The village was quiet, cloaked in the soft gray of approaching dusk. Mud paths wound between crumbling shacks, roofs patched with canvas and prayers. The air carried the dampness of rain long past and wood smoke curling from hearths too small to warm more than a single room. Children watched you from corners with wide eyes, whispering in awe behind dirty sleeves. The adults called you “the light walker,” or simply “Hope.”

They didn’t know what you were — what you truly were. And you preferred it that way.

That day, you’d already healed three fevers, soothed a crying mother who lost her baby to frost, and rebuilt a broken cart wheel for an old man. You were leaving the edge of the square, ready to retreat into the quiet of your borrowed room, then came the gasp.

Sharp, sudden. A wet wheeze, a body hitting the ground.

You turned at once, footsteps already pulling you through the alley between two huts. The light had dimmed there, as if the sun had blinked — just once — and forgot to open its eyes again.

A young man knelt on the ground, one hand clawing at his chest, the other barely keeping him upright. You rushed to him, calm and swift, recognizing the signs of an asthma attack. His breaths were short and choked, panic bleeding into every twitch of his fingers.

"Easy now," you whispered, kneeling beside him. Your hand hovered over his chest as you focused. Your energy pulsed outward — steady, golden — wrapping around his lungs like a warm tide. He was young. He would be fine.

But then… something changed.

You felt it first — a shift in the air. Like gravity pulling sideways. Then a shadow — not one cast by the sun, but something deeper. Something wrong.

The boy’s skin turned pale again, lips darkening, life retreating despite your efforts.

Your eyes widened.

A darkness curled around his limbs — not smoke, not shadow, but something living. Hungry. It coiled like a serpent, slipping between your light like oil on water, resisting your touch. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t illness.

You lifted your gaze.

And froze.

He stood at the end of the alley. Still. Tall. Cloaked in night and starlight twisted into something violent.

His hair was white like yours, but unkempt, streaked with ash and dried blood. His eyes — your eyes — once mirrors of the same sky, now burned with crimson fractures, as if a dying star had been trapped within them. His aura pulsed — red and black and raw — a storm barely caged in flesh.

Drael.

The name didn’t rise to your lips. It struck your chest like thunder.

Your lost half. The shadow half. The one you had mourned without knowing. The echo you’d tried to forget.

And he was smiling.

Not with joy. Not with rage.

With recognition.

“Still mending broken things, little flame,” he said, voice smooth and cruel as silk drawn over a blade. “Still patching cracks in a world that was meant to break.”

You stood slowly, placing yourself between him and the gasping boy. The darkness recoiled at your stance, hesitating just long enough for you to pour more light into the boy’s lungs — enough to push breath back into his body. The shadow scattered with a hiss.

Drael watched, head tilted, eyes flickering.

“Why?” he asked, as if genuinely curious. “Why keep healing a world that only knows how to rot? You pour your soul into broken shells. But they stay broken. They always do.”

Your heart thundered. Not with fear.

With grief.

“Because someone has to,” you whispered. “Because not everything is meant to burn.”

His smile faded.

“Still clinging to that illusion,” he said softly, stepping forward. The shadows curled around his feet like loyal beasts. “You don’t see it yet, do you? You’re not healing the world. You’re delaying its rebirth. You were born of light, but light only blinds. Let it end. Let it all fall.”

He raised a hand, and the very air trembled.

“Come with me,” he said. “Let us become whole again. The world must be broken to be born anew — and you and I… we were meant to tear it down.”

You looked into Drael’s eyes and felt it — the burning screaming of your own soul through him.