UMBRA-TE

  PROLOGUE: THE NIGHT THE WORLD BLED

  A hundred years ago, the sky split in half.

  Not like someone tearing cloth. Like someone screaming until they had no voice left.

  The ancients called it The Night of the Rip. Those who came after called it The Collapse. But the few who survived to tell the tale knew the truth: it wasn't a collapse. It was a birth.

  Something woke up that day.

  Something that had been sleeping since before men walked the earth. Something that was waiting.

  ---

  The woman was running.

  Her sandals slapped against the cold stone, echoing through the tower’s infinite corridors. Behind her, the black glass walls trembled, reflecting not her own face, but others—faces she knew, faces she had loved, faces she had lost.

  "You cannot run," the voice came from every direction. "That which has been awakened cannot be unawakened."

  "It can," she replied, breathless. "It must."

  The child in her arms cried.

  It was just a baby, wrapped in soiled cloths, with dark eyes that did not yet understand the world. Yet, he looked at the walls—at the faces in the mirrors—and smiled.

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  As if he recognized someone.

  The woman pressed her son against her chest and kept running.

  ---

  Outside, the world was dying.

  Entire cities crumbled, swallowed by a darkness that wasn't night. People screamed, but no sound came out—the darkness swallowed voices too. And in the sky, where a sun once hung, there was now only an open wound, bleeding purple light.

  The Rip.

  And from the Rip, shadows fell like rain.

  Not ordinary shadows. Living shadows. Shadows that sought bodies to inhabit, minds to consume, souls to devour.

  Most people died that night.

  Some survived, hidden in basements, in caves, in places where light still held out.

  And some... some were chosen.

  ---

  The woman reached the tower's exit.

  The door—if that smooth surface could even be called a door—opened for no one. Only for her.

  "Last chance," the voice said behind her.

  The woman turned.

  The figure was there. A dark silhouette, glowing purple eyes, a face so familiar it ached.

  "You know what will happen if he stays," the figure continued. "What he will become."

  "I know."

  "And you will take him regardless?"

  The woman looked down at her son. The baby was sleeping now, peaceful, oblivious to the end of the world.

  "He is not a weapon," she said. "He is my son."

  "He can be both."

  "No. Not while I live."

  The figure sighed. A sad, ancient sound.

  "Then go. But know this: one day he will return. And when he does... he will need to know the truth."

  The woman hesitated. "What truth?"

  "Who he truly is. And what his mother did to protect him."

  The woman closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there were tears.

  "Then I will wait for him. In the last mirror."

  The figure tilted its head. "Until then, Guardian."

  The woman stepped through the door.

  The world swallowed her.

  ---

  One hundred years later.

  In a fortress-city called Myridian, in the District of the Cursed, a young man named Kaelen woke from a dream he couldn't remember.

  He looked at the floor.

  His shadow was watching him with purple eyes.

  And it was smiling.

  END OF PROLOGUE