The morning sun painted Aetherlow Ridge in hues of gold and amber, its light filtering softly through the high, wispy branches of the ancient Aetherwood trees. Their silver-blue leaves shimmered faintly under the breeze, making it look as though the forest itself breathed in rhythm with the wind.

A wooden sword sliced through the air.

“Again.”

Eli exhaled and repeated the motion. His feet dug slightly into the packed dirt, legs wide, arms steady. Slash, pivot, turn, guard. He moved with the instinct of someone who had done this every day, not because he had to—but because something inside him begged him to be ready.

The soft chirps of morning birds provided rhythm. From the distant slope below, laughter echoed—village kids racing rune-tops, tiny magical toys that left light trails in their spin.

Eli slowed his breathing, sheathed the wooden blade into the makeshift holder he’d carved into a tree stump, and sat by the edge of the ridge. The valley spread out beneath him like a painted storybook. Aetherlow Village was small, barely more than a cluster of wooden homes and farmlands surrounded by soft green hills. At its center stood a cracked, vine-wrapped monument: the Shrine of the Ember Fang.

No one visited it anymore.

Eli's gaze drifted upward. The sky was cloudless. Still. Too perfect.

There’s something waiting for me out there, he thought.

Not just in the fields or the roads leading beyond the hills. Somewhere further. Deeper. His aunt always told him such thoughts were dangerous—that the world beyond Aetherlow was full of ruins and wars, that the Flame Wars left more scars than stories. But she didn’t understand. He wasn’t looking for stories.

He was looking for something to make him feel alive.

As if hearing his thoughts, a sudden chill danced through the air. The birds silenced. The wind shifted unnaturally.

He stood.

The leaves trembled against the direction of the breeze. His hand instinctively reached for the wooden sword—useless, yes, but comforting.

Then, the sky cracked.

A blinding streak of blue-white light tore across the sky like lightning turned sideways. It roared—louder than thunder, a deep, shuddering sound that made the ground quake beneath him.

Eli flinched, heart pounding.

Then—boom.

A burst of wind slammed against the ridge, almost knocking him back. Smoke rose in the distance beyond the treeline, somewhere between the forest and the edge of the cliffs.

For a breath, the world stood still.

Then Eli ran.

The woods were silent.

Eli sprinted through the narrow path, branches scraping against his arms, the smoke ahead curling higher into the sky. He didn’t shout for help. Something about the pressure in the air told him this wasn’t something the village could handle.

He passed the old rune stones—ancient markers carved with forgotten glyphs. They glowed faintly now, where they hadn’t in years. That made his stomach tighten.

“Almost there,” he whispered, half to himself, half to calm the racing in his chest.

A scorched smell hit him before he saw it.

He reached the clearing and stopped, boots skidding slightly on the dirt.

A perfect crater had been carved into the earth, its edges smoldering with steam. The grass around it was flattened outward, as if a wave of force had exploded from the center. The trees leaned unnaturally away from the point of impact, and heat still lingered, rising in waves.

At the center of the crater, someone lay curled on their side.

A boy.

Eli stepped forward cautiously, heart hammering in his chest. The boy wasn’t from Aetherlow. His clothes were strange—dark jacket, belts crossing his chest, odd fabric around his legs that shimmered faintly with lines. His boots had strange straps. And on his hip, tucked loosely into a cracked sheath, was a dagger—its hilt lined with symbols Eli couldn’t read.

The boy groaned.

Alive.

Eli dropped to one knee, brushing back some of the boy’s soot-streaked hair. It shimmered—only slightly—in the sunlight, like the silver of Aetherwood bark.

“Hey… hey, can you hear me?”

The boy didn’t respond, but his breathing quickened.

Suddenly, a hum rippled through the air.

Eli looked up toward the shrine. The Ember Fang Monument, cracked and forgotten, pulsed with faint light. For just a moment, a red rune shimmered across its base—then vanished, as if burned into the stone and gone.

The dagger on the boy’s hip glowed softly.

Eli’s fingers twitched.

He glanced down again. The boy’s hand, scraped and dirtied, twitched as if reaching toward something—maybe the sky.

What had he seen up there?

Who was he?

And why did Eli feel, in that moment, as though this—this exact moment—was the start of something he’d always been waiting for?

The boy stirred once more.

Eli reached down, grabbing his arm and pulling him up slowly, carefully.

“You’re heavy,” he muttered, forcing a small grin. “Hope you’re not a bandit or something. That’d be awkward.”

As he turned toward the ridge path, the shrine behind him gave one final flicker of light—and then went still.

From somewhere in the deep woods, a low growl echoed briefly, before silence returned.

Eli glanced over his shoulder.

“...Guess it begins now.”

Smoke blanketed the sky like a mourning veil. The once-quiet forest roared with fire, its trees alight in unnatural red. Screams echoed from deeper within the village. Creatures that had once been peaceful fled in chaos—or worse, turned violent.

Eli sprinted through the smoke, gripping a hunting axe in one hand and a sloshing wooden bucket in the other. The axe wasn’t made for battle—it was a tool, worn and notched from years of chopping bark and carcass—but it was all he had.

The crash had brought fire. The fire had brought panic.

And somewhere at the center of it all—Jeno.

Eli reached the crater. It steamed like an open wound in the earth, rimmed by fire and twisted roots. He slid down the edge without thinking, nearly dropping the bucket.

Jeno was still there.

Half-buried in dirt and soot, one hand clenched around a knife—simple, black-handled, iron-forged. Nothing fancy. But it glowed. Just faintly. Runes shimmered along its edge like veins of light, and the ground beneath it pulsed with strange heat.

"Still breathing…" Eli knelt beside him, relieved.

A growl echoed from the smoke behind him.

Eli turned, tightening his grip on the axe.

A fangbeast emerged—a creature once kept by forest shepherds, now deformed by red markings etched across its face and legs. Its eyes were blood-mad, frothing at the mouth.

Eli swung his axe up.

Too slow.

The beast lunged.

But Jeno's eyes snapped open.

The knife flared.

A circular rune burst from the blade and scorched itself into the earth—pure light. The beast froze mid-air. For a heartbeat, everything went still. Then—

CRACK.

The rune detonated outward like a shockwave. The beast was launched backward, crashing through a tree, its body twitching in smoke.

Eli dropped to one knee, stunned.

Jeno sat up slowly, blinking.

“…That wasn’t me,” he said, voice raw. “I think the knife just… did that.”

Eli stared at it. The blade looked longer than before—maybe an inch. The simple iron surface now held faint etched lines, curling like vines. Something about it had changed.

They returned to Eli’s home just before midnight. Fire still danced at the village edge, but the town’s guardians had erected barrier runes to contain it. Three homes were lost. Two villagers were wounded.

The strangest part: even the normally passive creatures—Glowbirds, barktails, moss-deer—had gone mad. It wasn’t just panic.

Something had changed the rules.

Jeno lay on Eli’s cot, bandaged, half-awake, the glowing knife now dull beside him.

Eli leaned on the windowsill, cleaning his axe with a wet cloth. His fingers paused when Jeno spoke.

"Thanks," Jeno muttered. "For not letting me roast like a marshmallow."

"You’re welcome… I think."

Jeno coughed, wincing. "What year is it?"

Eli blinked. "The hell does that mean?"

"I just… thought maybe I overslept. By a lot."

A silence passed. Jeno let his head tilt toward Eli, his eyes narrowing slightly.

“You look just like him.”

“Who?”

“My brother.”

Later, as the fires died down and the villagers settled in shelters, Eli washed his hands outside by the basin. His axe leaned against the wall—chipped now, from the earlier strike.

He glanced toward the forest. Past the barrier. Toward the Ember Shrine.

Then he saw them.

Footprints. Burnt into the ground.

Humanoid. Deep. Too heavy for a normal man. The scorched dirt around them still smoked.

They weren’t his.

They weren’t Jeno’s.

Someone else had come through.

And they were walking away from the crater, not toward it.

That night, in the silence of the dim cottage, Jeno stirred.

“I remember falling,” he whispered, eyes still closed. “But I wasn’t alone.”

Eli looked over.

“There was someone else. A guy. I didn’t see his face… but I saw his posture. The way he dove.” He opened his eyes slowly.

“Like a knife. Like he wasn’t falling… he was aiming.”

Eli said nothing.

“He didn’t get pulled in like me. He was sent.”

“For what?”

Jeno turned his head toward him.

“To kill me.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

Outside, the night held its breath. Somewhere deep in the burning woods, a shadow moved.

Its steps were slow. Purposeful.

Red light flickered under its hooded eyes.

A rune—black as void—crawled across its gauntlet.

The hunt had begun.

The morning air reeked of ash and dread.

Eli awoke to the low hum of warning bells echoing through the hills, their tone unlike anything he’d ever heard—panicked, drawn-out, and unrelenting. Outside, villagers ran toward the plaza, clutching children and tools. Jeno blinked awake beside the still-glowing knife on the table.

Then came the roar.

Not a beast’s cry.

Not human.

It was the sound of the forest itself screaming.

The first wave hit just after sunrise.

A horde of frenzied creatures spilled from the treeline—moss-deer with sharpened antlers, fangbeasts mutated with bony spines, and grotesque boarlings fused with bark and stone. Their eyes glowed red with rune corruption, their veins laced with pulsating black vines.

Eli rushed into the chaos, axe in hand, his heart pounding like war drums.

“BACK!” he shouted, dragging the village boy Kyo behind him.

Kyo, no older than ten, stared at the monsters with wide, frozen eyes. “Th-they’re not stopping—!”

“They won’t,” Eli growled. “Not anymore.”

Across the square, Mistress Yula, the town’s baker and local shieldmaiden from the old wars, swung a rusted iron pan through a barktail’s face with a clang that shook the cobblestones.

Beside her, Grint the Blacksmith roared, hammer raised, holding the main gate with two younger villagers at his sides. "We hold this line, or we all burn!"

Jeno leapt from the rooftop of the healer’s hut, knife drawn, the runes on its blade flickering again.

He landed just in time to slice through the tendons of a fangbeast lunging for Kyo.

The blade shifted mid-strike, growing a notch longer with a sharp metallic ring.

Jeno stared. “You’re evolving again?”

The knife pulsed in his grip—hot, alive.

But then came the tremor.

The villagers stopped.

The horde fell silent.

And from the shadows of the tree line… it emerged.

A towering, rotted creature stepped into the village, ducking under the half-destroyed arch. It stood nearly fifteen feet tall—a warped treant, fused with bones and human skulls, vines coiling around its jagged bark arms. Its jaw split open vertically, revealing rows of fangs and a black rune burning inside its throat.

“The Verdant Devourer…” gasped Elder Caelus, clutching his staff. “That’s no guardian anymore… it’s cursed.”

The Forest Boss charged.

Its clawed hand swept wide—instantly cleaving Grint’s arm from his body.

The blacksmith didn’t scream.

He just fell.

Blood soaked the cobblestones.

“GRINT!!” Yula roared, slamming her pan against the beast’s leg with a desperate cry. It barely noticed.

Eli ran to help, slamming his axe into the Devourer’s ankle.

The blow connected.

CRACK.

Wood and flesh splintered—but the axe handle snapped, the weapon now useless.

The creature turned.

Eli had no time to dodge.

But Jeno was already there.

He leapt forward, blade shining bright, and drove it into the monster’s mouth as it roared.

The rune exploded—a blast of light carving out its throat.

But the creature didn’t fall.

Instead, it grabbed Jeno midair, crushing his ribs with a vine-covered hand.

“ENOUGH!”

A blinding white light exploded from the knife, forcing the creature to release him. Jeno hit the ground, coughing blood, but alive.

The knife now had three glowing runes on its blade.

The horde surged again.

Villagers screamed.

Flames spread across thatch rooftops as the corrupted beasts overwhelmed the north side.

“We’re losing them!” someone cried. “We have to fall back!”

“No,” Eli said, standing shakily beside Jeno. His hands were bloodied. His axe lay in pieces. “We end it here.”

Jeno stood too, despite the gashes across his chest. “That thing… it reacts to me.”

The Devourer snarled and began to charge again, trees ripping behind it.

Eli looked at Jeno.

“You ready?”

Jeno smirked. “You called me brother. Let’s make that count.”