The 6th century…
The world was no longer alive in the way it was meant to be.
It did not feel like history anymore, but like a punishment that never ended.
The sky had turned into a wound of black clouds that did not move and did not break.
They simply existed above everything, like a sealed ceiling of silence.
The sun had not reached the ground in generations,
Not because it was weak,
But because something above reality had denied it permission to return.
The land below was not merely dark; it was corrupted.
Everything had begun to decay in meaning, where places no longer felt stable and time no longer felt reliable.
Even existence itself seemed unsafe, as if reality was slowly breaking its own rules.
Where life once should have been,
There was only an uneasy silence,
And where truth once existed,
There was only distortion.
The world no longer felt like a creation,
But like something abandoned in the middle of collapse.
And at the center of this corruption, there was only one presence.
A name that did not bring fear of death, but fear of erasure itself:
J.A.B.A.R.
He was a dark sorcerer whose existence did not belong to nature, time, or logic, but to something far worse—something that consumed meaning before it could exist.
Wherever he went, the fear of death would awaken in people's hearts instantly.
Even before his presence was fully revealed, terror would spread through the air, as if their souls already understood what was coming.
He looked at humans as if they were nothing more than insects—small, meaningless beings moving without awareness of how easily they could be erased.
To him, they were not lives, they were resources.
Wherever he went,
He studied them silently,
Observing their souls,
Their fear,
Their breaking point,
And their final moments, absorbing their essence to strengthen his own dark power.
With every soul he witnessed,
His corrupted energy grew deeper, darker, and more unnatural.
He appeared to be around 45 years of age, but age meant nothing on him.
Long black hair flowed past his shoulders—
Loose, wild, like storm clouds that had never been tamed.
His beard was dark as coal, thick and long, falling across his chest beneath a jaw that had never softened.
He wore a black, sleeveless robe, torn at the edges like something that had survived too many deaths to care about appearance anymore.
His arms were bare and muscular, with dark cloth wrapped around his forearms—
Not for protection,
But like a fighter who had already decided he would not need it.
In his right hand,
He held a wand made of black iron with jagged edges, twisted at the top like broken bone.
At its tip sat a deep red orb, glowing and pulsing slowly like the heartbeat of something trapped inside it for a very long time.
His eyes were terrifying.
The whites of them were not white; they were the white of something completely drained—
Pale, and bleached of every warmth.
Where pupils should have been, there was only dark red—
The red of something burning from a place too far inside to ever reach.
When those eyes moved,
It did not feel like being looked at; it felt like being read.
Every fear, every memory, and every small decision that had led you to this moment was already known and filed away.
Around his neck hung a purple locket.
It did not possess the glow of jewelry, but the glow of something alive, pulsing with its own rhythm and casting faint purple light across his collar and the ground beneath his feet.
It pulsed like it was breathing, like something inside it was pressing against the walls, trying to get out.
No villager could look at it directly for long—not because it blinded them,
But because something about it made the mind want to look away,
As if the eyes understood before the person did that some things are not meant to be seen.
Jabar did not touch it or look at it, as if he had long ago forgotten it was there,
Or perhaps he simply did not need to be reminded of what it held.
Deep inside a forgotten desert basin,
Where the endless sand met the edge of an ancient forest,
A small village still existed.
It wasn't because the village was heavily guarded or naturally safe;
It had survived simply because it had not yet been noticed.
Or, more accurately, it had not yet been judged.
Life here was deceptively simple, exuding a peace that felt far too fragile for the corrupted world surrounding it.
Children ran freely through the narrow sand paths between the clay huts,
Kicking up soft dust that made the earth look as though it were breathing in slow motion.
"I told you! I'm the fastest in the whole village!"
Ali shouted, his voice full of boyish pride.
Yusuf rolled his eyes, laughing.
"Fast?
are you kidding?
You tripped yesterday in front of everyone!".
Hashim quickly chimed in, eager to outdo them both.
"Both of you are nothing!
"I can run from the well to the mosque in one breath!".
Omar, who was naturally more cautious, shrank back slightly.
"Stop shouting…
"my father says loud voices attract bad luck".
Ali scoffed, waving his hand.
"Your father believes too many stories!".
"Yeah! Ghost stories!"
Yusuf added.
But Omar pointed upward, his voice dropping
"Then explain why the sky looks like that today".
Before anyone could answer, Zayd frowned, looking down at his feet.
"Guys… did you feel that?".
When Ali asked what he meant, Zayd whispered,
"Like the ground…is listening to us".
Hashim told him to stop acting strange,
But Farid suddenly stepped closer, his voice trembling.
"I saw something near the broken well last night".
When Yusuf demanded to know what it was,
Farid swallowed hard.
"A shadow… but it didn't belong to anything".
A brief, half-second of silence fell over the boys before they erupted into forced, nervous laughter.
Ali accused him of lying,
But Farid desperately swore by Allah that it was the truth.
Near the clay houses, the adults were moving through their morning routines,
Completely unaware that this would be their last one.
Amina called out, telling the children to stop talking about nonsense and come help carry water.
Fatima scolded Yusuf to stay away from the old ruins,
While Zainab threatened Hashim that she would tell his father if he didn't listen.
But beneath the mundane chores, an eerie wrongness was settling over the adults as well. Khalid,
The blacksmith, stared at his forge in frustration.
"Strange… my fire keeps dying today,"
he muttered.
Salman, the merchant, looked around uneasily.
"Even the desert wind feels wrong…
like it forgot how to move".
Imran, the hunter, returned empty-handed, noting quietly,
"No animal tracks outside the village…
not even birds".
Near the steps of the local mosque,
The village elders sat together as they always did,
As if their collective presence could somehow hold the fraying world in place.
Sheikh Harun,
The village leader,
Looked at the others with a heavy expression.
"Do you feel it too…?The waiting?"
he asked softly.
Elder Rashid nodded slowly.
"Yes…like something is counting us".
Elder Musa stared out at the still air.
" I have lived 70 years… but today feels like the first day of death".
Sheikh Harun shook his head, his eyes filled with a quiet,
terrifying realization.
"No… not death".
He paused, the word hanging heavy in
the air.
"Judgment".
"The observation became active…".
Above them, beyond the broken sky, something began to respond.
It wasn't a natural weather event or a gathering storm;
It was as if a conscious system had begun deciding what would be allowed to remain.
The air above the village darkened into an unnatural eclipse that formed without logic or reason—
Not fully night, and not fully day.
The clouds didn't drift;
They aligned themselves,
Opening all at once like thousands of invisible eyes.
A faint but suffocating pressure fell over the village—
Not the heavy,
Physical weight of a storm,
But the psychological weight of being noticed.
Ali looked up,
His voice trembling.
"Why… why does the sky feel like it's looking down?".
Yusuf shuddered.
"Stop saying that… it sounds cursed".
But Zayd whispered,
Zayd "It is looking".
Amina screamed for everyone to get inside their houses immediately.
Khalid urged them to lock the doors, sensing the deep wrongness in the air, while Salman stood bewildered,
Saying his customers had just left mid-sentence, walking away as if in a trance.
Then, reality itself began to stutter.
A water pot fell from someone's hands, but it didn't break.
It simply froze halfway to the ground.
Even the dust stopped reacting to gravity for a moment before everything resumed, as if nothing had happened.
Farid stammered that it wasn't normal, and Omar whispered that it was like reality was forgetting how to behave.
Shadows began detaching from their owners.
Some villagers saw their shadows facing the wrong direction, while others appeared older than the people casting them.
Fatima panicked, crying out that her shadow wasn't copying her anymore.
Imran pointed out in horror that his shadow was standing behind the well while he was standing elsewhere.
Then Hashim screamed,
"MINE IS SMILING…".
A dead silence followed before Ali whispered,
"Shadows don't smile".
Nearby, a goat tied to a hut didn't run or die;
It simply lost its definition,
As if it had never been fully rendered into reality,
Leaving only the rope behind.
Khalid shouted, asking where the goat went,
And Amina insisted it had just been there.
But Elder Rashid stared blankly, murmuring,
Elder Rashid: "No… it was never there".
Yusuf cried, telling his mother he didn't like the village anymore, and Amina pulled him behind her defensively.
Salman muttered that this wasn't a desert danger,
but something entirely different.
Sheikh Harun looked up with a profound sense of dread.
"It has started," he said.
When Zayd asked what had started, the old man replied,
"The counting".
The clouds finally split—
Not physically,
But like a veil being pulled apart to reveal countless faint,
Glowing points behind it.
They weren't stars or light;
They were something observing them.
"We are being…measured,"
Ali realized.
"Like numbers,"
Farid added.
The clay walls of the huts subtly bent inward.
Sound itself began to arrive late, and words felt delayed and incomplete.
Fatima cried out, asking why she couldn't hear herself properly, and Imran realized that something was interfering with sound itself.
The detached shadows stopped acting individually and merged into unified,
Silent groups near the walls and open spaces, simply watching.
Hashim screamed that they were all looking at them now.
A silence so deep fell over the village that even fear stopped reacting.
A new pressure spread across the area—
Not killing,
Not destroying,
But deciding.
Some people felt lighter,
Some heavier,
And some felt as though they were fading from notice entirely.
Sheikh Harun spoke softly,
"It is not here to kill…
It is here to choose who is real".
Ali asked, trembling,
"Am I real…?"
And Yusuf cried that he didn't feel real anymore.
Amina ordered them to stay quiet and stay together.
Above the village, the sky pulsed once.
THUMP…
Like a massive heartbeat.
And then, everything froze.
Not in fear, but in waiting.
It was as if existence itself was waiting for permission to continue.
The sky above the village was no longer natural.
It wasn't bright, and it wasn't dark;
It was trapped in a horrifying state between existence and absence,
As if reality itself had stopped breathing .
The wind had completely disappeared,
The birds had fled,
And even the insects had forgotten how to make sound .
A singular, crushing realization settled over the entire village:
They were being observed by something that did not forgive existence.
Amina pulled Ali tightly to her chest,
Her hands shaking uncontrollably.
"Ali…don't look up at the sky…Something is wrong…very wrong,"she pleaded.
Ali looked back with a terrifyingly blank expression.
"Ammi…Iam not even thinking properly anymore,"
He murmured.
"It feels like my thoughts are being watched before I think them…".
Nearby, Fatima ordered Yusuf to stay close and not move. Yusuf trembled, asking,
"Ammi…
why is everyone silent even when they are speaking?".
He felt a suffocating dread,
noting that it felt like their voices simply were not reaching outside.
The mental suppression began to tear at the adults.
Salman suddenly dropped his bag,
his coins scattering across the dirt, but he didn't even react .
"I… I was going somewhere,"
he whispered, staring at his empty hands.
"Where was I going?"
He tried to grasp the thought,
but the memory completely refused to stay in his mind .
Khalid gripped his axe tightly,
his knuckles white and his hands trembling with sheer rage.
"If something is here…
I will break it!
I don't fear unseen things!"
he declared.
His son, Farid, looked up at him with tearful eyes.
"Baba…
maybe it's not something you can hit…
Maybe it's something that hits you before you swing…".
Imran, the veteran hunter,
scanned the sky desperately, but his lifelong instincts utterly failed him .
Imran : "I have tracked living things by breath…
Imran : But this… This has no breath to track…".
When Hashim asked how they could possibly survive it,
Imran offered a chilling,
silent pause before replying,
"We might already not be surviving" .
Sheikh Harun stepped forward slowly, his voice carrying the weight of authority but breaking at the edges .
"! This is not a natural evListen to me carefully! ent!
This is something beyond nature itself!" .
Confusion and panic erupted.
One villager complained of a strange pressure in his mind,
While Elder Rashid admitted that in all his long years of seeing war and death,
He had never seen something that arrives without moving .
Yusuf cried out to his mother that his mind was suddenly empty.
Khalid refused to yield to an invisible enemy, vowing to trust only in weapons and truth .
But Sheikh Harun suddenly screamed,
His voice raw with terror:
"KNEEL!!
EVERYONE KNEEL!!
Before you are erased without even being remembered!!".
The villagers hesitated, protesting, but deep down, a sickening feeling told them that the old man was right .
Then, the sky subtly distorted.
It wasn't visually obvious,
But the mental strain became unbearable.
Everyone instantly paused;
Even their breathing felt controlled.
A voice entered everything.
It didn't travel through their ears or the air;
It vibrated through existence itself,
Bending reality under its immense weight.
"So many fragments…"
Jabar's voice resonated.
"So many thoughts pretending to be life…".
The villagers screamed in sheer panic, clutching their heads, realizing the voice was echoing directly inside their skulls like a physical judgment .
Sheikh Harun collapsed to his knees, completely broken.
"I accept… whatever you are…
Just don't erase us without meaning…"
He begged.
A long silence stretched across the frozen village.
And then came absolute finality.
"You are already part of the result…"
Jabar answered smoothly.
"Fear is only your confirmation…".
The air had stopped, and although the people were moving, the world itself felt completely frozen.
In the very center stood Jabar.
He remained at the village entrance exactly as he always stood—
as if the road had always been leading to him and the village had simply taken this long to arrive.
He was tall and broad, with long black hair loose across his shoulders and a dark beard falling across his chest.
He wore a black, sleeveless robe torn at the edges, and in his right hand, he held his twisted black iron wand.
The red orb at its tip pulsed slowly, casting a dark light,
while the purple locket at his chest glowed steady and alive,
like a second heartbeat.
Suddenly, Sheikh Harun fell down in complete devotion.
"My lord, please take me into your refuge… I will serve you with all my being,"
the old man begged, declaring Jabar the true ruler of the world.
Panic rippled through the villagers.
Whispers broke out, accusing their leader of going mad and his mind failing with age.
Ali felt a mix of fear and anger,
Telling his mother that this was wrong and that this presence could not be God.
Yusuf trembled, vowing not to bow to anyone,
While their mothers desperately tried to pull them back and keep them safe.
Hashim was confused and angry, demanding to know why they weren't fighting,
While Zayd realized this presence was entirely inhuman.
Refusing to submit, the main villagers started running in every direction,
Clay dust rising around their feet as if the earth itself was trying to help them escape.
:"How long will you run…?"
Jabar asked, his voice calm yet absolutely terrifying.
"Run, run, wherever you go, your death will take you to me."
"It is a matter of great regret that there is only one person in the entire village who knows the true God."
only one person recognized the true God".
He looked down at the kneeling elder.
"I want to reward you…".
Sheikh Harun eagerly awaited his reward, promising to obey his new lord.
Amina and Fatima watched in shock, realizing the leader was completely giving himself away.
Jabar raised his hand.
Darkness gathered around his palm,
compressing and tightening until it formed a small,
dark pill of concentrated corruption with shadow energy crackling around it.
Zayd realized instantly that this was not normal magic.
"Consume it,"
Jabar commanded.
The villagers stared in absolute shock as Sheikh Harun took the pill without hesitation and without a single glance back at the people he had led for thirty years.
He ate it.
For a moment, there was silence.
Then—
CRACK
His body started shaking violently.
His spine bent backward with the sickening sound of something that was never meant to bend that way.
Harun let out a bloodcurdling scream.
Yusuf began to cry in terror, and Fatima ordered him to close his eyes and not look.
Harun's skin darkened to a deep, unnatural green, and overlapping,
chambered scales pushed through from beneath.
The whites of his eyes went completely black—erased into nothingness—while his lenses glowed a piercing red.
His jaw unhinged,
stretching impossibly wide as rows of curved, sharp teeth pushed through his gums like something that had been waiting its entire life to come out.
His legs merged and his spine elongated as his human shape collapsed inward, rebuilding itself into a form that wore his face like a mask,
leaving nothing of what was underneath.
What stood in the village center was no longer Sheikh Harun.
It was an enormous Viper Wraith,
chambered in black and green,
hissing with a voice that used to read prayers at dawn.
"He… he's not human anymore,"
Hashim whispered in sheer shock.
Total panic erupted as people ran for their lives.
Amina screamed for Ali to run, while Fatima gripped Yusuf's hand tightly.
The Viper Wraith moved. With a single claw strike, it cut someone's head off.
It melted another villager with venom that burned from the outside in, tearing through bodies like cloth.
The village became a nightmare of sounds that had no right to exist.
Omar screamed that it was killing everyone, and Zayd realized in horror that the monster wouldn't stop.
Amidst the chaos and screaming,
Ali, Yusuf, and their mothers ran, disappearing into the desert paths toward the forest,
with
Ali warning his mother not to look back.
Through the screams of the fleeing crowd,
one voice cut through and stopped Khalid in his tracks.
"BABA NO!!!"
Farid was crying in the distance.
Khalid stopped. Salman stood right beside him.
"There's no point in running now,"
Tightening his grip on his axe.
Salman nodded. "Either we fight here... or we die here".
Khalid's speed power flared to life.
He moved like lightning, aiming his heavy iron axe straight for the Viper Wraith's neck.
CLANG!
The impact was deafening,
but it felt like striking a solid mass of darkness, not flesh.
Khalid's arms violently shuddered from the recoil.
"How... is this possible...?!"
Salman flanked the monster,
his two blades a blur of continuous strikes.
SLASH! SLASH!
Sparks rained down, but the creature didn't even flinch.
"It's not even bleeding!"
Salman yelled.
The Viper Wraith twisted. It moved so fast it practically vanished.
In the next fraction of a second, it was right in front of Salman.
"KHALID—!"
That was all Salman managed to say.
The monster's jagged claw drove straight through his stomach.
Time seemed to freeze. Salman's weapons slipped from his hands,
hitting the dirt with a heavy,
hollow thud that echoed in the silent village.
"...Khalid..."
Salman's blood began to pool into the sand.
His breath was failing.
"...don't run..."
He collapsed to the ground. Gone.
The blood froze in Khalid's veins.
His friend lay dead before him.
"YOOOUUU!!!"
Khalid roared with absolute,
blinding fury and charged.
BAM!
BAM!
BAM!
He rained down blows, cracking the earth beneath them,
but the Viper Wraith ignored the onslaught as if Khalid's strength was a mere joke.
In one brutal motion,
the monster grabbed him mid-attack and hoisted him into the air.
"Let me go, devil, you have given your soul as well as your self-respect to the magician."
" I never imagined that the person we respected so much would one day bite us and put the lives of all of us in danger."
"you are a traitor."
Khalid gasped, his limbs dangling uselessly.
Suddenly, the chaos of the village went dead silent.
The Viper Wraith froze like a statue.
Stepping through the shadows,
Jabar approached.
Dark chains erupted from the ground, binding Khalid tightly and locking him in place.
"Do you accept me as your God?"
Jabar's voice carried no rush.
Khalid's breathing was ragged.
He forced his head up.
"...No".
"Do you accept me as your God?"
"...No".
The third time, Jabar's voice turned entirely cold.
Khalid :"Do you accept me as your God?"
Khalid's face was bruised and bloodied.
Death was staring him right in the face,
but there wasn't a single drop of fear in his eyes.
He looked straight ahead, and spat directly on Jabar's face.
Silence. A suffocating silence.
No,I am not like that coward who has accepted you as his God, you are a demon who can never achieve the status of God.
The cold calmness wiped clean from Jabar's face.
"Now you will see...
how your death unfolds.
I will turn you into my slave".
Jabar raised his wand. The red orb ignited like a raging inferno.
Soul Drain Ritual.
A crimson aura plunged straight into Khalid's body.
Not through his skin... straight into his soul.
Khalid's scream tore through the sky.
This wasn't fire.
This was the violent extraction of his very essence.
His memories began to rip away.
His son 's name... his wife's face... the stubborn defiance he clung to even at the end.
Every piece of his humanity was sucked into the pulsing purple locket resting on Jabar's chest.
The locket flared twice, then went quiet.
Khalid fell to his knees.
But he wasn't Khalid anymore.
His form had warped entirely into a crimson jinn IFREET.
"...My... lord..."
he whispered,
bowing his head before Jabar without a second of hesitation.
As if he had never learned to bow to anyone else in his entire life.
Jabar raised his hand, and shifting shadows swallowed the scene completely.
Khalid had become a red jinn, leaving no trace of humanity in his eyes.
He simply bowed to his new master.
"…My… lord…" the jinn murmured.
A short distance away, shrouded in the settling dust, Farid stood completely still.
He was alive, but he wasn't running or moving.
A terrifying emptiness filled his eyes—there were no tears, no screams, and no expression of fear.
He was just a boy standing inside a village that had ceased to exist.
"…Baba…"
slipped from his lips, a broken, hollow whisper.
Jabar slowly turned, his dark gaze locking onto the boy.
"One more…
Who survived…"
Jabar noted calmly. He raised his hand, and suffocating Soul
Pressure began to build in the air around them.
But Jinn Khalid stepped forward.
"My lord… Spare him…" the creature pleaded in a slow, hollow voice.
Jabar paused, a flicker of cold curiosity in his eyes.
"Why…?".
"He is already… dead from within…"
the jinn replied.
"There is no meaning in killing him…".
Farid just watched them.
His eyes were open, but entirely lifeless. He couldn't cry, and he couldn't smile.
A heavy silence hung over the ruins.
"…Fine,"
Jabar finally said, lowering his hand as the gathered darkness faded away.
"I must chase those…
Who are running…".
He glanced at Jinn Khalid IFREET.
"You… go to my palace… With Sheikh Harun…".
"As you command, my lord,"
the jinn obeyed.
The space around them distorted, and both Jinn Khalid and the Viper Wraith dissolved into the darkness, completely disappearing.
Jabar didn't spare Farid another glance, acting as if the broken boy simply ceased to exist.
Farid stood there in the dust, completely silent and completely broken.
Jabar walked forward, his own body beginning to dissolve into shadows.
"Running… only delays death…"
he whispered into the void before vanishing.
Far away, near the edge of the ancient forest, the desperate survivors were running for their lives.
Amina dragged Ali forward, while Fatima tightly held onto Yusuf. Imran, Hashim, Zainab, and Zayd scrambled into the dense treeline,
trying to escape the desert nightmare.
But behind them, Jabar was coming.
He wasn't running.
He was simply walking.
It was the patient, terrifying walk of a man moving toward prey that could never truly escape him.
In the encroaching dark, the purple locket at his neck pulsed once.
Slow
low.
Patient.
Hungry.