He awoke beneath a dead sky.
Ash fell like snow, soft and silent, covering the mountains in a shroud of gray. The wind keened through blackened pines, but it did not stir him. Not at first.
He lay still among the ruins of stone and bone, staring upward with eyes that remembered nothing.
No name.No time.Only the cold, and the weight of something vast and broken behind his ribs.
The wind shifted. A shard of ice cut across his cheek, drawing blood. The pain was real. That, at least, he could know. He moved—slowly, limbs stiff and unyielding as rusted chain—and sat upright.
The world was ruin.
Towering monoliths of basalt pierced the sky, half-collapsed. Great bones jutted from the earth like the ribs of a buried titan. A shattered banner flapped from a spear driven into the earth. Black and gold. Familiar, somehow.
He looked down at himself. His armor was ancient—cracked obsidian chased with veins of silver, smeared with blood that had dried a long time ago. A blade lay beside him, wrapped in a torn red cloth.
When he touched it, it whispered.Not in words—but in hunger. Memory. Fire.
He picked it up. The sword was too light. Too well-balanced. It was his. He didn't know how, but he knew it the way lungs know to breathe.
He rose, and the ash swirled around him like forgotten prayers.
A voice echoed faintly across the vale. Not aloud, but inside his skull.
"You should not be awake."
He turned. Nothing.
"Sleep, knight. You are too early. The gods are still dead."
He looked to the horizon. To the fractured sky and the mountains split by fire. Something lay beyond those peaks. A city? A memory?
He began to walk.
Each step was heavy. The weight of his armor was nothing compared to the burden inside him. The silence of the world pressed in like a tomb. He saw no animals. No birds. Only the dead remnants of a world that had once burned too brightly.
And always, in the back of his mind, her voice.
Not the one that told him to sleep—but another. Softer. Warmer. A lullaby in a language he no longer knew.
Her name hovered just out of reach.He gritted his teeth and walked harder.
By dusk, he came to a broken shrine nestled between two cliffs. The altar was collapsed, but fragments of divine sculpture remained. A wing. A sword. A mask.
He knelt before it, without knowing why.
And he whispered: "Forgive me."
He did not know who he was begging forgiveness from.
But something answered.
A flicker of warmth. A pulse behind his eyes.
A name.
He staggered back.
"Arjuna."
He gasped. It tore through his lungs like fire.
That was his name.
Not given. Earned.
As the sun vanished, he built a fire beneath a twisted tree. The blade lay across his knees. He tried to sleep, but the dreams came like storm tides.
A field of fire.
A woman of obsidian and light, weeping blood as she whispered his name.
A tower crumbling into the sea.
And thousands of voices, crying out in a single moment, then falling silent.
He woke in darkness, breath shallow. The fire had gone out.
The blade pulsed faintly in the dark.
And across the valley, just for a moment, he saw it: a light in the mountains. A flickering torch. Moving.
He wasn't alone.
He stood, sword in hand, and followed.