Rain poured like shattered glass over the cobblestone streets of Nuvol. The wind howled through the alleys, carrying the scent of wet iron and smoke, and the city seemed to shiver under the weight of the storm.
Oculus was six. Six years old, drenched to the skin, heart pounding like a drum in his chest. He had just seen something he would never forget. Something that would never leave him, no matter how many years passed.
His father... strong, steady, someone who had always been the anchor of their small family, was being taken. Masked men, moving with a precision that made the night feel colder, lifted him effortlessly and vanished into the shadows. Oculus' tiny hands reached for him, but the distance between them might as well have been the width of a chasm.
"Father!" he screamed, but the rain swallowed his voice. His brothers, Auris and Nasus, clung to him, trembling silently, too afraid to act. Even at six, Oculus understood something strange: the world could take everything in a second.
And then… he felt it. A presence, still as the storm itself, watching. Someone... or something... observing him, laughing quietly in the corner of the night. Later, he would learn the name: Noctua. But now, he only remembered the gaze, cold yet patient, like it had been waiting for this moment all along.
He fell to his knees in the rain, chest heaving, fists clenched in mud. The city felt impossibly large, impossibly empty. His father was gone, and even the storm seemed to mourn with him.
That was fourteen years ago… Oculus thought bitterly, staring at the raindrops clinging to the windowpane in his small apartment. Why think of it now?
Now, at twenty, maybe twenty-three, memories of that night were sharper than the first cut. The pain, the fear, the sense of helplessness... it lingered, etched into his soul like a scar that refused to fade. It was not just sorrow. It was fire. The fire of a promise unspoken, a vow that had never left him: he would find the truth. He would find his father.
The city outside was quieter than Nuvol had ever been. Rain tapped softly against the glass, almost like whispers, almost like secrets waiting to be uncovered. Oculus' hands gripped the edge of the table, knuckles white, and his mind raced with fragments of the past, questions with no answers, and a strange pull he didn't understand yet... the first threads of a journey that would stretch across years, lands, and fates beyond imagining.
Somewhere, in the shadowed corners of memory and present, he could feel it again. Not clearly. Not yet. But always there. Noctua. Watching. Waiting. Laughing quietly at the patience of eternity.
Oculus exhaled, shoulders tense. This was only the beginning. Only the intro. The story had already begun, though he did not yet know where it would lead.