The forest had grown darker than night itself — not just the absence of sunlight, but the swallowing kind of dark. The kind that wrapped around your limbs like wet velvet and clung to your breath like smoke.
Damián pressed forward, his hands rough with dried sap, dirt ground beneath his fingernails. His once-tailored black shirt, now torn and speckled with forest grime, clung to his frame like second skin. The air here was thick with pine and damp soil, every step on the mossy floor a whisper beneath his worn shoes.
He hadn't seen the sky in hours.
Not that it mattered. The stars wouldn't care about a city boy lost in ancient woods — a boy who once lived for video games, soft beds, and sugar-coated distractions. That boy had vanished somewhere between the cracked branches of Kuzmin, and in his place walked something else. Something quieter. Something colder.
"How the hell did I end up here?" he thought, his breath fogging in the crisp air.
This wasn't just a forest. It was a graveyard of thoughts. A vast cathedral of trees too old to remember their own beginnings. Their trunks rose like forgotten gods, bark split and twisted, roots curled like claws in the undergrowth. Each time his foot crushed a brittle leaf, the sound echoed strangely — like a blasphemy whispered in a holy place.
And then...
A flicker.
Just off the corner of his eye, like a dream trying to break through reality. He turned his head — and there it was. A faint orange glow, wavering through the curtain of leaves like the pulse of a dying star.
Drawn to it like a moth to flame, Damián made his way through the thicket, the branches clawing at his clothes, thorny vines biting his ankles. His legs ached. His shoulders burned. But still, he pressed on — because that glow meant people. And people meant warmth. Maybe food. Maybe even—
A sign.
Wooden. Worn down by rain and time. The paint had chipped off, leaving only ghostly white traces of letters. But in the halo of a flickering lantern that hung above, he read the words:
"WELCOME TO LAKEWOOD"
He stared at it. Just stared. The quiet buzz of the lantern was the only thing reminding him this wasn't some fever-dream etched by exhaustion.
A dry laugh escaped his throat — cracked, mirthless.
"I hope you're more welcoming than my mother," he muttered.
But there was no one to laugh with him. No one to scoff or sneer. No expectations. No sharp words to pierce his ribs like knives. Just trees. Just silence.
Just Damián.
He stood there for a long moment — not because he was tired, but because this sign, this place... it felt like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence he hadn't finished writing.
Lakewood.
A place he had only heard of in passing. A village bordering the edge of the Lako Ocean, under the rule of the Leon Empire — if memory served him right. Which lately, it barely did.
He was alone now. Not in a pitiful way. Not in the way children fear being forgotten. But in the raw, primal way — the way a man realizes the world doesn't care whether he breaks or bends, whether he thrives or fades.
And so, with no gods to guide him and no devils to haunt him, Damián stepped beyond the sign and into the unknown.