Night cloaked the forgotten world in silence. Under a moonless sky, a shard of starlight cut through the void. A fallen fragment of a once-divine soul bound in cold, broken iron. It descended like a dying meteor, silent and unseen, toward a remote valley where ancient pines stood guard over crumbling stone. With a hiss of air and a tremor in the dark soil, the fragment embedded itself in the earth. No witness marked its arrival. Only the wind stirred, curious but uneasy, carrying the faint taste of ozone and ashes.
For a long time, there was only darkness and stillness. Seasons whispered past in endless procession. Spring rains that washed the jagged metal clean, summer moss that crept over it like a gentle shroud, autumn leaves that swirled and decayed at its edges, winter frost that tried to bite into unyielding god-forged steel. Centuries slipped by as quietly as dying breaths. The world changed, but in this hidden glade change came slowly. A young sapling grew crooked beside the buried blade fragment, year by year thickening into an ancient, twisted tree that bowed over the shard protectively. The stones of a once-proud shrine, long ago fallen to ruin, sank deeper into the soil. Lichen and moss covered every surface, mute witnesses to the slow passage of time.
Deep within the broken sword, something stirred. At first it was only a faint awareness. A flicker of consciousness adrift in an endless night. The fragment of soul knew nothing of form or time. It drifted in dream, barely more than an echo of a person. Yet, it felt pain. It felt longing. In the abyssal silence of its slumber, the soul fragment clung to a single image. The face of a girl, blurred at the edges like a half-forgotten dream, yet as luminous as the moon. She hovered at the center of its consciousness, bringing a serene light to the darkness.
Who was she? The soul did not know her name, did not know its own name, but her face was a lifeline. The memory of her gentle eyes and sad smile kept the fragment from dissolving into madness. In moments when the sliver of awareness flickered, nearly snuffed out by the void, that moonlit face would bloom in its mind and ward off the emptiness.
Time flowed on, an endless river of nights and days. Slowly, ever so slowly, the fragment felt the world around it. It tasted the earth in which the sword shard was buried, felt the throb of roots from the tree that grew beside it. It listened to the murmur of the wind through pine needles and the patter of rain soaking the soil. These sensations were faint, filtered through layers of metal and magic, but they were there. Each one was like a droplet of water to a parched throat, nourishing the dormant soul. With each year, the fragment's awareness expanded, like a candle flame gaining strength. Where once there was only darkness inside, now there were flickers of color and sound borrowed from the world above. The green of moss, the silver of starlight on quiet nights, the distant call of a lonely bird.
Yet as awareness grew, so too did suffering. The soul fragment began to remember fear. In its dreamlike state, it heard whispers that curled through its consciousness like smoke.
Betrayal... they sighed.
Traitor... they accused in voices echoing with hatred and sorrow.
At times, the fragment felt phantom pains as if bound by invisible chains, and it would shudder within the steel. It recalled, without context, the sensation of immense power lost. Like a limb torn from one's body, an emptiness where once divine strength had flowed. These were the seeds of nightmares that plagued the soul as it slumbered. Half-formed visions of golden sigils wrapping around it, of cold laughter and a circle of faces looming in judgment. Among those faces, one momentarily shone bright. The face of that girl, looking at it not with anger, but with tears in her luminous eyes. The vision always shattered there, leaving the fragment awash in grief and confusion. Was she weeping for it? Or was she part of the betrayal that damned it to this fate? The soul fragment did not know, and the uncertainty festered like a wound.
During the darkest nights, the boundary between the soul and the world thinned. The fragment sometimes forgot that it was a separate thing. In the black silence, it felt as though the line between itself and the moss and the rain had blurred. It was the raindrops soaking into the ground; it was the wind sighing through hollow shrine stones. In those moments of dissolution, a strange peace almost emerged. As if the soul were merging with the Dao, returning to the great oneness of all things. But always, a spark of self would flare within a longing that would not allow it to fade away. That tiny ember of identity held the fragment intact against the pull of oblivion.
Who am I? it wondered in voiceless thought.
Why do I suffer? came another thought, echoing in the emptiness. There was no answer, only the drip of water in the dark and the slow echo of centuries.
On one particularly eerie night, under the pale gaze of a crescent moon, the dormant soul began to awaken in earnest. A storm had passed at dusk, leaving behind a creeping mist that carpeted the forest floor. The air was thick with the scent of wet earth and something faintly metallic. Beneath the old tree, the broken sword shimmered with cold light. Soul-force pulsed within the fragment of steel. Weak, irregular, but growing stronger. The surrounding spiritual energy of the world, the very Qi in the air, had begun to gather, swirling gently toward the sword as if drawn by a magnet. Small creatures of the forest felt it and fled; an old fox watching from a distance whined in fear and slunk away into the brush. The glade grew deathly quiet. No night bird sang, no insect chirr. Only the sigh of the mist and a soft thrumming hum from beneath the moss marked that something unnatural was brewing.