Chapter 1The Marks of Fate
“I don’t want this… not again.”
But dreams do not ask for permission.
Elena screamed until her voice burned in her throat, until the veins in her neck trembled yet nothing changed. The walls did not shake. The cold did not break. Time did not move forward even a single step.
The room was like an open grave. The air was heavy… still… and the cry of an infant echoed through the darkness weak, broken… yet piercing straight through the heart.
Then came the whisper.
A woman’s shattered voice, laden with aching love:
“Elena… I love you.”
She trembled. She looked at the baby lying on the ground. Small… fragile… as if the world had cast her aside before she learned how to cry.
“Please… leave me this time…” Elena whispered in desperate pleading.
But it was already too late.
An unseen force violently dragged her soul away. The world flipped. The voice vanished.
Then she opened her eyes…
She was no longer looking at the child she was looking from inside her.
She had become the child.
And before her stood… something.
A thin body the color of dead ash. Eyes wider than they should be. Features attempting to be human… but failing.
It began muttering twisted chants that belonged to no language ever known to mankind. Each syllable tore through the air like a wound in reality.
Then it opened its mouth.
It was not a mouth it was a black void swallowing light.
From within it burst glowing violet symbols living marks moving with a will of their own. They headed straight toward the lower part of her back… toward the three Marks of Fate.
They wrapped around the first one then ripped it away.
The pain was not merely physical; it was an internal rupture… as if her soul were being unraveled thread by thread.
The second mark began to detach
“Stop…” she tried to scream, but the infant’s throat would not obey her.
With every mark that was torn away, she felt herself splitting. One part ripped out… one part left behind… but incomplete.
And when the violet symbols reached for the third mark
She woke up.
A sharp gasp shattered the silence.
She was in her room. In her bed. In a world that was supposed to be real.
But her heart was unconvinced.
Her hand moved instinctively to her lower back, touching cold skin that still trembled with the memory of a pain that would not fade.
