He raised his right hand, the motion instinctual now, less like a conscious decision and more like answering a question someone else had asked. The symbols etched into his palm pulsed once more, and then they shifted.

  Not numbers, not yet. Instead, words emerged, flickering into existence like frost catching light.

  "A gift to the mirror..."

  The sentence trembled at the edges, unfinished, half-erased. Before he could process it, the letters vanished, swallowed by the skin itself. In their place, the numbers returned, clear, stark, undeniable.

  Core – 50

  Assimilation – 60

  Eclipse – 80

  He stared at them, breath caught. The numbers had changed, radically. He remembered what they had been, fractured digits barely scraping the double digits. Now they stood tall, alien, as though someone, or something, had intervened.

  He flexed his hand, and the digits pulsed once more, then faded from view, only then did he notice.

  His skin was smooth, whole. The burns, the scars, the cuts, gone. No trace of injury remained, not even the faintest ache. Every breath felt cleaner, his heartbeat more solid, more right. Even the way he stood had shifted, shoulders square, limbs lighter. Power moved beneath the surface of his skin like coiled potential, ready to strike.

  He felt... reborn.

  A shiver climbed his spine, but he steadied himself. This wasn’t just healing, this was transformation, and it filled him with fire. He would find a way out of this place, he would uncover its truths. He would remember, he would survive.

  The Hollowed City loomed behind him, quiet for now. The sun, a pale, trembling disc in a bruised sky, cast a flickering glow over the ruins.

  He turned his back to the spires and stepped into the wilds beyond.

  The land surrounding the city was no less strange, but it breathed differently. Untamed, open, vast. Rolling hills dipped and rose like the slow rhythm of a sleeping beast. Rivers carved glowing paths through the valleys, their waters tinted with faint luminescence, reflecting alien constellations that didn’t belong to any sky he remembered.

  He walked for hours, observing, noticing, trying to remember. Everywhere, life surged, twisted and beautiful.

  He passed through groves of trees with bark like glass and leaves that sang when the wind touched them. Wildflowers bloomed in impossible colors, shifting hues like thought given shape. Great winged beasts soared in the distance, their forms barely visible against the sky, shadows too large to be birds, too graceful to be machines.

  In one clearing, he found a creature curled in sleep, its body like a sculpture of silver vines, its breath slow, deep, unthreatening. In another, a flock of shimmering entities passed overhead, like drifting jellyfish made of crystal and light, casting soft music as they moved.

  The land was neither kind nor cruel. It simply was, a world untethered to human rules.

  He stayed clear of the great landmarks. The Market, the Cathedral, the Spire. Even at this distance, he could feel their pull, like deep currents under still water. They would come later, when he was ready. If such a thing was even possible.

  For now, he wandered, observed, learned, and all the while, something within him stirred, as if the land itself recognized the numbers etched into him.

  Core, Assimilation, and Eclipse. He didn’t know what they meant, but he would.

  Soon.

  A tree stood like a sentinel in the open field, towering above the low hills and curling grasses. Its bark was a deep, weathered black, rough like scaled stone. Massive limbs stretched skyward, twisted and thick, draped in strands of moss that shimmered faintly in the dying light.

  He approached with cautious reverence.

  This tree was older than anything else in the landscape, older than memory. When his hand touched its surface, something stirred beneath the bark. Not movement exactly, more like acknowledgement.

  With its blessing, or at least its indifference, he worked.

  He found a fallen branch as long as his arm, gnarled but solid. Using the edge of a jagged stone nearby, he began shaping it.

  The bark peeled back in curls, exposing pale, fibrous wood that gave off a strange sweet scent when carved. He split the end and inserted a sharpened shard of obsidian he’d taken from a broken pillar earlier that day. He bound it with long grass, tight and knotted.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The spear was crude but sharp, and balanced. He made a second tool. A shorter blade, shaped from a chunk of glassy stone and tied to a bone handle he scavenged from the remains of a long-dead animal. He tested its weight, felt it slice clean through sap. Primitive but effective.

  His stomach ached with hunger, it was time.

  He moved into the deeper fields, where the tall grass swayed high as his chest and the wind carried the scent of unfamiliar beasts. Birds the size of dogs flitted through the air, their wings whisper-thin and translucent. Herds of antelope-like creatures grazed near the glowing riverbanks, their horns spiraled and covered in soft, blue fur.

  He hunted the smallest ones.

  With patience, he learned their movements. Everything, from when they bent to drink to when they lowered their guard.

  The first strike was messy, his spear caught in bone, and he had to wrestle the creature down, but the second came easier. By the third, he barely flinched at the act.

  He harvested what he needed. Meat, clean bone, sinew. He thanked nothing. There was no god here, only necessity.

  Far across the hills, he spotted movement.

  Figures, three of them, moving with purpose, humanoid. Clad in ragged armor or scavenged gear, difficult to see clearly through the mist that gathered as the sun dipped lower. They hunted too. He saw the flash of a thrown blade, a beast falling.

  He crouched low in the grass, watching. They didn’t see him, or at least pretended not to. He didn’t approach, not yet.

  The land stretched endlessly around him. Empty, save for the ruin-walkers and the creatures that called this place home, but the worst of the beasts he only saw now.

  The Mawbeasts.

  They moved like shadows torn loose from the ground, quadrupeds with slick, dark skin that shimmered like oil. Their heads were nothing but massive, gaping maws, rows of jagged teeth circling in spirals, twitching and breathing. One of them tilted back, let out a low, warbling groan that vibrated through the grass like thunder beneath his feet.

  He froze. He had seen them in dreams, or at least he remembered so. These were creatures that consumed. Not just flesh, but skill, essence, anything that made a thing itself.

  He circled wide, slipping into a ravine and taking a longer path home.

  When he finally returned to the his cave, the sky was bleeding into deep violet, and the stars were pulsing like wounds. The ruined tower above him loomed as always, unmoving, uncaring.

  He gathered dry vines and brittle bark from the forest, crushed glowing mushrooms between his fingers for their faint spark, and worked with flint until flame caught.

  The fire crackled low and warm. He skewered strips of meat on sharpened sticks and held them over the flame, watching the fat drip and hiss. The smell was rich, comforting in a way he hadn’t known he missed.

  He ate in silence, alone, distanced from the world. The taste was wild, strange, and slightly metallic, but nourishing nonetheless.

  His thoughts drifted to the numbers.

  Core – 50.

  Assimilation – 60.

  Eclipse – 80.

  He didn’t understand them, but something out there did. He looked out from the mouth of the cave, across the endless land, and for a brief moment, he imagined he wasn’t the only one watching the stars tonight.

  The fire cracked low, casting shadows that danced across the cave’s jagged walls. Grease from the meat hissed softly, and he chewed in silence, gaze flickering to the stars beyond the cave mouth. The city above loomed quiet, still. A silence so vast, it almost felt sacred.

  A silence broken by a voice. It spoke not a word, not language, but a wet, shuddering whisper from just beyond the firelight.

  His blood ran cold, there were multiple. The sound of flesh against stone, slithering, skittering. He turned, slowly, and saw the figures, twisting, dripping.

  Fleshshapers.

  There were many, at least a dozen, maybe more. They crawled into the cave like insects, their bodies reshaping as they moved, once-human silhouettes, now warped beyond recognition.

  Some walked, others slithered with limbs split open into blades, their skin peeled back to reveal tendrils laced with bone. Their Eyes, if that's what these were, glowed faintly red.

  He leapt back just as one lunged.

  The first strike tore his makeshift blade in half, but he drove the broken end into the thing’s throat. It screamed, not in pain, but in rage, and ripped the weapon from its neck, blood bubbling, skin already knitting back together.

  He moved like instinct, like desperation. His body surging with the remnants of something darker.

  Eclipse.

  His hand opened, and shadows poured from his fingers like ink, coiling through the air. One of the Fleshshapers screamed as the darkness touched it, its regeneration halted, limbs spasming, flesh refusing to obey. He struck then, fast and furious, driving a stone shard into its skull.

  The others hesitated, just for a breath, and then they came all at once. The fight was chaotic and brutal, a blur of movement and blood.

  He ducked beneath a spike of bone, slammed a torch into one’s chest. It wailed, skin bubbling, arms splitting into new blades. Another wrapped him in sinew-like tendrils, dragging him down, but he bit through one, tore free, stabbed upward.

  Shadow magic again, a wave of black tendrils exploded outward from his palm, catching three of them in mid-mutation. Their bodies stuttered, locked, as if time had frozen in that one rotting moment. He used it, crushed a skull, a burned another with fire.

  Still, it wasn’t enough, they kept coming. For every one he downed, two more rose.

  His body screamed, lungs burned. A blade caught his side, tore deep, another pierced his thigh, a third lashed across his back. Blood poured freely, his vision doubled.

  They began to encircle him, hissing, laughing, shifting.

  One leaned close, face half-melted, mouth twisting open in a spiral of teeth. It whispered, “You’ll taste like home.”

  He fell to his knees, and his vision dimmed. The cave flickered in and out, shadows pulsing, his heartbeat slowing.

  His eyes rolled back... blackness, and then...

  Light.

  Flashing steel, cracking bone, screams not his own. Silhouettes burst through the firelight, figures moved like lightning, cloaked in armor and shadow, blades of black-glass and radiant flame.

  One hurled a crescent of searing eclipse-light, three Fleshshapers turned to ash on contact. Another slammed into the horde with a spear, driving it through two of the beasts at once, pinning them to the stone wall like broken puppets.

  The Fleshshapers screeched, and then they fled. Not all, not quickly, but the tide had turned.

  He tried to rise, body twitching, blood pooling beneath him. The world was tilting sideways, he felt confused, scared, angry.

  A figure knelt beside him, and then everything collapsed into black.