It’s not an army as I, with my mighty but blood-thirsty hands, have slayed the outcasts, for the knowledge I gained, was much greater than what I destroyed, and hence, had no right to exist....I, the great warrior of the defenders, must exorcise the curse, within this, else the world may collapse into shards at once, for the sake of the mortals, it must be recruited, I shall bring rain of my blood, for a sacrifice is what it wants....I do not know what awaits forth, shall I despite the curse of death, protect the town of the victorious and the worthy, for they wield the power, I never achieved, nor will I ever have, because the one that pulls me back, is none other than, me myself....You never know the capability of the one who stands before you, yet you must fight for your life, for what you know, is that life, has that never-ending faith and hope, that sings to yourself, the sweet lies of itself, and lets not a man, surrender to the bitter truths of death, I know, my friend, for I have seen countless people, or fools I say, die in the battlefield of Krepelia, fighting till their last breaths, yet we all come to an end, whether we wish or not....this all, my dear, is a lie, we are not alive, none of us is, everything is a hallucination, infact alive itself is one, the only truths among us all is God, the almighty deity, and the bitter truth, who everybody hates, Death, unwillingly, one day or the other, these both truths, are where we all, big or small, black or white, it is where we shall reside...but you know, there is a lie hidden in this too, for what you see, is never the reality...so you see, my dear, this world, infact the universe, is a great lie in itself.....

-Yashika, 7th grader [2025]

The rain came before I had bled a single drop.

It fell upon the gates of Verhaldt, the town of the victorious and the worthy, and it did not fall like water. It was thick, and each drop pattered against the floor like a voice being repeated by a thousand mouths, each one softer than the last, each one saying my name. I stood beneath the iron arch with my hands still stained from Krepelia, stirred only by a voice behind me.

"You are late, Warrior." The voice belonged to a woman wrapped in the grey of the Council, her face half hidden beneath a hood stitched with silver thread. Her name was Klementine Daria, Keeper of the Seals, and she was the only soul in Verhaldt who did not flinch at the sight of me.

"The world does not keep time," I answered. "Only the dying do."

"Then you will be pleased to know that something has begun dying." She turned, and the rain parted around her as though afraid. "Walk with me. There is something you must see."

I followed her through streets of white stone, past windows that shut as I approached and doors that bolted before my shadow touched them. The victorious do not forgive the ones who made their victory possible. They only use them and then forget the taste of the knife.

We descended.

Beneath Verhaldt lay a cathedral that had been there since the beginning of time. Its pillars were grown from the earth, pale, veined stone bursting upwards like the bones of some buried god, and between them hung a seal the size of a sky: rings upon rings of script, burning a dim and sickly gold. At its centre, there was a crack. A single, hair-thin crack, and from it, the whisper rose.

"Seven days ago it was whole," said Klementine. "Seven days ago, you finished the last of the outcasts."

The words struck me harder than any blade had.

"They were not heretics," she continued. "That is what we told you, and what we told ourselves, to keep doubt at bay. But their knowledge was not a crime, Warrior. Each of them carried a fragment of the binding in their minds, passed from mouth to mouth for a thousand years, because the seal cannot be written, only passed down."

I looked down at my hands. They had always been mighty. They had always been blood-thirsty.

"I took their knowledge," I said. My voice sounded like gravel in a well. "When each one fell, I felt it enter me. I thought it was my reward."

"It was their last act." Klementine finally lowered her hood, and I saw that her eyes were wet, though her dark face was stone. "They did not die in vain, and you did not kill in vain. You are the lock now. Every fragment, every verse of the binding, lives inside you. And the seal knows it."

The whisper grew louder. It was no longer saying my name. It was saying I am hungry. I had carried the weight of the seal's shadow bleeding into me since Krepelia, since the day I watched ten thousand fools die singing to the sweet lies of hope, and I had believed it was the rush of victory.

"What does it want?" I asked.

"A sacrifice," said Klementine. "Blood freely given, from the one who holds the binding. Do that, and the seal is renewed for another thousand years."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then the crack widens. And the world, as you said once to a dying man, collapses into shards."

"Who told you what I said to a dying man?"

Klementine hesitated. "No one told me," she said. "I remember it. I remember a battlefield I never walked. I remember your voice. Warrior... the fragments are not only in you. They are leaking. Into me. Into the Council. Into anyone who stands too near the crack."

Behind us, footsteps echoed down the stair. Torchlight spilled across the pillars, and in its glow, I saw the grey robes of the Council, and in their midst, a figure I did not expect. He was small, ragged, barely more than a boy, with ink-black eyes and wrists bound in chains of silver. The Council dragged him forward and threw him at my feet.

"The last outcast," announced the eldest of them. "He hid among the dead of Krepelia. We found him yesterday."

The boy lifted his head. "You are not the lock," he rasped. "That is the lie they told you. You are the key."

Klementine's hand went to the blade at her belt, though I could not tell whom she meant to use it on.

"A lock keeps the darkness in," the boy went on, smiling through split lips. "A key lets it out. Ask them, Warrior. Ask them why they needed a murderer, and not a priest. Ask them who wrote the binding in the first place, and what it was written to keep... from escaping a different prison."

The whisper beneath the seal fell silent.

And in that silence, I heard my own voice, from long ago, from some hour I could not place, repeating the oldest truth I knew: Everything you see is a lie.