"Soul Crown: Curse Erosion"
When the seventh toll of midnight shuddered through the air, Adam’s knuckles cracked with a sickening pop. He clenched a blood-soaked leather glove between his teeth, watching his irises bleed from amber to feral green in the grimy mirror. This marked his 109th full moon in this alien world—a world where the lycanthropic curse clung to his bones like a parasite, yet still, against all odds, had not devoured the last shreds of his humanity.
Three years ago, Adam had been nothing more than a corporate drone in a cubicle, debugging code under fluorescent lights. Everything changed when a subway explosion hurled him through a vortex of flames. He still remembered the surreal moment his hand phased through molten steel, plunging him into a void streaked with violet auroras. When he awoke, he was curled in an iron cage etched with glowing runes, the verdict of his trial echoing in an unfamiliar tongue: “Otherworldly beast—banished to the Evernight Citadel.”
The Citadel—a gargantuan fortress suspended above an ocean of clouds—was humanity’s final bulwark against the abyssal horrors below, and a prison for all non-human races. Adam learned to hide the silver wolven markings snaking up his neck beneath scarves, surviving as a black-market peddler in the slums, trading salvaged electronics from his old world. Every full moon, he retreated to a derelict altar in the catacombs’ third layer, chaining himself to a stone sarcophagus. Amid the searing pain of claws rending flesh, visions haunted him: a crown of burning cogs floating at the heart of the cosmos, like a deity’s discarded relic.
“That’s the Soul Crown,” rasped One-Eyed Maggie, the fortune-teller, her cigarette smoke curling around Adam’s sketch of the vision. “Legends say it can tear reality itself… but the Grand Inquisitor shattered it into seven fragments three centuries ago. They’re hidden—” Her words died as steam-powered airships roared overhead, searchlights from the Citadel’s enforcers flooding the alley.
The first corpse appeared the night Adam infiltrated the Central Library disguised as a janitor. The victim hung from the bronze statue of the God of Knowledge, a dagger of volcanic glass embedded where his heart should have been—a ritual execution reserved for lycanthrope traitors. By dawn, the Evernight Gazette blared headlines: “Wolfkin Terror Attack—Citywide Curfew Enacted.”
The true nightmare began on the third full moon. Adam awoke in the catacombs to snapped chains glistening with another’s blood, his fist clutching a shred of fabric stamped with the Inquisition’s sigil. Worse, fractured memories surfaced: a masked man in a rain-lashed clocktower, pressing a shard of light into his chest.
“Your veins hum with the Crown’s resonance,” hissed a nocturnal elf assassin materializing from shadows, her cloak embroidered with wisteria patterns that mirrored the auroras of Adam’s transit. “The Inquisition is dissecting every wolfkin alive—and you’re their prime specimen. Unless we claim the other fragments first.”
