The sunlight on Terris never offered warmth. In the jagged slums of Kenet, clinging to the skeletal edges of the Kingdom of Oakhaven, the sun was nothing but a searing eye—baking dust, destitution, and despair into a cloying, stagnant stench of rot. It was a light that did not nurture; it only accelerated the inevitable decay.
Alaric Vane swiped at his brow with a hand stained dark by soot and toil. Sweat ran in stinging rivulets into eyes the color of obsidian, blinding and bitter. Beneath his boots, the floorboards of the 'Broken Hilt' groaned in protest, a weary echo of a body that had moved without reprieve since the first gray light of dawn.
"Two more coppers," he rasped, his voice a dry scrape against the cacophony of clinking glass and the raucous, whiskey-soaked laughter of dockhands and sellswords. "Two more, and the children at Gray Cradle eat an extra loaf tonight."
The thought of his foster siblings was the only tether keeping his knees from hitting the grime. At eighteen, the weight of their survival was a phantom limb Alaric carried every waking hour. The King of Oakhaven, perched in a fortress of cold stone, spared no thought for the starving mongrels on his borders. To the crown, the Gray Cradle was merely a smudge of ash on a gilded map. Alaric nursed that hatred—a jagged loathing for the King, for the filth of Kenet, and most of all, for his own hollow impotence.
A bloated patron lurched out, leaving the sharp tang of spirits and a single, sticky copper on the table. Alaric snatched it, a desperate spark flickering in his gaze. One more.
Then, the tavern's rickety door was kicked off its hinges with a violent crack. The silence that followed was instantaneous and deafening.
Searing light flooded the room, but the shadows standing in the threshold were far more blinding. Four men. They didn't wear the frayed linen of the poor; they were draped in cured hides, iron chains, and the jagged sigil of the 'Iron Claw' mercenaries. They didn't come to drink. They brought the scent of iron and imminent slaughter.
Alaric froze, a primal alarm shrieking in his skull. Across the room, Barnaby—the tavern's corpulent, sour-faced owner—turned a shade of gray usually reserved for the dead. He dropped his rag and bolted toward the door, shoving through the paralyzed crowd to throw himself into the dirt at the lead mercenary's feet.
Through the grime-streaked window, Alaric watched Barnaby prostrate himself, his frame convulsing with tremors. The leader, a towering silhouette with burn scars that had melted half his face into a mask of melted wax, remained motionless. His one good eye peered down at Barnaby with the clinical indifference one might show a crushed beetle.
Movement caught Alaric's eye. Lica, Barnaby's daughter, barely fourteen, stood paralyzed in the corner. Her face, usually so placid, crumpled into a mask of raw terror as she watched her father beg.
One of the scarred man's curs prowled inside, reeking of stale sweat and old blood. His gaze locked onto the girl like a predator scenting a kill. Alaric tried to shout, to tell her to run, but the air turned to lead in his throat.
Without a word, the man lunged, fist tangling in Lica's dull blonde hair. Her shriek ripped through the tavern's stagnant air. He dragged her out like a sack of grain, indifferent to her knees splintering against the rough floorboards, and threw her into the filth beside her father.
Sring.
The sound of cold steel leaving a scabbard sang through the air. A broadsword caught the unforgiving sun. The leader stepped forward, his voice a low, tectonic rumble that shook the very walls.
"Barnaby the Coward!" he barked, his iron-shod boot grinding into Barnaby's spine, pinning him to the muck. "Did you think this rat-hole was a sanctuary? You staked your own flesh and blood as collateral for your debts. The clock has stopped. We've come to collect."
Lica's screams spiraled into hysteria. Barnaby wailed, his forehead grinding into the dirt. "Mercy, my Lord! Mercy! I don't have it—not yet! She's just a child! Please, spare her!"
The scarred man's lip curled. "Time is a luxury for the living, Barnaby. And we're out of patience."
He swung.
The blade was a silver blur, faster than thought.
Crassh.
A geyser of crimson erupted, painting the dust. Both of Lica's arms were sheared off just below the elbow. The cuts were sickeningly clean. Lica didn't scream at first—her mind simply fractured under the weight of the agony—before an inhuman, rattling keening tore from her throat. She collapsed, the stumps of her limbs geysering thick, hot red into the thirsty earth.
"Pay the debt, or I'll take the rest of her piece by piece!" the leader roared, his face a mask of utter boredom.
Barnaby went mad with grief, his forehead thudding into the ground, now slick with the warm blood of his child. "Mercy! I swear on my life, I don't have it! Take me! Cut me! Not her!"
"You still don't understand." The leader shook his head with mock pity.
The blade lashed out again.
The steel bit through Lica's legs above the knee. Her screams devolved into a primal, animalistic roar; her face went ash-white as her life-force poured into the expanding mire beneath her. She writhed, a limbless torso drowning in her own gore.
Barnaby's voice shattered. He howled her name, a broken, rhythmic chant of despair. "Lica! Lica! Forgive me! Stop it, please! Take anything, just let her live!"
The leader looked down at the weeping wreck of a man with pure revulsion. "You have nothing left to give, Barnaby. And you've wasted enough of my day."
He raised the broadsword high. Alaric, watching from behind the glass, felt his soul wither. Terror turned his blood to ice.
The blade fell.
This time, it found Barnaby's neck. A single, thunderous stroke.
Thud.
Barnaby's head parted from his shoulders. Blood geysered from the stump, drenching Lica's back. The head bounced once, eyes frozen in a final, glassy stare of horror, before rolling into the dust and leaving a red, matted trail behind it.
Lica's screams reached a pitch of absolute ruin—a mortally wounded animal calling for a father who was now a headless corpse. "Father! Father! Don't leave me!"
The final blow to Alaric's sanity came next. The mercenaries didn't even look at the body. They laughed. They hoisted the limbless, dying girl—now just a hunk of broken meat—and carried her back into the tavern.
Alaric knew the fate of a girl without limbs in the hands of monsters. The bile rose in his throat, hot and acidic. He knew if he stayed, he would be next.
Trembling so violently he could barely stand, Alaric backed away. He couldn't look at the headless thing in the street or the widening lake of red. He had to run.
Before he vanished through the rickety back exit, a morbid, agonizing impulse forced him to look through a gap in the wood. There, amidst the silence of the tavern, they began to violate her. Lica, without arms to push them away, without legs to flee, could only endure. Her screams had faded into weak, wet whimpers.
Alaric broke. He retched at the threshold, stomach acid burning his parched throat. With tears of pure, unadulterated terror streaming down his face, he threw open the door and bolted.
He sprinted through the skeletal alleys of Kenet. The stench of trash and rot was a physical weight, but he didn't slow. His lungs burned like they were filled with hot ash. He didn't look back. In Oakhaven, a man like Barnaby and a girl like Lica were nothing but debris. Kenet was an abyss that swallowed souls whole.
"I have to get home," he choked out, a frantic prayer. "The children... Gray Cradle... They need me."
Their faces flashed in his mind—hungry, innocent, waiting. He couldn't die. Not here. Not in this rotting pit.
Fueled by a terror that would never truly leave him, Alaric Vane fled through the merciless dust of Terris. He carried with him a trauma that would haunt his nights, and a seed of vengeance that began to take root in the blackened soil of his heart.
On Terris, the sunlight never felt warm. And for Alaric Vane, the darkness dawning within him was far more absolute than the shadows of Kenet.