The sky above the city of Rosandale looked dull, wrapped in a bronze hue that hung like dust that simply refused to fall.
In front of the large, rotting wooden gate, two guards stood stiff—like statues molded from sleepless nights.
In one of the guard's hands, the worn-out bag now lay open. His rough fingers touched a small, gleaming object nested inside.
Two metal badges. Each engraved with a hunter's emblem and a registration number.
"Where did you get these?"
The guard's voice was hoarse, heavy with suspicion. His eyes flicked between Elira and Kael, as if trying to dissect their intent from the faint creases on their foreheads.
Elira opened her mouth. Her breath caught.
"We—we... I mean, Bert and—"
"—We were attacked on the road," Kael cut in.
His voice was flat. Unassuming. But behind every word lay an inhuman precision.
"I... I'm Bert's distant cousin. He asked us to bring this to his family in the city. We don't know what happened—just... blood and screaming. We ran."
He lowered his gaze. The shadow of a child's face, void of emotion, cloaked his small frame.
The guard didn't respond right away. He kept staring at Kael, as if weighing whether a lie could truly be that cold, that calm, coming from a mouth so small.
Then his gaze shifted to Elira, who was now truly crying. Real tears. No need to be trained to fear.
"...You're lucky this city's not too strict," he muttered at last, then nodded toward the gate.
Kael offered a quiet thank you. like a child raised in a world that never existed.
But their world had died long ago.
Rosandale greeted them with a gentle clamor: a modest market with the ringing of hammered bells, horses pulling carts with tattered cloths draped over them, and merchants offering fruit that looked far too ripe to be trusted. The buildings of stone and wood towered asymmetrically, as if they had grown from soil that rejected logic.
Kael walked slowly, taking it all in.
This was truly a different world.
He saw an old poet sitting atop an empty apple crate, reciting verses to pigeons that didn't even listen.
A mage floated across the sky, his robe fluttering like a broken wing.
A creature—four-legged, with eyes on the sides of its neck—darted across the street, unnoticed—as if normalcy had been redefined long ago.
"This world," Kael whispered, "is in deeper ruin than the hell I abandoned."
But amid the chaos, a shadow emerged. Not from his own memory, but from Bert and Webster's. A faint tug in his mind. A map not drawn by human hands.
Kael grasped Elira's hand. "Follow me."
They left the city center, walking along cobbled paths that grew quieter with each step.
The scent of warm bread gave way to the tang of rusted metal. Their footsteps passed houses whose windows had never been opened.
Then Kael stopped.
Before them stood a wooden house, faded and bent like an old bone that had forgotten how to bear weight. On its door, the number: 492.
He tried the door. Locked. But he found the key easily in Bert's bag. The smell of burnt soup greeted them—faint, like a hungry ghost that never finished cooking.
Kael stepped inside. Everything was just as it was in Bert's shattered memories—
"This was their home," Kael said softly.
Elira didn't ask anything. She simply sat in the corner, her body exhausted, her eyes hollow.
Night fell like a tired curtain dragged down against its will.
Kael sat cross-legged on the cold floor, calmly closing his eyes. He focused his entire awareness on the faint vibrations lingering—the remnants of Bert and Webster's deaths, fused into fragments of his soul.
He tried to dive in, to slip through, to steal shards of memory that hadn't yet been destroyed.
But something resisted.
The waves of memory weren't like water he could dip his fingers into. They were like lava seeping through fractured stone—scorching, reluctant, uninviting. His body tensed. His head throbbed. His blood burned.
"Not... yet,"
he murmured, slowly opening his eyes.
This human body... was still too weak.
He stood. Watched Elira curled up in silence, trying to sleep on a thin cloth. She trembled in silence, like a leaf too afraid to rustle. She looked like a dry leaf too ashamed to ask for help.
Kael stepped closer.
"You said I have the strength of a mage. Then tell me—how does one wield magic?"
Elira opened her eyes slightly, then shut them again.
"I... don't know," she whispered. "My core is weak. I can only cast a spell or two… and I don't even know how I do it."
Kael fell silent. He understood. Once, when he still had wings, he could tear through reality just by opening his eyes. But he had never understood how his power worked. It was like breathing: natural, automatic, without knowing the mechanics.
Now... even breathing felt like a forgotten skill.
Morning came like a fresh wound: quiet, yet painful.
Kael rose early. Elira was still asleep, her face buried in her arms and what remained of the night. Kael stepped outside quietly. The morning air carried the scents of the market, smoke, and a hint of stale liquor.
He pulled up the dark hood that hung loosely from his shoulders, then stepped out with a knife in hand, like a small shadow refusing to be owned.
Kael moved through the alleys of the city in silence, his hood covering most of his face. The heavy morning air was thick with the stench of salted fish, old sweat, and burnt oil.
He neared a small market—not the city center, just a cramped area with cloths strung overhead, casting shifting shadows like lazy spiders.
But every time he tried to listen in on conversations, the noise blurred together. Too many shouting vendors, laughter, and taunts from street kids mocking his ragged clothes.
"Get lost, brat! This isn't your place!" a fat woman yelled from behind a cart.
Kael drifted away without looking back. All he gained was a headache and a faint hunger from the scent of charred bread.
He crept into a narrow, empty alley, hoping for clearer sound—but found only two cats fighting over a corpse.
"Had I chosen the wrong place? Or maybe... they truly knew nothing?"
He nearly turned back—until he heard it.
Magic.
His eyes caught two men in guard uniforms, but with different emblems—likely city guards. They sat under the shade of a tree.
They weren't on duty—just loitering, bottles in hand, laughing lazily as if the world didn't need them.
Kael wedged himself behind a pile of rotting wooden crates and listened. Their voices were faint but clear enough:
"...If you've got a Circle, you can control elements."
"Not everyone can, idiot. You need a Core first. You're either born with it, or you build one."
"All official mages are registered at the White Tower. Unregistered ones? Wild. Crazy."
"Rumor has it magic came from the skies. Now it runs through dirt like filth."
"They say if you eat soulvine root, sometimes it awakens your core... but sometimes it melts your soul."
Kael didn't understand all of it. But the words formed a web that began to reveal the structure behind the world's chaos.
Circle. Core. Tower. Soulvine. Magic—either inherited or forced.
Kael closed his eyes.
"I want more than this."
He paused.
"All I need is one small lie. The rest will be built by their own belief. Evil doesn't need power—just misguided trust."
"What should I use... should I tremble, wear a pained expression—"
"What do they call it?"
"Oh yeah—fear."
"I have to start with fear," he murmured. "That's what they understand."
He waited.
Long enough.
One of the guards left, leaving his drunk companion behind.
He slit his arm lightly with a small knife. Blood trickled slowly—just enough to look fragile, never enough to cause harm.
Then he ran.
His small footsteps struck the stones of the alley with precise rhythm. When he was close enough, he let himself fall—his tiny body crashing down like it had been struck by an invisible force.
"AAARGH!!"
His scream tore through the morning air. Loud enough to draw attention,but not so loud as to seem rehearsed.
The guard jumped to his feet. "What the hell was that?!"
Kael trembled, hugging himself. His eyes welled with fake tears, summoned from deep within—a technique he had learned as a child, when pretending to be hungrier than he was could earn him more candy from his parents.
"I... I told him I didn't want to go… but he got mad… he shoved me..."
A stranger stepped closer. "Who pushed you? Kid, are you hurt?"
Kael pointed at the guard—still frozen, not quite aware of what was unfolding.
"Him... he said he'd give me candy... but I just wanted to go home... he got mad... he—"
The words didn't finish. But precisely because they didn't, they left a gap—a gap filled by the darkest corners of adult imagination.
The man instantly lost it. "You bastard! This kid's bleeding! You think this is funny?!"
"What are you talking about?! I don't even know him!"
Passersby began to gather. Whispers turned into noise.
"That kid's crying!"
"Did you see the cut on his arm?"
"You think being a city guard gives you a free pass?!"
"What kind of sick shit did you do, coward?!"
Kael looked around at the crowd, then lowered his head like a perfect victim—trembling, weak, helpless. He knew the world loved illusions. And he offered it flawlessly.
And as their eyes locked onto the "villain," Kael moved.
He felt it still wasn't enough.
The small blade he'd hidden earlier was now in his hand. He stabbed deeper—right into the wound he'd made before.
A scream. Blood sprayed.
Panic erupted. The accused guard turned, startled.
"What the hell's going on?!"
Before he could defend himself, someone from the crowd punched him hard.
"Ugh—!"
The guard collapsed to the ground, gasping—not from exhaustion, but from the quiet ecstasy of a plan going perfectly.
The first punch opened the gates.
The second burned away hesitation.
And the rest became a symphony of violence: angry fists rained down on the guard's face, fueled by fury that wasn't theirs—but Kael's, carefully seeded.
"I didn't—ARGH!"
"You sick freak! That kid could've died!"
"How dare you touch a child in this city!"
Blood soaked the guard's uniform. His body was punched, kicked, beaten and thrown down again and again. No one knew who struck first, or who struck last. His face swelled, his eye burst, his teeth scattered.
Kael stood a short distance away. His small frame trembled. Blood dripped from the wound he gave himself.
He wasn't crying anymore.
He didn't need to.
As the crowd began to lose steam, their rage giving way to fatigue, all that remained was the barely breathing body of the guard—half-conscious, dying but not yet dead. None dared finish the job.
A man shouted, "Quick, call the city watch! This is getting out of hand!"
Another yelled, "Take the kid to the outpost!"
The focus began to scatter. Some ran off to get help. Others hovered near the guard, trying to revive him—not out of concern for guilt or innocence, but because it was the thing to do.
And in that razor-thin opening—Kael moved.
His small steps were quiet. His face showed no hatred, no smile. Like a tiny ghost in the calm after the storm.
He crouched next to the broken man.
No one noticed; they were too busy shouting over each other, too busy playing heroes in stories no one would ever hear.
Kael placed a hand on the man's forehead. Just for a moment. Like a child pretending to care for a man he barely knew.
But beneath that simple gesture, his other hand slipped deeper.
It slid behind the skull, fingers tracing the base of the head, searching the gap between cervical vertebrae.
Press. Push. Twist.
No scream.
Just a soft—crack—like a twig snapped in haste.
Silence.
He was dead.
As a former Reaper, Kael had seen humans use this method countless times.
Kael pressed his fingers gently against the man's forehead once more.
Then he stood up. Still. Blood dripped silently from his fingers, lost in the noise of false concern.
He turned his face away, wiped his hand on his own cloak, and stepped back—past citizens too busy calling for help, past a world too stubborn to see that among them, a fallen angel was learning how to kill the human way.
"Justice, in the hands of man, is just a wooden stick. It's swung not when truth speaks—but when emotion screams the loudest."
Kael turned at the end of the alley and stopped.
His body had recovered. The cut on his arm barely stung. But more importantly, The vibration had returned—subtle, but undeniable.
The vibration from the guard's memory.
He closed his eyes. And like a curtain slowly drawn, layers of false thought peeled away.
The memory pulled him under—and then: Light. Sound. Fragments.
A room.
Inside: a large orb gleaming like an eye, glowing with golden light.
A wide table at the center.
Figures in dark robes sat around it. They never used names—only symbols. One wore a medal marked with a third eye. Another held a staff etched with violet-black runes.
"He wants to purify it himself," said an old man in the memory. "But the artifact resisted. It requires... a great sacrifice."
Sacrifice?
The man stepped forward—not to me, but to the one whose eyes I now borrowed.
"Go find an easy victim for the first activation of the annihilation spell."
"Find someone with no family. No one who'll come looking when they disappear."
"Once the spell is active, we'll sacrifice the entire city for that ancient relic."
Kael left the memory—not because it overwhelmed him, but because it had finished speaking.
This memory wasn't like Bert's or Webster's.
Maybe the man was weaker—easier to enter.
No one knew Kael had just stolen a secret.
Something hidden inside the landlord's house. Something... alive.
His steps were calm, though his breathing was still uneven. The world returned to silence inside his mind—and only one sentence echoed in the void between memory and reality:
"If all this is about sacrifice... then I must be the only one who walks away whole."
The evening wind dragged the scent of blood off his clothes.
A few people glanced his way—but no one asked.
Humans only care when the blood is their own.
As he stepped into the district where the house stood, the sky began to change—
a pale orange caught on the edges of old rooftops.
Kael paused at the end of the street.
He stared at the house numbered 492 from a distance.
Something inside him tensed...
as if his body knew before his mind could assemble the possibilities.
"Something's wrong."
He drew in a slow breath, slid the knife back beneath his belt,
and tightened the hood he'd worn since morning—"
a dull gray cloth that kept his eyes hidden from anyone who dared look too long.
His steps softened.
He wasn't in a hurry.
The darkness left behind by the sun could never compare
to the kind of darkness carried by someone who knew what was about to happen.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Kael looked up.
At the far end of the street, a large man was banging on the front door of the house.
His fists were heavy, his voice hoarse:
"Come out! Bert! Webster! I know you're in there!
Don't think you can fool me with your cheap little tricks!"
Kael stepped forward, standing straight.
"Huh? Who the hell are you?"
"I'm... some kind of cousin. From far off."
The man squinted, heavy footsteps closing the distance.
"I'm their father."
"And they've never had any distant relatives."
Their eyes met.
The air turned sharp.
That evening... felt like Kael's first real test—
his first step as a true liar.