He awoke with stillness pressing against his skin like old smoke. The world around him is ashen grey, a dead man's canvas stretching endlessly in all directions, weapons-swords, spears, axes-all jutting from the blackened ground, as if they grew there. None gleam. Every blade is dulled, rusted, or heat warped. no wind just perfect stillness.
Above, the sky bled.
A blood-red void loomed above, covered the sky, and at its center hangs a charred moon, cracked and glowing like a corpse caught mid-cremation. Its light falls like embers, not warmth—each ray a smoldering breath across the ruined battlefield.
He could hear something, faint and distant. Not sound—memory. Like the battlefield itself was trying to remember the screams that had once been screamed here. Not voices. Agony. Fury. Purpose.
In the distance, beyond broken war banners and shattered helms, lies something impossible.
Cinder staggered forward, breath catching in his throat.
A figure.
It took him a moment to realize what it was. Not a monument. Not a ruin.
A colossal humanoid skeleton, half-buried in soot and ash, lay crumpled on its side as though felled mid-step. Its skull had been caved in, the bone charred and cracked like brittle porcelain. One massive hand reached skyward, fingers frozen in a clawed grasp toward the moon.
And before it—kneeling, unmoving—was an obsidian knight.
Charcoal-black armor, body bowed, one gauntlet clenched around the hilt of a shattered blade stabbed into the ground.
Even kneeling, the knight radiated weight. Not mass. Meaning.
Cinder tried to breathe but tasted only iron and smoke.
The world pulsed.
His heart—
No.
Something in his chest lurched. A twist of pressure, not pain. His breath caught.
The knight's head lifted, ever so slightly, toward him.
And Cinder remembered.
He remembered being here.
He remembered this ash. This light. This moment.
Not as a dream.
Not as a story.
As a life.
His knees buckled. His vision blurred. The battlefield darkened around the edges.
And the knight rose.
Not with violence. With purpose.
Each movement burned into the bones of the world.
Cinder could not run. He couldn't even try.
The black knight stopped before him. The blade was gripped lightly in his hand.
Cinder trembled.
Then, without a word, the knight's other clawed gauntlet reached out plunging into Cinders chest.
He screamed. Pain coursing through his very being.
It was a harrowing, violent thing. Like tearing his soul apart and fixing it repeatedly. It burned worse than anything he had ever felt.
As the knight's fingers wrapped around something inside him—his soul, his fate, his fire—Cinder saw it.
Not the battlefield.
Not the knight.
Himself.
Burning.
Bleeding.
Kneeling on ash with a sword in his hand.
And the sky watching.
Cinder hit the ground hard-his scream swallowed by ash and silence.
The pain was beyond flesh. It dug into bone, into memory, into things he didn't even know had names. His body seized and arched, fingers clawing at the scorched soil beneath him as smoke pourd from his eyes, his mouth, his ears, from every pore his body could no longer contain.
He choked—ash catching in his throat, lungs burning with heat that wasn't real but meant something.
"You are being rewritten," something whispered in the marrow of his being.
"You are not dying. You are remembering."
Above him, the Ashen Knight stood still towering, both silent and unmerciful helmet tilted downward as if examining the frailty before him. Not judging. Not even curious. Just watching what was already decided.
Cinder's skin cracked along his chest like parched earth, and from beneath it, something began to glow—not bright, but deep. Embered. Beautiful.
A mark, born not of ink or blade, but burnt into his souls.
It spread like fire-laced veins across his ribs and shoulder. A sigil that danced like blackened flame, faintly iridescent, as though ash had learned to shine.
And in his eyes—behind the pain—embers flickered to life.
Not fire. Not light.
He gasped as his body finally collapsed, smoldering, twitching. The smoke rose slowly into the red-dark sky.
The Ashen Knight knelt again—but this time not in reverence.
He leaned closer, the shattered helm tilting as if to whisper. But no words came.
Instead, he drove his sword into the earth beside Cinder.
The battlefield shook. Weapons rattled. The skeleton of the titanic being in the distance shifted slightly, as if remembering the moment it fell.
Where the knight's sword struck, the ground burned outward in a perfect sigil—a ring of black fire, lines scorched into the dirt like a seal of fate accepted.
Then, like dust blown from a forgotten blade—
The world shattered again.