Ah, boy. You wake as the suns anoint your flesh in their celestial fire, their fervor seeping through sinew, nesting deep within the marrow of your frail vessel. Your stomach howls its lament, for you are but a pitiful thing—a being of need, of insatiable hunger, a whisper of mortality lost in the tide of greater wills.
You rise, blinking against the blinding expanse, your gaze cast into the vast unknown. The land is a miser in its mercy. Nothing but trees, trees, and more trees—an unbroken assembly of uncaring sentinels.
Yet above, the sky bestows its gift. Fruits—swollen, glistening, alien. Not of the orphanage’s feeble plots, nor the tamed fields of lesser men. No, these are wilder—relics of a world indifferent to your longing, pulsing with a vigor beyond your reckoning.
You leap. Hands claw bark, legs coil and spring, and you ascend—not as a man, but as a beast reborn, unshackled from meekness. The birds scatter in your wake, fleeting, feeble things, unfit to witness the trials you would welcome.
Then, the waters rupture.
From the abyss, something emerges. A form armored in spines. The ocean itself, birthing a scourge of coral and cruelty. Nearly three and a half meters of sharpened malice—the kind only the Navorians could sculpt into their own flesh. A warrior. A nightmare. A harbinger.
You do not know what he is.
But I do.
Still, your gaze does not falter. For within your eyes burns that maddening gleam—the glimmer of defiance, of untempered will. Oh, you reckless, wretched thing.
You do not ponder survival.
You do not ask if the beast will end you.
You wonder how strong he is.
You wonder if he is strong enough.
If shattering him would make you any more than you are.
But first, you feast.
The fruit shatters between your teeth—sharp, sweet, a war of flavors waged upon your tongue. Yet even as you chew, the taste is an afterthought, drowned beneath the hunger that writhes deeper still. The hunger for fire, for fury, for the inferno that awaits beyond the silence.
And so, you run.
Through the jungle, wailing, shrieking—a specter of madness unbound, a creature of neither prey nor predator, but chaos incarnate. The world trembles beneath your feet, the trees shudder at your passing. And the Navorians hear you.
Three of them. Engaged in a ritual befitting their kind—driving spears through the writhing body of an ape, not for sustenance, but for sport. They turn. They see you.
The spined one, the leader, laughs.
Oh, what a laugh. You may not hear it, but I hear what men cannot. You have found a brother, perhaps. A fool wrought of scales, as you are wrought of flesh.
He does not hesitate.
His arm moves.
The air itself recoils at the violence. Even your erratic instincts, so sharp, so honed, fail to carve an escape. His strike finds you.
The world turns white.
And then, you are flung unto the sky.
The trees crumble beneath you, folding, bowing, a boundless sea of emerald surrendering to the sky’s dominion. The wind shrieks in your ears, a herald of ruin, and I feel it—your body, coiling, bracing. For agony. For oblivion. For the end.
But no.
This is not fear that grips you.
This is reverence.
The world unfurls before you. Immense. Unclaimed. A promise too great for mortal hands—too great for yours? No.
And there, beyond the reach of the treetops, beyond the whispers of leaf and limb—
Something gleams.
Not stone. Not sky. Not the bones of this earth, nor the breath of its heavens.
A vessel of the void.
Your heart lurches. The madness in your soul stirs anew. A starborne relic, here?
A fragment of the boundless, a whisper of the infinite. You dream of the stars, do you not? Of tearing through the firmament, of seizing strength beyond mortal reckoning?
But dreams are no wings.
You fall.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Yet—you snare a vine. It wrenches you forward, whips you through the air, a lifeline spun from chance and instinct. The jungle, once your adversary, bends to your folly. You release. You soar. You strike the earth in a tangle of limbs, your body howling in protest.
Pain.
Pain like fire in the marrow, like steel through sinew.
And yet—you grin.
I despise you for it.
I admire you for it.
But the ship, the ship, the ship.
You rise.
You run.
Faster. Faster. Through the snarl of green and shadow, drawn to the metal corpse resting in the embrace of time. Its crown entangled with trees, its belly devoured by the earth. A dream, long dead, left to rot beneath an indifferent sky.
You step forward. Wonder gleams in your eyes. The world expands once more.
Ah, boy. You tread where few dare, where even time has turned its gaze away. Your feet press against metal long forsaken—among relics of war, the husks of those who bled for their kin. Their echoes remain, etched into the bones of this vessel, carved into symbols beyond your grasp.
But not beyond mine.
Your gaze skims the inscriptions, lines upon lines of a language unknown to you. If your feeble mind could grasp their meaning, you would know what they whisper:
Tales of warriors. Of those who carved their names into the abyss. Of those who crushed the weak beneath their might and bore the strong toward glory.
But there is no time for remembrance. No time for the weight of blood and triumph.
Not when the trees wail.
Not when something stirs in the jungle, ripping through vine and ruin, driven by hunger and wrath.
You see him. The spiked Navorian.
His eyes seize you.
You have thrown yourself at him once, a moth to a black sun, a fool to the jaws of something greater.
Would you do it again?
No.
At last, you see.
You cannot win.
And then—the whisper.
"Here."
It slithers past the battle-drums in your chest, past the fire in your bones. It does not beckon. It does not plead. It simply is.
You turn to the shadow that has watched you.
There—beneath a rusted trapdoor. A figure. Eyes like ghost-light, grey-white, unlike any you have ever seen. A presence that does not belong, yet lingers as if the wreck itself has shaped it from forgotten shadows.
You do not hesitate.
The trapdoor wrenches open. You drop into the abyss beneath the ship. It slams shut behind you, sealing you in the cold, in the silence.
And the dark swallows you whole.
Then—a flicker. A tremor in the bones of this place. The walls shudder, and the dark breathes. Lights, feeble ghosts of a forgotten age, sputter to life. And at last, you see.
A hall. Vast. Hollow.
This is no mere wreck. No simple husk of metal and wire, no grave for the nameless dead. It is more.
You do not understand.
You do not need to.
Your feet move before thought can anchor you. Forward. Blindly. Foolishly.
Then—emptiness.
The platform vanishes beneath you. Gravity seizes you like a predator long denied its feast. You plummet, limbs flailing, breath torn from your lungs. The world slams into you, pain surging through your body like a river of fire.
But do you stop?
Do you falter?
No.
Because there is more.
More to see. More to take in.
More legends.
Not spoken. Not written. Carved.
Your fingers graze the etchings upon the walls—etched with a hand both reverent and ruthless. Two figures.
One wields hammers, a titan among titans, his presence bending the world around him. The other, a warrior in gauntlets, a king without a crown, standing as if the stars themselves kneel before his might.
They bow before a sun. Then, they rise, side by side—monstrous birds crashing beneath their fists, feathers and blood raining down.
They are strength. They are power. They are unbreakable.
But the chain that binds them?
It shatters.
They part.
The hammer-bearer walks toward an unknown world, his path swallowed by the void. The gauntleted one remains, a king upon a throne that does not feel like home.
A story. A legend. A wound upon the fabric of time.
And yet—all you see is how great they look.
You smirk, sliding a hand across the steel—when something else catches your eye.
A mattress. A blanket. A life.
And then—the boy.
Small. White-haired. Frail, barely there. A thing that could shatter beneath a breath. You could crush him with a tap, break him with a glance.
He shudders, curling in on himself like a wounded animal. Then, in a voice barely stronger than the whisper that led you here—
"Ail."
His name.
But look at you, boy. So bright, so unshaken, so unbroken. You grin—all teeth and warmth—and say:
"I’m Zett."
And then—
"What are you doing here?"
The boy stiffens. Turns away. Pulls into his dark corner, into his mattress, into his silence. His voice is nothing but air.
"I’d rather not say."
You tilt your head. Unbothered. Unworried. You drop beside him, knees to your chest, a child at rest. You have no intention of leaving.
"You can leave tomorrow," Ail mutters. "The Navorian will be gone by then."
You glance at him. And then, you smile.
A child’s smile.
"Say."
"No."
"Come on."
"No."
"Pleeease?"
"NO!"
Silence overtakes. The way you scratch your head, unbothered, unworried. The way your eyes—those crimson, fearless eyes—finally see.
The scars.
His arms. His neck. His face. A map of scars, carved into his skin.
He has suffered.
For how long? By whose hands? A mystery. A story left untold. But one thing is certain.
Whoever did this—was cruel.
And now, the boy—this small, fragile thing—drops his head.
And you see them.
The tears.
Wimp.
That is all I say.
And his voice—so small, so broken—finally speaks what his lips have hidden for so long.
"I don’t know who I am.
I don’t know anything.
I just… am.
And no one likes me.
Not since I was a child. Not now, probably. But I wouldn’t know."
Wouldn’t know?
"I’ve been here for eight years."
Eight.
Eight years in this graveyard of metal and ghosts.
Hiding.
“Because—”
He stops.
Refuses to say more.
"Stay away from me," he whispers. "And after you leave… never come back."
The boy doesn't know you.
For you are stubborn.
You decide something in that moment.
You will come back.
You will drag him outside, kicking and screaming if you must. You will show him the world.
But not tonight.
No, tonight…
You will play a game.
Not for yourself.
For him.
So that, even for a moment—
Ail can smile.
What would YOU do in Zett’s place?
