Kael Voidwalker's Arc

Chapter 1 of 10

Kael dug his fingers into the ash where his village had stood, and the ground was still warm. An hour ago there had been forty roofs here. Then the sky tore open. The Voidfall came down like black rain, and everything it touched crumbled into gray dust. Kael had run. He always ran. Survival mattered more than pride, and pride had never bought him bread. But this time the void followed him into the dead field, and it did not stop. The corruption crept up his boots. It ate cloth and skin the way it had eaten his home. Kael felt his own body starting to unravel at the edges. He had one choice left. He had spent his life fearing the power inside him, keeping it small, keeping it quiet. Now he stopped fighting it. He opened his hand and pulled. The void pouring from the sky rushed into him instead of over him. It burned. Dark violet smoke curled from his fingers and wrapped his arms. His bad eye flared like a tiny eclipse, and black veins spread across his neck. The corruption in the field bent toward him, drawn to the hungry thing he had become. He drank until the ground went cold and quiet. When it ended, Kael knelt alone in the ruins. He was alive. He was also changed. His shadow moved a half-second behind him. The air around him hummed with a pressure he could feel in his teeth. He had crossed a line he had spent decades avoiding. He was a Voidwalker now, and there was no walking back. A crow landed on a broken beam. It had no eyes, only smooth black hollows, and a jagged beak. It tilted its head and watched him with a certainty that eyes could not have managed. Kael had seen it before. It was the crow he had saved a couple months ago from a wandering void beast.It was the only survivor out of its nest much like how he himself is now. Then he heard the second thing. Far off, low, a long wet growl rolled across the dead field. Kael turned. A shape moved at the tree line. It was too long to be a wolf, its dark hide split by cracks of leaking violet light, smoke trailing from its spine. Void-light bled from its jaws. It had felt his hunger the moment he took the power in. It was coming to answer it. Kael understood the price now. The strength that had saved him was a beacon. Every void-touched thing in Oblivia would smell it and come hunting. He could not sit still. He could not go home, because home was gone. He had to keep moving, and he had to learn to muffle the aura roaring off him before it drew worse than one beast. He pulled his hood up, gripped his knife, and backed away from the growl. The eyeless crow lifted off and flew ahead of him, as if it already knew the road. Kael followed it into the dark.