The lie screamed louder than the truth ever had.
Nerin's hand trembled around the knife—bone-hilted, ghost-weighted. Its edge whispered things in dead languages, none of them comforting. The girl's chains rattled above the flooded street, orbiting her too-wide grin like vultures orbiting a battlefield. The trial had begun.
But it wasn't a fight. Not yet.
The Dusklands didn't want combat. They wanted confession. Every corner of the collapsing city seemed to lean inward, listening. Waiting to see what kind of monster Nerin would become.
She didn't lunge. She simply was—closer now, flickering in and out of places she shouldn't fit, her shadow spilling behind her in impossible directions.
"Lesson one," she crooned again, voice splintered with amusement and something deeper—grief, maybe, or hunger. "Survival demands a cost."
Then she moved.
It wasn't fast. It was wrong. Like watching someone skip frames in a film that hadn't been made yet. One moment she was across the street, the next her hand grazed his throat—a chain slithering toward his eyes.
Nerin didn't think. He reacted.
He stabbed—not at her, but at her reflection in the oily water pooling at their feet.
The scream wasn't hers.
The world buckled.
Everything collapsed inward, sucked through the eye of a scream. Rain reversed mid-fall. Color drained from the sky like it was ashamed to be seen. And then—
Black.
When Nerin came to, he was standing.
The city was gone. Not behind him. Not beneath him. Just… unmade. Replaced.
Now he stood inside a cavernous cathedral, formed not of stone but of bone and whispers. The walls wept candlelight. Each flame inside each brazier held a heartbeat, fluttering faint and fragile.
In the center of the cathedral: a raised dais, carved with a sun cracked in two—the Hollow Mark.
His Mark.
It pulsed beneath his skin. Cold. Alive.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION:
[Path Selection Initiated][Aspect: Echo of the Forgotten][Attribute: Adaptive Instinct][Trait: Hollow Memory]
You are the echo of those who never survived. Choose the lie you'll wear into truth.
Three doors materialized around him. They bled ink from their frames. Above each, carved in dying tongues, were words not meant to be read—only felt.
The Blade That Remembers
The Mask That Lies True
The Throne That Devours
His feet moved without permission. Toward the second.
The moment he stepped through, the world blinked.
[Path Chosen: MINDMIRROR]
"Every lie you kill becomes a truth you can wear."
Mirrors unfolded from the floor, from the walls, from his skin. Each showed a different version of himself. One a warlord. One a king. One a child who never escaped the fire.
One—bleeding, smiling—stepped forward.
"Name yourself," the mirror said.
Nerin opened his mouth, and another voice came out.
"Commander Veyr," he said. "Breaker of Halgen. Defender of the Eastern Rift."
[New Identity Acquired: Veyr][False Authority: Level 1]
Pain lanced through him. Not just in his mind—through it. Like someone driving nails into memories that didn't belong. Tactics, formations, wounds he'd never taken—all buried inside him now.
And worse… they fit.
The knife in his hand changed. Not visibly, not physically. But in meaning. What had once been a shard of desperation was now a symbol of command. A relic of war.
The Mark approved.
When the cathedral collapsed, it did so silently. Like a god exhaling its final breath.
He stood again on the streets. Not the shrine. Not the place he'd flipped the coin. This was deeper.
The city twisted around him like a wound. Buildings curled upward into the sky, their windows bleeding smoke. Roads unspooled like guts beneath a surgeon's knife.
Ahead: Blackgate.
A fortress made of obsidian grief. Its towers stabbed the heavens. Chains hung from every spire like warning bells.
And on the highest parapet, she stood again—the girl. No longer a girl.
Now she wore her own mask: not over her face, but over her past. Chains crowned her brow. Her eyes burned with reflection.
"You chose the mirror," she said, voice echoing across the dead city.
Nerin didn't answer. Didn't need to.
The lie inside him pulsed like a second heartbeat.
"You'll need it," she continued. "Because inside Blackgate, you won't just face monsters."
A beat.
"You'll face all the truths you've buried to stay sane."
[Trial Two: Gate of Reflections][Objective: Infiltrate Blackgate. Endure its truths. Do not look into your own cell.]
Nerin took one step forward. Then another.
And Blackgate opened its jaws to welcome him.
The gates loomed like fractured teeth in the bruised dusk, a black maw swallowing the weak light whole. Chains—long and rusted—hung from the jagged towers, clinking softly in the poisoned wind, sounding like the ticking of a deathwatch. Nerin stood before them, the air thick with the stench of forgotten screams and rot.
His breath came ragged, the cold biting deeper than before, as if the very shadows tried to crawl beneath his skin. The Mark pulsed faintly, a cold ember against his palm. It burned not with fire, but with a slow, spreading frost—whispering secrets in a language older than pain.
A voice echoed inside his mind, brittle and cruel:
[SYSTEM ALERT: TRIAL THREE INITIATED — BLACKGATE][OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE THE GATE OF REFLECTIONS. FACE YOUR TRUESELF.]
Nerin's eyes flickered upward, catching the warped reflections in the obsidian gates. They weren't mirrors of glass but shards of dark memory, twisting and convulsing with images not entirely his own—fragments of lives he never lived but knew all too well.
With every step forward, the ground beneath him warped, rippling like broken glass. The gates groaned open, revealing a labyrinth of endless corridors carved from bone and shadow. Each hallway breathed, walls pulsing softly as if alive, digesting light and hope.
Inside, whispers crawled through the dark—words not spoken but felt, slithering into his thoughts like vipers coiling for the kill. Faces flickered at the edges of his vision: a mother's scream, a traitor's last breath, a child's hollow smile. Memories stolen, lives broken, lies lived.
Then the first door appeared, black iron etched with a serpent coiled around a bleeding heart. Nerin hesitated, fingers tightening on his bone knife. The voice came again—this time closer, more intimate, like a lover's cruel whisper.
"You will lose yourself here," it promised. "Or become more than you ever dared."
He pushed the door open.
Inside, the room shifted, a hall of mirrors twisted by nightmare. Each reflection distorted his shape, some grotesquely thin, others bloated with despair. One showed him with too many eyes, another with teeth where skin should be.
His own voice echoed back from every surface—mocking, begging, laughing. The mask he'd chosen in the cathedral felt thin and fragile against this onslaught.
Then, from the shadows stepped a figure—familiar yet wrong. His own face, twisted in a cruel grin, eyes black voids reflecting everything he feared. The mirror-self spoke without moving lips:
"Welcome to the true trial, Commander Veyr. Here, your lies will either save you or shatter you."
Nerin's heart hammered as the mirror-self lunged, claws made of shattered promises tearing at his soul.
But Nerin fought back, stabbing with the bone knife, cutting through the illusions, the past, the lies.
Every wound he inflicted echoed in the air, burning away fragments of the mask. Pain blossomed—real and raw—but so did clarity.
As the mirror shattered into shards of night, a new voice whispered in his mind:
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: TRUTH UNLOCKED][New Attribute Acquired: Shattered Resolve][Trait Upgraded: Hollow Memory → Hollow Resolve]
The labyrinth shifted once more, the corridors bending toward a deeper darkness. The path to the next trial had opened.
But with it came a cruel realization: The Hollow Mark wasn't just a curse or a key. It was a hunger—a void that demanded more than flesh and blood.
It demanded the very essence of self.
Nerin stepped forward, shadows clinging to him like a second skin, the cold fire of the Mark burning brighter with every step.
The Gate had claimed its first blood.
And it thirsted for more.