The village had returned to uneasy silence, but jain could not sleep. The evets of the night kept replaying in his head, wrapping around his mind like creeping vines. The storyteller's words echoed in the quiet of his room, each syllable carrying weight of something ancient and inescapable. you must find the gifted.
But how? how did one find preople who did not even know what they were?
The fire had burned low in the hearth, casting flickering shadows across the wooden walls of his modest home. The wind outside had not quieted. it still howled, an unnatural sound, not quiet of this world. He lay on his cot, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed over his chest as if to hold himself together.
Then, the pain struck.
A lightning hot branded seared across the base of his spine, sudden and unbearable. Jain arched upward, a ragged cry escaping his throat as his body locked in place. it felt as though something ancient was being carved into his very bones, as if molten iron had been poured into his flesh. He crawled at his blanket, grasping through clenched teeth.
Then, as suddeny as it had come, the pain vanished.
jain collasped back onto the cot, his body slick with swear, his breaths ragged and uneven. The silence that followed after was thick, pressing against his ears, but his body still thrummed with the sensation of something wrong. something changed.
Slowly, with trembling hands, he reached behind him, fingers searching the skin where the pain had been. There was no wound, no raised scar—nothing. But something was there. something unseen.
His pulse pounded as his gaze flickered to the small, battered mirror propped against the wall. Hesitantly, he pushed himself up, legs unsteady beneath him. Each step towards the mirror felt like stepping toward something inescapable, something waiting just beyond his understanding.
He leaned forward, breath fogging the glass. For a moment, he saw only himself—dark eyes shadowed by exhaustion, jaw cenched tight. Then the light shifted. And he saw it.
Just at the base of his neck, barely visible beneath his skin, was a mark. Not a scar, not a birthmark. A symbol, a star.
Not like those in the sky—its edges twisted, ancient, woven into something beyond human craftsmanship. it pulsed faintly, as though alive, as though responding to something unseen.
Jain's breath hitched. His hands gripped the table for support, knuckles white. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the moment he did, the whispers came, soft at first, a breath against his ear.
Then they grew, slithering, shifting, curling into his mind like fingers pressing too deep. They did not speak words he understood, yet he knew them all the same.
Awaken. Awaken. Awaken.
Jain staggered back, knocking over a wooden stool. The sound shattering the quiet, but the whispers did not stop. They deepened, sinking into his bones. The air in the room thickened, pressing in on him. His heartbeat pounded in his skull.
Then the wind changed. Not outside, inside.
A whisper of cold air brushed the back of hsi neck, carrying something else with it. A presence. A watching, waiting thing.
Jain's gaze darted towards the window. The shutters trembled as the wind pressed against them, rattling the wood . But it was more than wind. Something was there.
A shape, just beyond the glass, tall, Unmoving, Watching.
Jain's breath came in shallow gasps. His body screamed at him to run, but his legs would not obey. He was rooted in place, as if the very air had thickened around him, weighing him down.
Then the laughter came, not human laughter. Not quite.
It was distant and stretched, as if carried across an endless chasm, yet somehow right there in the room with him. it twisted at the edges, too high, then too low, never settling into a sound that belonged to anything living.
Jain's fingers twitched toward the small dagger on his table. A pitiful weapon, he knew, against something he did not understand. But his body moved on instinct, deesperate for anything real to cling to.
The wind howled again, and this time, the shutters slammed open.
The candle flickered violently. The embers in the hearth guttered, splitting tiny sparks into the dark. And for the briefest moment, he saw what stood beyond the window.
Not a man.
The shape was wrong. its limbs too long, its head tilted at an unnatural angle. And its eyes—
Jain didn't realize he had moved until he was across the room, his back against the opposite wal, daggered so tight his knuckes ached.
The whispered clawed at his mind, pulling, urging—
A darkness, deeper thatn the shadows cast by the im candlelight, seeped into the room. It slithered along the wooden wallsmlike living ink, stretching toward him. Jain's breath hitched as the temperature plummeted, his breath now visible in the flickering light.
A shape, humanoid but wrong, emerged from the blackness, stepping forward without sound. It did not walk—it glided, its presence consuming the space around it. Jain could not see its face, but he felt its eyes. Felt them sink into him, tearing him apart, and suddenly his body reacted before his mind.
A searing heat burst behing his eyes, and suddenly it glew.
Blinding, unnatural light flooded his vision as his entire body lurched forward. The space around him shattered. The room, the floor, the walls were gone. He was weightless, falling and rising all at once. And then he was somewhere else.
A battlefield, smoke choked the air, the sky above was bruised, red and black clouds swirling like an open wound. Below chaos reigned, figures clashed, steel meeting flesh, magic cracking in the space between. jain saw the Gifted, fighting against horrors not of this world, also the possesed, their eyes glowed with unnatural hunger, their twisted forms once human but now something else entirely. Jain saw warriors he did not know but whose names carved themselves into his mind as if branched there by fate.
Elias the stormcaller.
seraphine the unbrooken.
Tael of the twin flames.
Tardyn the hollow blade.
Veyna, weaver of echoes.
One by one, he watched them fall, their cries split through the air, their weapons shattered, their bodies were consumed by the darkness that spread like wildfire. The Gifted were strong, but they were losing. Dying. And he—he was standing amidst it all, unseen yet present, forced to witness their fates.
A voice—ancient, heavy as stone—whispered through the storm. "You will rember their names. you will find them. Or you will share their fate."
Jain gasped, his body slamming back into the present like a drowning man breaking the surface. He wasa back in his room—on his kneew, dagger in hand; heart pounding so violently it hurt. The shadow was gone. The air was still. But the vision remained.
Jain's stomach twisted. He had known the signs. He had heard them. And yet, he had not understood until now.
The war that had been buried was waking.
And now, so was he