The world believed darkness was ruled by devils.
They were wrong.
Darkness was empty.
Hell itself stood abandoned, for every devil had already found a home among humans.
Stein learned this too late.
He had grown into adulthood without ever knowing where he came from. Seventeen years ago, someone had left him at the edge of a quiet village—no note, no mark, no memory. The villagers raised him because they had no reason not to. Or perhaps because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't.
No one spoke of that night.
Even now, when Stein watched them whisper among themselves, their voices dropped, their eyes refused to meet his. Fear clung to them like a sickness—old, rotting, and unresolved.
Stein did not understand it.
The village lay deep within the countryside, far from the capital, far from wars, far from the attention of kings. Life was simple. Predictable. Or so it seemed.
That night, sleep abandoned him.
His dreams were wrong—twisted fragments of events that felt remembered rather than imagined. He saw himself dying again and again, each time in a different way, each time in a different place. Time bent inside those dreams, folding back on itself, whispering truths he was not meant to hear.
When he woke, his heart raced, but his mind found no answers.
Morning came.
Stein continued his work as usual, exhausted yet functional, unaware that somewhere beyond his perception, he was already dead.
In another timeline, stein had reached the village gates.
In another, fire had consumed the fields.
In another, screams never stopped.
Days passed—or perhaps they only pretended to.
Then the truth arrived without warning.
Soldiers bearing the banners of a neighboring kingdom stormed the village. There was no declaration, no mercy. Homes were torn apart. Lives were ended without reason. The ground drank blood it never asked for.
Stein stood frozen.
Threatened. Surrounded. Powerless.
One by one, the villagers who had raised him fell. The same people who feared him. The same people who protected him.
And when there was nothing left to destroy, they turned to him.
Stein did not fight.
Stein did not run.
At the end, his head fell from his shoulders, striking the earth with a sound that echoed far beyond the village.
But death did not claim him.
Because Stein was not meant to die only once.
As his vision faded, something ancient stirred—something that existed outside time, outside guilt, outside mercy.
And somewhere, in a reality that had not yet broken, the sin of Stein was about to be committed.