Evening found Arinthal in a strange melancholy.
The sun had begun its slow slide behind the distant ridges, yet no one here called it nightfall.
For the people of this village, the setting sun only marked the beginning of another reminder—a warning that morning would soon follow, and with it the cruel daylight that forced them to wake, to labor, to accept once more that their lives were real.
Beneath that dim orange light stood the house—the house that did not deserve even that noun.
It was large, yes; the roof spread wide enough to hold small storms on its back. But size was its only boast.
The wood, thin and splintered, looked as though it had been shaved off from crates meant for storing other people's wealth. Its panels carried no scent of polish, only of heat and failure.
It could barely shelter thirty if one counted space honestly. Instead, it swallowed three hundred.
They filled it from floor to stairwell, every hollow packed with breathing bodies and the dull constant sound of lungs working through dust.
In one corner, a boy stirred awake.
Aralan wiped sweat from his brow, his skin sticky and salt-streaked. His throat ached in a slow pulse that felt like thirst threatening to replace the heart entirely.
He turned to the figure beside him. "Mother. Wake up. Father isn't back yet."
Her eyes blinked open—mud-colored eyes, soft from worry even before they found focus. "He's gone to find us food, maybe water," she said. Her tone was not reassuring; it was the defeated rhythm of repetition. "Aralan, my son, I'm sorry for giving you this kind of life. But what you do from here—that's for you to decide."
The words did nothing to slow his heartbeat.
He left the house at once.
Dust clung to his ankles as he ran out toward the fading glow eastward. In his mind, thoughts darted with the same confusion that colored heat waves above the dirt road.
I've been running for sixteen minutes. I should have thought about where he'd go. If I were in his place, I'd look for the well first—the Fen Well. But he seemed different yesterday. Desperate. Maybe he went looking for food instead. Food's worth more than water now. Still, maybe I should check the well anyway… just in case.
He quickened his pace toward the east—the road narrowing, the ground turning gravelly where the fields had long since burned to grey.
Halfway there, he smelled it.
A foul sweetness, animal rot layered with wet iron.
Then he saw them.
The Gornets.
Small beasts moving over bodies like insects over honey.
They were not large—bone-thin creatures, their hides a dull black sheen. Four legs, seven tails flicking in different tempos, and three heads sharing one neck, all clawing and biting into what was left of the corpses strewn across the road.
Their size should have made them harmless, almost pitiful, yet the sight of their wriggling forms left the stomach hollow.
Aralan whispered to himself. "They look fierce, but they're too small. They can't take down this many people. Something else did this."
The question followed him as he approached the nearest standing shop, its sign charred half away.
"Mister," he called through the doorway, "do you know what happened here?"
The shopkeeper, old and trembling, answered in a voice too practiced at horror to sound shocked anymore. "Mr. Jerry and his daughter."
The names fell like grit into Aralan's throat. The breath left him in one painful motion.
A flicker of meaning passed through him, not as thought but reflex: irritation, frustration, grief, and a helpless anger that clamped shut his jaw.
He walked on.
Outside, the air hung thick. The dust beneath his feet absorbed all sound.
Then—familiarity struck like a knife of recognition out of empty vision.
A shape lying near the side of the street. Pale skin beneath shallow wounds.
His mind caught up only after his body had already moved toward it.
Father…
He ran.
When he reached the body, the shapes of Gornets turned their three heads up momentarily, pausing at the intrusion. One was chewing through the neck, one through the ribs, the last working around the mouth, prying at the lips as if trying to unlearn silence itself.
The sight burned through his eyes before the mind could refuse it.
One swift kick sent one Gornet flying sideways, bones crunching with a sound like sticks breaking.
The others skittered away shrieking—if such composite throats could truly shriek. Their tails dragged slime behind them as they disappeared into brush.
The carcass that remained was only a suggestion of his father, a map of absence: a hollow chest half collapsed inward, the throat unrecognizable, the face reduced to an outline with injuries masquerading as new orifices. Heat curled from it in thin waves.
Aralan froze.
His own lips trembled open as though preparing to scream—but air caught, folding inside him like it had turned solid.
His mouth opened wider for a moment, instinct clawing to escape, then the will forced it shut again.
The struggle repeated—open, close, open—a silent war between grief and restraint.
When no sound came, his body found another way to cry.
Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, hot and blinding, cutting lines through the dirt on his cheeks.
He turned and fled, legs moving with the logic of panic.
"I can't," he muttered between gasps. "Can't stay… can't look anymore."
He could feel words beating silently in his skull, an answer forming not from reason but exhaustion.
Mount Wellin. I'll go there. Jump. It's maybe an hour away. An hour, then all ends.
He ran again.
The sun was lowering behind his back now, and his shadow grew longer, leading him like a rope toward the mountain.
In the way he was trying to avoid thinking about how hopeless , pathetic his situation is. He accepted that he is pathetic piece of shit long time ago . He thought just accepting it would improve his life . He thought that happiness was just the matter of mind . But this moment changed everything. He never thought his inferior situation could have affected him like this . At this moment his rage and helplessness against Mr.Jerry rised again.
Forty-nine minutes later, the outline of Mount Wellin rose before him—its cliff face like a black wound cutting into the horizon.
His breath was gone, chest scraping for air.
The thought of the leap was less terrifying than the thought of one more sunrise.
Then his foot knocked against something hard.
He looked down.
There, half buried in dust, lay an object reflecting faint light—a metallic device roughly shaped like a whistle, but larger, heavier.
Its surface carried engravings dulled by dirt.
He crouched, wiped it clean with his sleeve.
Letters appeared, etched deep into the metal.
"Malric," he whispered aloud. "What kind of brand is that? Rich people stuff, probably. Idiots like me shouldn't touch this kind of thing."
He turned it over in his hand.
Despite the grime, it shone with precise sharpness—a luxury that didn't belong to this world.
Yet curiosity edged the despair aside for a flicker.
"If it's precious," he said under his breath, "maybe it's worth more than that bastard Jerry's entire mansion."
Tilting it, he found a small button embedded along the ridge.
The impulse outweighed the question.
He pressed.
A sound erupted—not quite a bang, more like the tearing scream of the air itself.
A flare of light burst from the front, a compact fire streaming in one clean line until it disappeared into far distance.
A second later, the horizon erupted.
Something detonated beyond sight—a roaring bloom that consumed the edges of the sky, thrice wider than Mr. Jerry's mansion.
The pressure reached him seconds after, carrying heat yet no recoil at all.
Aralan didn't so much as step backward.
He stared, frozen, mouth parted in disbelief.
His mind grasped at comparison but found none.
The smell of singed wind brushed his face.
"No recoil," he murmured. "No kick. Nothing."
The whistle remained cold in his grip.
"I've never seen anything like this. It's not like the guns they have at Jerry's. Not like anything from here."
His lips curved faintly—not in joy but in a tremor between fear and purpose.
"Whatever it is… it's mine now."
He looked toward the west, where the dark crown of Mr. Jerry's estate waited beyond the haze.
His eyes narrowed until they burned.
"I'm coming for you," he said softly, almost as prayer. "You and your house. You and everything you built on us."
Wind passed through the ruined road, stirring the dust around his feet.
In that moment, the boy who had wept by his father's corpse no longer moved like a child.
He walked toward the horizon, the strange device hanging in his hand like a quiet promise.
Night spread across Arinthal—thick, absorbing the edges of everything.
In its heavy calm, the burned landscape cooled while tiny sparks from unseen fires clung above the ground like dying stars.
Somewhere out beyond those fields, a mansion waited in silence.
And a six-year-old boy, carrying the echo of a father's death and a weapon that felt borrowed from another world, began the slow, relentless walk toward it.