"Even silence has a sound in Varkai. It's the sound of something waiting to devour you."
---
Ash didn't fall anymore. It hovered.
A grey mist clung to the forest like skin stretched too tightly across bone. The trees were malformed things, gnarled and black, their bark peeled open by Pulse storms. Shallow veins of corrupted energy throbbed through the roots, glowing faintly with a color that had no name.
Vrakon moved through the Maw, barefoot and limping. The child's shirt hung in tatters, dried blood cracking along his collarbone. The other boy, Thren, had died during the second night—eyes wide, soul flickering like a dying candle before fading into stillness.
Vrakon had not cried.
Not for Thren.
Not for Shayra.
Not for himself.
He just kept walking.
The Genesis Pulse had gone quiet now, but its absence felt louder than its storm. He could feel it—like a breath held too long by the world. His soul trembled, not in fear, but in response.
Something was changing.
---
🕯️ The Shrine
By the third night, his legs gave out near a collapsed ruin half-swallowed by thorned roots and bonegrass. The structure was old—Pulse-Seer markings etched along its stone archways, long defaced. The altar inside had caved in, crushed under time and corruption.
But some fragments still whispered.
Vrakon pulled himself inside the hollow shell of the shrine. The spiral mark in his left eye flickered faintly—reacting. He didn't understand why.
He simply followed it.
At the heart of the ruin, an old mural lay half-exposed: a ring of figures holding hands around a spiraling void. Their faces had been scratched out by claws or worse. At the center, a crystal lens flickered once, then died.
Vrakon touched it.
And the world shifted.
---
🌌 Vision: "The Fall Within"
He stood in an endless sky—cracked, bleeding stars and smoke. The land below was a spiraling sinkhole of bone and light. He saw himself—not as a boy, but as a shadow of spirals wrapped in broken skin.
He fell.
And kept falling.
Until a voice called from somewhere deeper.
> "You are not whole. You were never meant to be."
The spiral in his palm ignited—briefly—before sputtering out. The light didn't comfort. It didn't warm.
It warned.
He collapsed back into the shrine, gasping.
---
🧬 The Awakening: Level 1 – Mortal Spark
Something within his chest pulsed—a slow, second heartbeat, separate from the physical. The Pulse had nested inside him. Not as fire or fury, but as structure.
Geometry. Purpose. Echo.
His breath steadied.
He felt no joy.
Just... alignment.
> "You are Level 1," the Pulse seemed to murmur. "Mortal Spark. The first step. The spiral has begun."
He looked down. A faint spiral shimmered beneath his palm for a moment. Then, it vanished.
---
💭 Memory: "Mirra"
He stared at the broken altar and, for the first time in days, an image rose in his mind.
Mirra.
Her laughter. Her voice teasing him as they raced up the ash dunes. Her anger when he didn't speak for days. The way she had once yelled:
> "You don't feel things like normal people, Vrakon! You just stare and stare!"
She was right.
Even then, he had not cried when her dog was devoured by a Pulse-Eater. He had simply stared at the sky, tracing spirals with his fingers in the dirt.
She had thrown a stone at him.
They had still shared bread the next day.
Now, she was probably dead. Or worse.
And Vrakon?
Still cold.
Still quiet.
---
🐺 The Bonebeasts
Outside, something howled.
Not like a wolf—no, this was worse. A sound that snapped bone before it reached the ear. Pulse-eaters. Bonebeasts. Feral things born of corrupted souls and marrow.
They'd caught his scent.
Vrakon stood slowly. Blood pooled at his feet from old wounds, but his hands didn't shake. He gripped a rusted shrine spear, broken at the tip. He held it like he'd always known how.
The beasts crawled through the underbrush, their ribcages open like wings, skulls stretching with long tongues of bone. Three of them. Hungry.
He didn't scream.
He didn't cry.
He let the Pulse move through him like a quiet hum, the faintest flicker of Spiral Light threading through his skin.
> "You are Mortal Spark," the voice from earlier returned. "But even sparks burn."
And as the first beast lunged—
He moved.