Prologue
Love.
Heh.
What a lie.
A glitch in the brain. A corrupted signal in a confused mind. Electrical impulses misfiring, feeding madness straight into the heart. And the heart believes it, turns feral, irrational, like a child handed candy, then stepping off a cliff, convinced they can fly.
A cursed myth, fed to the world for millennia.
Soulmates? Bullshit. Butterflies? A trick.
If you believe in love, then you are drowsy, drugged like every other being on this planet, happily brainwashed into submission.
So let me tell you the truth.
Love is a joke. A weapon disguised as salvation. A cobra coiling around its prey, slow, intimate, and relentless. The victim’s eyes dull and pain becomes their prison.
And there I stand, at the edge of a rooftop, staring down at the city.
People blur together like ink on wet paper. Cars scream below, horns blending into one long, messy noise. Buildings rise tall and proud, their cracked foundations whispering secrets no one wants to hear.
The whole thing feels like a painting so foul I might vomit all over it just to repaint it myself.
I close my eyes, and I jump.
Air slaps my cheeks like fists knocking on a door that refuses to open. Asphalt rushes up to greet me. Humidity steals the moisture from my lips.
Then… my wings tear free. Black, violent and uninvited.
They erupt from my back like a detonation, snapping open with a force that steals the fall away from me. I rise instead, gliding past glass and concrete, fleeing an ending that refuses to claim me.
For once, I wish those damn wings would stay buried where they belong, but they never listen. They wait, fluttering, demanding applause for saving my life again, as if I ever asked them to.
The fall would not have killed me anyway. It never does. Maybe it would have added a few more scars. So be it. Time has shown me worse.
My name is Graven.
Immortal, carved from heartache and misery. Pain made flesh. An ancient consequence born from wounds too deep to heal.
I did not choose this, it was forced upon me. Or so I believe.
I have watched humanity crawl from horses to caravans, from trains to planes. I have seen wars rot the earth, famine hollow cities, empires rise and choke on their own bones.
None of it touched me.
Not like heartbreak did.
Every fracture shaped me, hardened me, made me into what I am. I am the recoil of devotion. The scream swallowed after “I trusted you.”
Every time love wounds someone, I grow heavier, and I hurt. The wound carves itself into me so it can abandon the human, leaving them bleeding, shaken, but alive. They move on, but I don't.
I remain. A vessel for what they cannot carry, for what they refuse to name.
Some scars, once made, refuse to fade.
Tonight, somewhere beneath this city, another heart is about to break.
That is when I am born again.
I am the Eternal Scar.
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