Sunlight.

  Blinding, hazy, disorienting.

  It filtered through the blur, flickering through the vision as if the world itself was struggling to hold its shape. Fuzzy contours of trees came into the view, basking in the golden glow of what could have been a breathtaking sunset. The eyesight swirled, unable to come into focus. The ringing in the ears drowned out everything.

  The scent came back first, sickening and wrong, burning down the throat.

  “Sol! Sol, honey, please!”

  A voice cut through the daze, echoing from inside the skull, soft, loving… Desperate.

  Mother.

  A blink. Two.

  Vision sharpened, the light twisting into something else. A shape emerged. Her face, framed with dark curls, her skin tan, her catlike gold eyes, her garments light—white once, now stained. Tears carved rivers down her cheeks, but she smiled despite the horror, for her child… for him.

  “Baby, you have to run, okay?” Her hand cupped his cheek, warm and caring, her touch trembling. A last moment of comfort.

  The smell of her skin—sea, smoke, and honey—burned into memory before he even knew what memory truly meant. The tremor in her hand wasn’t fear but certainty. She’d already chosen her ending. The world around them had gone silent. He could hear his own pulse echoing in her touch.

  “Go! Get to the temple. It’s going to be safe there. He is going to protect you.” Her lips, wet with grief, pressed a kiss on his forehead, tender, lingering.

  Hands reached for her, but she was already moving. Already standing. Already turning away.

  “I’m going to find your father and join you, alright, love?” She promised, but her eyes said otherwise.

  “Now go!”

  Few steps, stumbling forward, he hesitated. Turned.

  He saw her then, reaching for a fallen sword—one too big, too heavy, too wrong in her hands. She was never going to follow. She was never going to run.

  She was only buying him time.

  A scream split the air.

  He bolted.

  The world was in chaos, writhing in agony, burning down all around. Vision bobbed with every frantic step, breath coming in sharp, panicked bursts.

  Jump. Dodge. Dash.

  Straight through the massacre.

  Bare feet slapped against white stone slick with something warm, something sticky.

  His own blood? Someone else’s?

  He ran through streets carved from light, now brutalized.

  The gutters ran red where water channels used to whisper, the same fountains that had fed the lower terraces now spilling bodies instead of flowers. The air reeked of salt and fire, the sea wind dragged the stench through every corridor, turning it into incense for a dying god.

  Arrows sliced through the air. Bodies fell. Something splattered against the skin. He did not look.

  He stumbled past the market square where pots lay shattered, fruit crushed under boots, coins glinting between ribs. The whole place looked painted by someone who loved it too much to let it die clean.

  Do not look.

  Armored hands reached for him, missing by inches, voices shouting.

  Commands? Warnings? Language foreign.

  The world spun around him.

  Duck. Twist. Slip free.

  Keep running.

  The city, blooming with flowers over white stone just this morning, was aflame. Bright blue sky now thick with smoke. Desecrated.

  Screams. Screams. Screams.

  Drowned in the sound of his own heartbeat.

  He did not stop.

  The temple rose ahead, tall and unsullied, inviolable, a beacon in the ruin. Cypress trees stood behind it—dark spires among marble and gold.

  Sanctuary.

  Heart lurched with hope as he dashed towards the entrance, heavy footsteps following behind him.

  There! Inside, through the threshold, past the towering pillars, straight to the altar!

  Breath ragged, his feet faltered before the realization hit.

  Bodies.

  Lying still. Silent. Gone.

  Silks soaked through with crimson.

  Ahead, the altar gleamed under the fractured sunlight. White marble, pristine, untouched by the violence around. Water lapped gently at its base, turquoise and brilliant, shimmering with an invitation. The statue stood above it all, eternal, watching, waiting.

  Mother said He will protect. Just a few steps left. Just one last push.

  A step. A pause.

  A noise.

  As feet landed on the last stair, painting the marble crimson…

  Even then, it gleamed too clean, too bright. His reflection swam in it. Small, wild-eyed, blood-slicked, haloed in the light from above. For an instant he thought the statue’s head turned toward him. Then the sound came.

  Sound not meant to be in a place like this. It came from within.

  Metal scraping against the bone—wet, grinding.

  And the time froze.

  Breath stilled.

  A heartbeat. His last.

  Pain blossomed in the chest—sharp, hot and all-consuming. He looked down, hands motionless midair.

  A blade, glistening with gore, jutted through his ribs. He watched, detached, ears ringing again, drowning the horrors of the world around him. Warmth of his own blood spread too fast, defiling the sanctuary that was supposed to protect him.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Falling.

  Water cradled like a parent, tender and lovely, limbs going weightless, blood clouding the turquoise into something sickly. The light above fractured, warping, dimming.

  World faded, just for a moment, consciousness slipping from the wound with hot blood, mixing with water.

  With something else.

  Ringing was back.

  Whispers too blurred and distant layering over it, like wind through dead leaves. Too familiar.

  It felt like home, but not kind.

  It was hungry. It was mourning.

  The warmth wrapped around his numb body, a presence curling through veins, pressing against ribs not yet healed, into his skull, whispering in a voice made of sorrow and rage. Voices moved through him, many and one, speaking words he didn’t know but somehow understood.

  His body spasmed once, twice, as light burned under the skin, threading through veins with molten gold searching for a heart.

  Anguish.

  A flood of memories none of his own, ancient, sacred—

  Creation.

  Betrayal.

  A city drowning in red.

  A body splitting open beneath divine hands.

  The God’s love—

  Consuming. Suffocating. Unescapable.

  A shout, but there was no sound. Only darkness.

  Only nothing.

  The ruins were still.

  The water below the altar, untouched by time, still gleaming too brightly for a place filled with so many bones. Moss crawled over the shattered columns, vines weaved through the cracks, but the light…

  The light still fell the same way.

  Boots crunched against the broken stone.

  A group of scavengers picked through the remains, armed, their voices hushed but careless. One of them stopped, brows furrowing as he stared at the figure floating beneath the surface, untouched.

  “Hey, look at this.” His hand dipped below the surface, picking up the body as if it’s a toy, dropping it on the marble stairs without respect. “What in the Rot is this elf kid doing here?”

  Another man approached, peering down. “He looks fresh as fuck. How could he get here?”

  “Eh, whatever,” another voice scoffed. “Leave him. Kid’s got nothing valuable on him anyway. Probably some monster dragged him through the tunnels.”

  They turned away.

  Then—

  Breath.

  First in a long time. Foreign for the lungs.

  Pain slithered through veins, lancing through the chest, the limbs, the skull, filling every cell. Eyesight blurry, the world tilting, shifting before it snapped into focus with devastating clarity.

  The men were leaving.

  They did not notice. They did not hear his stomach twist in agony. They did not feel the hunger—a need that burned like an open wound, a hunger that had no name, no mercy. Not for sustenance. Not for mere survival.

  But for something stolen.

  For a life taken.

  The craving was blinding, a fever in his blood, a call in his marrow.

  Not to eat. To reclaim.

  And before thought can caught up—he moved.

  One moment his body lay upon the marble, a fragile offering at the feet of a God long forgotten, the next—

  Teeth sank into the man’s throat with a nauseating crunch. His scream, wet and gurgling, cut short as his claws tore flesh from the bone. The scent of blood, real and warm, alive, filled his lungs. And something inside him settled. Soothed.

  The others…

  Some ran, screaming in tongues he did not recognize, some reached for their weapons.

  It did not matter.

  He was faster.

  Blades cut through the muscles. He barely felt them.

  He moved as a beast unchained, frantic, ravenous, lost to hunger beyond his understanding.

  Images shattered behind his eyes, blurred and fleeting, slipping between moments of blood and motion.

  And when the world steadied, when his breath returned—

  It was already over.

  Bodies littered the ground, discarded and useless. One was still wheezing, a gaping wound in his throat, barely clinging to life. He watched the light flicker from their eyes, felt the warmth spread through his own veins.

  He breathed deep.

  It felt... better. Wounds on his small body knit together, slow enough to witness, too swift to be natural—skin remembering where it belonged, guided by something unseen, something restless.

  He lifted his gaze to the statue that loomed above, its stone eyes watching—glowing, ever so faintly.

  Maybe a trick of the water’s reflection. Maybe not.

  He protected. Just like mother said he would.

  He stepped forward. Down to the tunnels. Where they came from.

  Blood dripped from his fingers, trailing behind him as an afterthought.

  It was quiet there. A silence so heavy it sank into his skin, filling his lungs like water did many lifetimes ago. Distantly, he wondered if this was what it felt like to be buried alive.

  No screams. No footsteps. No voices in foreign tongues. Only the soft echo of his own breath.

  The air was damp. Thick. Laced with the scent of old rot and salt. The rock beneath his feet uneven, slick with moisture, but he didn’t stop.

  Didn’t not think for too long.

  The tunnels winded like a beast’s intestines, twisting and narrow, leading him somewhere, nowhere. His body moved forward on instinct alone. Hands brushed the rough walls, fingertips scraping against cold stone.

  He didn’t remember how long he’d been walking.

  Minutes. Hours. Days. Time was as distant as the world above. Time didn’t make sense after what he had witnessed.

  Water dripped. A light, methodical sound. A heartbeat that was not his.

  He pressed on.

  At some point, the walls widened. The tunnels opened into something larger, cavernous. Bare feet pressed into wet, dark sand. Air carried distant hum of waves crashing against the jagged rock, sharpened by the waters restless. Somewhere far, far away, muffled through the thick walls. The scent of salt sharpened.

  The sea was close.

  The weight in his chest was unbearable. Ribs ached where the blade had been. The wound long closed, but the phantom pain persisted, unyielding.

  And yet, he kept walking. Deep in the underground. A lone, blood-soaked child wandering through the caverns beneath the ruins.

  Hands stained. Eyes vacant.

  At last, the underpass ended.

  Light.

  Sudden and merciless.

  It crashed over him, searing through the dark with a swift slit against the void’s throat. He raised a trembling hand to shield his eyes, blinking furiously, but the gold was unrelenting, burning away the last remnants of the abyss.

  Then—into the forest, it consumed him whole.

  Step after step, days passed in a haze.

  Wind.

  A scent not of blood, not of stone, but of earth.

  Mirage?

  A valley, cradled between mountain and forest.

  A lone hut, bathed in amber, where the grass swayed like whispers on the wind. A place that did not belong in his world of ruins and massacre.

  There was a child laughing, reaching for the sky, untouched by the horrors life carried. There was a woman, broad-shouldered, her skin dark like ashen bark, sitting with her back turned.

  At peace.

  Something tightened in his chest.

  He stepped forward.

  A twig snaped underfoot.

  The woman stiffened.

  Slowly—too slowly—she turned.

  Her eyes landed on him. And she did not move.

  For a moment, neither of them breathed.

  No screams. No swords raised. No orders barked.

  He waited for it. For the shouting, the hands grabbing at him, the strike of steel.

  But none of it came.

  He swayed, exhaustion weighing him down. His torn garments were soaked in gore, dried in patches, some of it his, some of it not. He must have looked like a specter, something dragged up from the underworld itself.

  The woman rose, worry etched into every line of her face.

  He should have run. Every muscle in his body screamed to flight, escape, hide.

  But his legs didn’t move. Locked in place by a tiny body finally giving up.

  The woman stepped forward, her movements measured, slow, like approaching a wounded beast, hand outstretched. Offering.

  She knelt before him, close enough to meet his gaze, far enough not to frighten him.

  The air between them held like cracked glass. He could smell the woodsmoke on her clothes, the sweetness of cooked roots. A sound escaped him—half whimper, half breath—before he swallowed it. He hadn’t meant to make a sound at all. The woman’s eyes softened, just slightly, and for the first time since the world burned and drowned, he didn’t run.

  Her voice came—low and tentative, laced with concern. Words shaped in a tongue he almost understood, familiar yet foreign, an echo of something once known.

  He did not answer.

  He only blinked.

  And the world faded.

  Darkness.

  Then, a sound.

  Distant, at first. Muffled, blurred. A murmur of voices, swallowed by static. The crackle of fire. The shifting weight of bodies moving through camp, boots crunching against the earth.

  “Sol.”

  The valley, the woman, the child—they began to unravel. Their warmth lingered, like the last embers of a dying flame, but the edges blurred, frayed.

  “Sol, wake up.”

  The past slipped through his fingers like smoke.

  The warmth fractured first, peeling away in thin ribbons of light. The child’s laughter folded in on itself, merging into the voice that called him by name. The smell of the hut became campfire ash. He reached for it—whatever it was—and felt it crumble like paper between his fingers.

  “It’s time to move.”

  A voice, closer now. Familiar. Real.

  His eyes fluttered open.

  The past was gone.