Chapter I: when nighttime to nightmare
“They warn endlessly of how frightening the world is, yet never realize the world itself fears them.”
—Veyra Hagaldr
FERIA HAGALDR
Ringing.
A high, needle-thin whine pierced the absolute dark. That was how it began. Not with a sudden awakening from a nightmare, but with a slow, suffocating return to a body that felt entirely broken.
Feria tried to open her eyes, but a thick, warm crust glued her lashes together. She tasted it then—copper, ash, and the foul, stale air of a dungeon. Her head throbbed in a violent, sickening rhythm. She tried to lift her hands to wipe the wetness from her face, but the movement was violently arrested.
Clink.
The sound was sharp, cold, and crushingly heavy. Rusted iron bit deep into the raw flesh of her wrists.
The ringing in her ears began to fade, slowly replaced by a distant, rhythmic roaring. It sounded like an angry ocean, but it was not water. It was voices. Hundreds of them.
Rough, calloused hands seized her under the arms. She was hauled upward, her bare, numb feet dragging uselessly across jagged stone steps.
Then, the light hit her.
It was not a sunrise; it was a physical blow. A blinding, searing white struck her dilated pupils, driving a spike of pure agony through her skull. Feria squeezed her eyes shut, a wave of nausea twisting her empty stomach. The roar of the ocean crashed over her—a deafening cacophony of shrieks, jeers, and spitting malice.
She was dragged onto a wooden platform. As her vision slowly adjusted through the squint and the crimson haze of her own bleeding forehead, the shapes below coalesced into a sea of distorted, hateful faces. Mouths stretched wide like open wounds, screaming words that her battered brain struggled to process.
“Daughter of the Witch! Filth!”
“Burn the rot!”
Feria swayed, panic rising in her throat like bile. She scanned the sea of hatred, her chest heaving with desperate, ragged breaths. Where are they? she begged the void. She searched the mob for the broad, reassuring shoulders of her father. She searched for the unruly, light-beige, almost white hair of her brother, Kelvar. She waited for them to burst through the guards, swords drawn, to save her.
“Where is my father?” she gasped, her voice a dry, broken rasp that barely escaped her lips. “Where is Kelvar?”
The jeering near the front of the scaffold faltered. A momentary, chilling lull rippled through the immediate crowd. They did not look at her with anger, but with genuine, baffling confusion.
A woman whose face was twisted in disgust scoffed. She exchanged a bewildered look with a baker standing beside her. “Father?” She spat onto the wooden boards near Feria's feet. “The Witch Veyra took no man to her bed. She spawned you from the rot itself, you filthy aberration!”
“Madness,” a priest sneered from the steps, his white robes pristine against the dirt of the square. “She screams for ghosts that never lived.”
Never lived?
The words did not merely strike her; they unraveled her. The world tilted sickeningly. The cobblestones, the sky, the faces—everything felt thin, like a painted veil about to tear. A cold, creeping numbness spread from her chest, freezing her lungs.
No. Feria argued with the silence in her own mind. No, Father's hand was warm. He just stroked my hair. Kelvar just shouted my name... Am I mad? Was my entire life a fever dream?
Then, the fragments hit her. Not a smooth memory, but a violent, disjointed assault on her senses.
A shower of blue sparks, raining down like dying stars.
The sharp, metallic stench of ozone and burning air.
The deafening shriek of tearing wood and clashing steel.
Father's voice, a desperate roar: “Seal it! Now!”
Kelvar's eyes, wide with a terror he could not hide, staring back at her just as the stone wall slammed shut.
It was real. She remembered.
“LIARS!” Feria screamed. The sound tore her throat raw, spit and blood flying from her lips. She thrashed against the iron chains, her muscles tearing. “ALL OF YOU ARE LIARS! They were there! Kelvar! Father!”
“Silence the mad beast,” the priest commanded, waving a dismissive hand.
The guards yanked the chains, dragging her violently to her knees. Then, the platform groaned.
Thud. Thud.
The vibration traveled through the wooden boards, up her shins, and settled deep in her marrow. It was not a man approaching. It was a living mountain. The Executioner. A Titan—a monstrous, towering relic of the Old Calamity. His skin was the color of bruised granite, his thick, knotted muscles bulging under heavy leather.
As he stepped forward, he completely eclipsed the sun. A sudden, freezing shadow swallowed Feria whole. He did not look at her with malice or pity; he looked at her with the dull, empty eyes of a beast bred only for violence. He was a cursed thing that history had not managed to erase—unlike her family.
A hand the size of a boulder clamped down on the back of her neck. He forced her downward with unstoppable, crushing weight.
Her cheek slammed against the executioner's block. The wood was slick and freezing. It reeked of centuries of fear—the stench of old sweat, rusted iron, and dried blood.
Pinned and helpless, Feria looked out sideways at the crowd. Hundreds of eyes stared back, entirely devoid of recognition or mercy. To them, she was a spontaneous mistake. A loose thread of a lone witch, being properly severed from the tapestry of the world.
“Doesn’t anyone remember?” she sobbed. The tears finally broke through the crust of blood on her face, burning her skin. “O Lord Valzareth... my brother... my father... what is happening to this world?”
Her plea was met only with the cold wind and cruel, indifferent laughter. The horror of this moment was not the axe. It was the absolute realization that she was dying entirely alone, in a world that had completely rewritten her existence.
Above her, the Titan shifted. The massive joints of his arms popped and creaked like breaking tree branches as he raised the heavy iron axe.
The shadow of the blade stretched across her neck.
“I am not crazy...” she whispered to the rotting wood, closing her eyes. “I saw them...”
Whir.
The air parted. The blade fell.
The world tilted violently, plunging into an endless, absolute dark.
