He woke up choking.
Not on air—on existence itself, a thick, visceral sensation of being violently crammed into a container too small and too real. It was the opposite of the void: an overwhelming, cacophonous presence.
Sound slammed into him first. Not as a unified chorus, but as a jagged, discordant symphony of urban decay. The grinding whine of distant, poorly-maintained engines—likely generators or outdated freight haulers. The uneven percussion of footsteps; some hurried and light, others a slow, dragging shuffle. Shouting voices, layered atop one another from different distances and directions—a barked order, a drunken slur, a child's cry. It was the sound of a city that never bothered to sleep because true rest was a luxury it couldn't afford.
Cold followed, a damp, invasive chill that seeped through the thin, coarse fabric of his clothes and directly into his skin from the unyielding concrete beneath him. It was a cold that carried the smell of mildew, rust, and stagnant water.
Pain came last, sharp and immediate, blooming behind his eyes like a migraine that had been waiting patiently for him to return to a body. It pulsed in time with a sluggish, unfamiliar heartbeat.
He sucked in a breath—a reflexive, desperate gasp—and immediately coughed, a raw, scraping convulsion. Dust, particulate filth, and the tang of metallic pollution filled his lungs.
A shadow loomed over him, blotting out the sickly yellow glow of a flickering, failing streetlamp. Not monstrous. Human. The silhouette of a man, hunched and wrapped in a stained coat, bent to peer down at him.
"—Kid?"
The voice was rough, tinged with disinterest more than concern.
"Hey. You alive down there?"
The boy—and he was a boy, he could feel the slightness of his form—blinked rapidly, tears forming from the dust and the sudden assault of light.
His vision cleared in frustrating, nauseating fragments. Cracked pavement, veined with black weeds. A rusted iron drainage grate half-clogged with unidentifiable sludge. Piles of trash bundled in slick, oily plastic or spilling from torn bags. The walls of the alley were stained with graffiti and older, darker patches of mold. His own hands came into focus, resting on the ground. They were small. Too small. The fingers were thin, knuckles pronounced. Pale scars, thin and white, marked the back of his left hand. A larger, rougher patch of shiny skin disfigured his right forearm—a burn, poorly healed. These were not the hands he remembered.
Ten years old.
He knew that with a bone-deep, instinctual certainty. Not because anyone had told him, but because the Nightmare Spell hadn't yet. This was the baseline, the starting line. A child's body, already bearing the evidence of a hard life.
Memory, stark and uncontestable, rushed back in a painful torrent that dwarfed the physical migraine.
The convenience store's fluorescent buzz.
The taste of burnt, stale coffee.
The cosmic wheel spinning in silent eternity.
The bored god in the galactic bathrobe.
The scroll of shadow and blood burning its Divine law into the core of his being.
Shadow Slave.
He swallowed, his throat clicking dryly.
"…Yeah," he croaked, the voice that emerged high, young, and rough with disuse. "I'm alive."
The man above him grunted, a sound of minor inconvenience resolved. "Good. Thought you were dead for a second. Don't die here. Makes a mess."
The shadow straightened, losing all interest almost immediately. Heavy, worn boots scraped against concrete as the footsteps faded, swallowed by the alley's echo. The city, impersonal and relentless, reclaimed the space where he lay.
Gritting his teeth against a wave of dizziness, the boy pushed himself upright. Every joint protested—knees, elbows, shoulders—each movement sending a fresh ache through his undernourished frame. His head swam, the world tilting slightly before settling. His body felt profoundly wrong—lighter, yes, but also weaker, a puppet with slack strings. A deep, gnawing hunger lived in his gut, but it was more than that; it was a hollowness in his muscles, a fragility in his bones, a fatigue that seemed to saturate his very cells.
Again.
He checked himself over with a clinical detachment that felt alien in this young form. No fresh wounds. No bleeding. Just the old scars and the pervasive, familiar enemy.
Exhaustion.
"…Figures," he muttered to the empty alley.
He was in a narrow passage between two decaying, monolithic structures—likely old factory shells or condemned residential blocks on the outer rim of one of the human settlements. This was a borderland, a place not quite claimed by the relative order of the inner sectors nor fully given over to the anarchic ruin beyond the great walls. A place for the discarded. Neon signs from a distant, slightly more lively street bled weak, distorted colors—pink and electric blue—onto the perpetually wet concrete. Somewhere much closer, a faulty generator sputtered and coughed like a dying animal, its rhythm unreliable and ominous.
He pulled his thin knees to his chest, hugging them for meager warmth, and exhaled slowly, watching the ghost of his breath mist in the chilled air.
I'm back at the bottom. Square one. Zero.
No family. No connections. No money. No protection. No identity beyond what he could scrape together.
Just like before.
A grim, wet chuckle escaped him.
Except this time—
His gaze, young but devoid of a child's naivety, sharpened, focusing on the grimy wall opposite as if it were a tactical map.
—this time, I know what's coming. I know the exam before I've seen the textbook.
The Nightmare Spell had not claimed him yet. There was no drowsiness pulling at his eyelids, no creeping lethargy in his soul. He was just a kid. An orphan. A nobody. That meant time. A buffer. Years, if he was careful, before the inevitable descent.
He did the math with cold clarity. The Spell typically took its candidates between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. He had six years. Six years of grace, of preparation.
Six years until the minimum age where the Spell would sink its hooks into him, whether he liked it or not.
Six years until his First Nightmare.
"…Six years," he whispered to the dripping darkness.
A laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep, quiet, brittle, and utterly humorless.
He uncurled his legs, planting his feet firmly on the cold ground. The gesture was one of decision.
"I can work with that."
Year One – Learning Not to Die (Again)
Hunger, that most ancient and ruthless teacher, instructed him faster than fear ever could. It was a curriculum of sharp edges and bitter truths.
He learned the schedules of the district's silent, mechanical digestion. Which metal trash bins behind the commissary were checked by sanitation at dawn and thus were safe to scour just after midnight. Which bakery not only threw out stale loaves but occasionally discarded whole, unsold pastries wrapped in clean paper, a treasure trove of sugar and fat. Which soup kitchen's volunteers looked the other way if a small, silent face appeared for a second bowl. Conversely, he learned which grocers deliberately poured bleach on discarded produce, and which restaurant owners would rather set their scraps on fire than feed the "vermin."
He learned how to sleep sitting up in a recessed doorway, back against solid wood, so no one could approach unseen from behind. He learned to keep one eye half-open, the blurry world through his lashes still transmitting movement. He learned to listen, to separate the harmless shuffle of a scavenging rodent from the deliberate, weighty step of a person, to identify the particular cadence of a Peacekeeper patrol boot.
Most crucially, he learned that adults in a place like this didn't see children—they saw complications. Problems to be shooed away, ignored, or, in the worst cases, exploited. To be seen was to be vulnerable.
So he practiced becoming invisible. He moved with the shadows, timing his passages between points of cover with the swing of overhead lights or the passing of bulkier crowds. He kept his gaze down, his shoulders slightly hunched, making himself a smaller, less memorable silhouette. He never ran unless fleeing immediate danger; running drew eyes.
He stole when he had to, his morality sanded down to a simple imperative: survive. Food first, always. Then clothes—a thicker sweater from a forgotten laundry line, sturdier socks from an unguarded market stall. Then, tools. A broken knife with a chipped three-inch blade, discarded behind a butcher's shop. He painstakingly ground the edge against concrete until it could bite. A length of flexible, sharp wire, perfect for snares or, in a dire pinch, a garrote. A cheap lighter with one good spark left in it, a prize more valuable than gold for its potential to provide warmth or signal.
At night, in the deepest hollows of his various hiding spots—a dry crawlspace beneath a collapsed warehouse, the rusted shell of an ancient vehicle—he trained.
Not because a mentor told him to. Not because of a grand destiny.
Because weakness had killed him once already. He would not let it be the author of his second death.
He did push-ups on raw knuckles until his arms trembled and gave out, then did more on his knees. He performed squats until the muscles in his legs burned with a fire that drowned out the cold. He would pick a point in the distance—a broken streetlamp, a specific fire escape—and run, his breath sawing in his raw throat, his vision narrowing to a tunnel, refusing to stop until he collapsed, vomiting bile onto the pavement. Then he would get up and walk back, every step a lesson in endured pain.
When he slept, his dreams were not of rest. They were of silent, spinning wheels etched with impossible names, of a bored celestial voice saying "Oof," and of a scroll burning with black-violet fire, imprinting words like Cursed Archivist onto his soul.
Year Two – Conditioning the Mind
The body, he found, adapted faster than the mind. The mind clung to old patterns, to the shock of existence, to the despair of starting over. So he trained them both with equal, ruthless discipline.
He turned his daily struggle for survival into a deliberate exercise in awareness. Walking a route, he would force himself to count the footsteps behind him without turning his head, identifying potential followers by rhythm and weight. He mapped alley networks in his mind, noting choke points, dead ends, and scalable fences. He would loiter near market stalls, not to steal, but to watch the shopkeepers, timing how long their attention drifted during transactions, learning the rhythm of their distraction.
He began to watch the Awakened.
They were rare here on the fringes, but not unheard of. Sometimes they passed through, on business or patrol. They were obvious, but only if you knew what to look for—a certain hyper-reality they carried with them. They moved with a economy of motion that spoke of absolute control. Their gazes were too steady, too penetrating, missing nothing. They seemed present in a way ordinary people weren't, as if the world around them was slightly slower, slightly less substantial.
He couldn't mimic their power, but he could mimic their discipline. He practiced controlling his breathing, making it slow and silent even when his heart was racing from a close call. He worked on his balance, walking along narrow pipes or crumbling walls, forcing his core to stabilize. He practiced control over his expressions, his reactions, sanding away the startled jumps, the fearful glances, replacing them with a calculated, neutral observation.
At night, in the deepest dark of his current hideaway—a dry, concrete-lined cavity beneath a collapsed overpass—he would whisper to the emptiness, testing the boundaries of his new reality.
"Status."
Nothing. No blue screens, no disembodied voice, no surge of power.
"…Right," he muttered, the word echoing faintly. "Not yet. The gate is still closed."
But he didn't stop asking. The request became a ritual, a reminder of the potential locked within him, waiting for the key of the First Nightmare.
Year Three – The First Knife Fight
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't for honor, territory, or some grand ideal. It was brutish, short, and ugly.
A bigger kid, maybe fourteen, with a pinched, mean face and clothes just as ragged, cornered him behind a derelict warehouse used for illicit chemical dumping. The air reeked of acid and decay. The other boy wanted his food pouch—a half-loaf of hard bread and a strip of dried meat. Then he eyed his shoes, which were less torn. Then he saw the handle of the chipped knife tucked in his belt.
"Give it," the bigger boy snarled, spittle flying. "All of it. Or I break your fingers."
The boy didn't argue. He didn't plead. He just went very still, his back to the cold corrugated metal wall. His mind, cold and clear, assessed the space: three paces between them. Litter on the ground—a broken bottle near his foot. The bigger boy's stance was aggressive but unbalanced, weight too far forward.
He waited.
With a guttural shout, the attacker lunged, hands reaching to grab and overpower. It was sloppy, fueled by bullying confidence rather than skill.
The boy sidestepped the lunge, not fully away, but inside the grabbing arms. In the same fluid motion, he drew his knife and slashed upwards, not a wild stab, but a controlled, cutting arc across the inside of the larger boy's reaching forearm.
Not deep. Not meant to kill. Just enough to part skin, to draw a bright, shocking line of red.
The effect was instantaneous. The bully's aggression vanished, replaced by animal shock and pain. He screamed, a high-pitched sound of outrage and fear, clutching his bleeding arm. He stared at the blood, then at the smaller boy holding the red-tipped knife with unnerving calm, and his courage shattered. He turned and fled, his wails fading into the industrial gloom.
The boy stood there, alone again. A fine tremor ran through his hands, the adrenaline aftermath making the knife quiver. The coppery smell of blood mixed with the chemical stench.
He waited for the guilt, the nausea, the moral crisis.
It never came.
Instead, there was only a single, cold, crystalline thought that settled in his mind like a foundational stone:
I survived. I chose violence, and I survived.
That night, in a different, more secure hole, he trained until his muscles screamed, focusing on the precision of the slash, the economy of the sidestep. The memory of the blood was not a trauma; it was a lesson.
Year Four – The Architecture of Survival
He stopped growing taller, his frame solidifying into a compact, wiry build. But he grew denser in other ways. His muscles, constantly tested, became defined cords. His reflexes sharpened to a hair-trigger. His gaze, when he allowed it to be seen, held a flat, assessing quality that made even larger scavengers think twice.
He moved beyond mere reaction. He began to build.
He practiced tirelessly with makeshift weapons, understanding their limits. A length of steel pipe was good for crushing blows but slow to recover. A sharpened piece of rebar could thrust but was brittle. He learned leverage—using an opponent's weight against them. He studied timing—the exact moment to strike between breaths. He mentally catalogued weak points: eyes, throat, knees, groin.
He began to consciously memorize and cross-reference everything he could infer or overhear about the Nightmare Spell. Whispers in queues, fragments of conversations between weary Awakened in grimy bars, the dogma preached by zealots of the great clans. He pieced together a foundational truth: First Nightmares weren't random executions. They were judgments. Tests of spirit, will, and cleverness. The Spell evaluated potential. And while the test itself was immutable, the candidate who entered it could be prepared.
The outcome is a judgment, he thought, sharpening a piece of scrap metal against a stone. But you can study for a test. You can become the answer it's looking for.
One clear, cold night, staring at the few visible stars through a jagged hole in the roof of his latest sanctuary, he whispered a mantra to himself, "Luck… is just preparation meeting a moment you didn't see coming."
Year Five – The Weight of the Inevitable
The waiting began to morph into a palpable pressure. It started subtly, insidiously.
A fatigue that a full night's sleep in a safe, dry place didn't fix. A heaviness in his limbs upon waking that took longer to shake off. Moments where his vision would blur at the edges, just for a second, as if a lens had shifted. Yawns that felt too deep, pulling at the roots of his soul.
He recognized the symptoms, not from experience, but from a deep-seated knowledge implanted by the cosmic being. The Spell was beginning to notice him. His soul was ripening on the vine.
"…Not yet," he muttered through gritted teeth, slapping his own cheeks to clear the fog. "Not yet. I'm not ready."
He became paranoid, meticulous. He stopped taking any risk that wasn't absolutely essential. No more testing himself against street thugs. No more venturing into new, un-scouted territories. His world contracted to a single, focused purpose: final preparation.
He found the perfect location after weeks of searching: a forgotten warehouse on the very edge of the industrial zone, where the regulated hum of the city gave way to the silent, polluted expanse beyond the secondary wall. It was abandoned, its ownership lost to bureaucratic entropy. The roof was mostly intact, keeping the interior dry. It was quiet, the sound of the city a distant murmur.
This is where it happens, he thought, the certainty absolute. This is the antechamber.
He claimed a corner reinforced by a thick, grimy support pillar. He cleared the area of debris, swept it with a makeshift broom of bundled wires. He hid caches of supplies—water in sealed bottles, non-perishable food, clean rags, a backup knife. He mentally mapped every exit, every potential hiding spot, every piece of movable cover.
This was his staging ground. His launchpad into hell.
Year Six – The Threshold
The dreams began three days before his sixteenth birthday. They were not nightmares, not yet.
They were whispers in a language of rust and static. A pressure building behind his eyes, not painful, but insistent, like a thumb pressing on his forehead. A pervasive, unnerving sense of being observed—not by a person, but by a vast, cold, and utterly impersonal attention. It felt like standing in a silent museum, aware that the exhibits were aware of you.
His body knew before his mind fully accepted it. The lethargy became a constant companion. The world took on a slightly muffled quality, as if he were viewing it through a thin pane of fogged glass. Hunger and thirst became distant signals. Sleep pulled at him with gravitational force.
By the time he stumbled into the dim interior of his warehouse sanctuary on the final day, he was barely conscious, moving on autopilot and sheer will. The walk from his last water source had felt like a marathon. He made it to his prepared corner, his breathing shallow.
As he lay down on the cold, familiar concrete, his back against the solid, reassuring bulk of the support pillar, he positioned his best knife within easy reach. It was pure habit, a final gesture of defiance to the helplessness he refused to feel.
A strange, thin smile touched his cracked lips.
"…Took you long enough," he slurred into the dusty air.
His eyelids, heavy as stone slabs, drooped. The already dim light from a high, grimy window blurred, smearing into streaks of gray and brown.
The world dissolved into a meaningless swirl.
And then—
A sensation of falling, not downward, but inward, into a depth within himself he never knew existed.
Darkness, thick and sentient, swallowed him whole.
[Aspirant…]
The voice was nothing like the bored god's. It was colder, older, devoid of amusement or personality. It was the sound of glacial ice cracking over a deep, dark ocean. It resonated not in his ears, but in the marrow of his soul.
[Welcome to the Nightmare Spell.]
Light flared, but it was a cold, soundless light that illuminated nothing. In that non-space, symbols burned into existence—arcane, geometric, pulsing with a law-like power. They were not letters he could read, but concepts he understood: ENTRY. ASSESSMENT. TRIAL.
[First Nightmare detected.]
[Soul resonance: stable.]
[Aspect evaluation in progress…]
In the heart of the burgeoning chaos, the boy—now a young man forged in six years of concrete and shadow—opened his eyes within the dream. The childish fear was gone, burned away. What remained was a focused, razor-edged anticipation.
He smiled, a real smile this time, full of a weary, hardened acceptance.
"…Let's see," he said, his voice clear and steady in the psychic chamber. "Let's see what I've earned."