Blood floods the earth like a river denied.
The village of Arvanth burns—a pyre of screaming souls. Flames coil through the air like serpents, consuming wood, flesh, and bone. The sky, once clear, turns ashen gray. Thunder groans above, as if the heavens themselves weep for what unfolds below.
Corpses litter the dirt paths, some still twitching. Children lie beside their mothers, faces frozen in wide-eyed horror. Men hang from shattered beams, entrails spilling like ribbons. Blood leaks into the soil, staining it a deep, grotesque black.
And he walks through it all.
A man draped in a tattered cloak blacker than midnight, its hem soaked in red. His boots crunch over broken skulls. The silver sigil glowing on his chest pulses—a cracked, six-pointed star surrounded by writhing thorns. It hums with forbidden power, an ancient mark erased from all records… but whispered of in fearful tales.
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A young boy, maybe ten, stares up from a crawl, face smeared with ash and tears. “P-please… no more…”
The man stops. His head tilts, studying the child as though examining a bug. “No more…?”
He raises his hand.
The boy ignites.
Not a scream—just a flash of white-hot light, and the child becomes cinders in the wind. The man continues walking, unaffected, unhurried. His aura pulses—dark, alive, and cruel. It coils around him like a beast made of shadow, drinking the fear from the air.
In the skies, rain begins to fall.
But it is not water.
It is thick. Red. Warm.
The heavens cry blood.
A priestess, half-dead beneath a crumbled shrine, raises a trembling arm. “Y-you are not human… You are… a demon…”
He stops beside her. Kneels. Whispers softly.
“No. Demons have mercy.”
And he plunges his sword into her chest—slowly, watching the light fade from her eyes.
The rain pours harder now, hissing against the fires. But it cannot wash away the sin. It only spreads it.
His blade hums, craving more.
As he walks toward the edge of the massacre, the whispers of the dying fade, leaving only the crackle of flame and the hiss of cursed rain.
A single name slips from his lips, not as a boast, but as a death sentence to history.
“Let the world remember… Kael Varian walked here.”
And the sky bled for it.