slow, sinking cold, like water filling his lungs.
The shattered essence fragments lifted off the floor, drawn to him. Then they slammed into his chest all at once.
Pain tore through him.
His vision exploded with foreign memories—voices in a language he'd never heard, cities that shouldn't exist, bridges built from shadow and regret, kingdoms stacked seven layers deep beneath the world, and at the bottom of it all, a faceless king sitting on a throne of silence.
He felt himself drowning in someone else's thoughts.
"Submit," the presence hissed.
"No."
His voice came out quiet, but hard.
He pushed back. Crushed the invading will. Swallowed it whole. Something inside him shifted, burned. When he opened his eyes, they felt different. Wrong.
He caught his reflection in a broken mirror. Each eye now had two pupils.
The kind of thing that shouldn't be possible. The kind of thing that marked you as something other than human.
The front gates slammed open.
Azerath stood slowly, brushed the dust off his coat, and walked toward the entrance.
A man stepped through the fog. Tall. Noble. Wearing a black plague doctor's mask and a long leather coat. Ten riflemen fanned out behind him.
Azerath didn't react.
"Azerath Vale Noxborne," the man said, voice polite, almost bored, "by decree of the Noble Assembly, you're accused of attempting to become a Marrow Lord. Your family resisted. They paid for it."
Azerath let the silence hang for a beat.
Then he said, quietly, "You should've brought more men."
The rifles fired.
The world slowed.
The Depth memories sharpened everything—time stretched, gravity bent. Azerath slipped between the bullets like smoke. By the time the echoes faded, the riflemen were already falling.
The masked noble stumbled back.
Azerath was already behind him.
The man dropped to one knee, cracks spreading across his mask like a spiderweb.
"What… are you?" he whispered.
"Not sure yet," Azerath said. "But I will be."
He stepped past him and kept walking.
Behind him, the manor sat silent, windows glowing faintly with the last remnants of warmth his family had left behind. He didn't look back. The grief sat heavy in his chest, pressing against his ribs, but he carried it the way his father had taught him—quietly, without flinching.
Overhead, the Blue Moon brightened.
Something impossible stretched across the sky. A bridge made of shadow and starlight, unfurling above the clouds like a path written in a forgotten language.
He felt it pull at him.
A voice—distant, ancient, almost kind—whispered in his ear:
"Child of Sin… take your first step."
The streets were empty. The lamps flickered like dying candles. Azerath walked toward the bridge, each footstep echoing in the silence.
The Empire had hunted him.
The Depth had crowned him.
And Azerath Vale Noxborne didn't hesitate.
He stepped forward.