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“You are a Null,” she had said, voice barely above a whisper. The words echoed through the chamber harder than any scream ever could.

For one disorienting moment, Caelyn couldn't separate the present from the past.

He had spent turnings trying not to remember.

But memory had always been cruel like that. It waited beneath the surface, biding its time until an opening large enough allowed it to break through

Rain hammered through the forest hard enough to sting his face as his mother dragged him through the trees beneath a dark sky without stars. Branches tore at his skin and roots caught his boots, making him stumble. It had been morning just a few bells ago!

“Blackwake,” he recalled his mother calling it.

Caelyn remembered falling more than running. Mud swallowed his boots with every stumbling step while sharp branches clawed across his arms and cheeks. Somewhere far behind them, the world burned. He remembered the strange white light flickering between the trees while black smoke rolled through the woods thick enough to choke on.

“Do not look back,” his mother kept saying.

Over and over and over again.

Her hand crushed painfully around his wrist as she pulled him forward through the dark. Caelyn remembered how terrified she sounded. She’d not been frightened in the way adults usually were when storms came, or food ran scarce during winter moons. No, this was something worse. It was the kind of terror that made her voice shake even while she tried desperately to hide it from him, but he was too perceptive.

He didn't know where they were going.

Only away.

Away from their village.

Away from the screaming.

Away from whatever had begun crawling out of the eastern currents.

The forest had sloped down through the steep eastern hills, opening onto a narrow overlook above the valley below. His mother stopped so short that Caelyn nearly collided with her from behind. He remembered the way her entire body stilled.

Then he looked down.

The village beneath them no longer looked real. Was it even a village?

Black crystal spread across the valley floor in jagged formations large enough to swallow entire buildings. It erupted through the roads and foundations like rot splitting open flesh, glowing steadily beneath the darkness with sickly silver light. The astrylite lanterns lining the streets were flickering erratically, their resonance warped and unstable.

And the silence—it was deafening.

No screams of pain.

No crackling of fire.

No wind moving through the trees.

Nothing.

It felt as though the entire world had stopped and they were in their own bubble.

Caelyn remembered pressing closer against his mother’s side while something cold and awkward sat like a weight in his chest. Even as a child, he understood instinctively that he was looking at something no one was meant to survive.

Then the fog moved.

At first, he thought it was only mist rolling through the broken streets below. But shapes slowly emerged from the silver haze, staggering unevenly through the ruins.

They were… people.

Or what had once been people.