He woke in the ruins of the world.

  Ash clung to the ragged edges of his breath as Ren Veyne struggled upright, blinking against the searing white light that pierced the dust-choked air. His body ached in strange ways — not bruised or broken, but stretched, hollowed out, like a puppet stitched together with raw nerve and stubborn will.

  Above him, the sky bled.

  No other word fit it.

  The sun was no longer a sun, but a raw, burning wound in the heavens, pulsing with malignancy. Its light scorched the jagged skeletons of buildings, turned twisted trees to cinders mid-sway, boiled the thin mist rising from the cracked black earth.

  And Ren felt it on his skin.

  Felt it in his bones.

  It was killing him by inches.

  He stumbled toward the shadow of a collapsed overpass — little more than a ribcage of melted steel — and collapsed into its brittle shade. The agony of exposure receded almost immediately, but a deeper, quieter pain remained: a pulsing throb just beneath his sternum.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Breathless, Ren tore open the tattered remains of his shirt.

  There, burnt into his chest, was a mark.

  A shackle.

  Twisting runes spiraled outward like blackened veins, forming a jagged circle around a sigil he couldn't recognize — a broken eye crowned by thorned chains.

  He touched it.

  The world shifted.

  He wasn't standing beneath the ruins anymore.

  He wasn't anywhere.

  Blackness stretched out in every direction — thick, suffocating, alive.

  A heartbeat echoed across it, deep and slow, as if some vast thing was slumbering just beneath the surface.

  "Ah," a voice murmured. "You are awake."

  Ren turned — or thought he did — but saw no one.

  "You will walk this broken land," the voice said. "You will carry my ruin. You will be my vessel, until you are not."

  Panic flared. "What the hell are you?"

  "The end," the voice whispered. "And you, Ren Veyne, are already bound."

  Pain lanced through him — not from outside, but from within — as if something massive and cold had gripped his soul in one colossal hand.

  The blackness tore away.

  The world returned.

  Ren curled into a ball beneath the wreckage, gasping, shuddering. His heartbeat thundered against his ribs, a frantic, desperate drumbeat.

  He didn't know where he was.

  He didn't know how he'd gotten here.

  He didn't even know if he was still human.

  But he knew one thing with absolute certainty:

  He was not alone in his own skin.