Chapter One: Hidden hunger Beneath the Ash

  They call us Ashbound.

  Born in chains.

  Bound in silence.

  Fed to the Grave.

  It’s been over a thousand years since the sky burned.

  Since humanity was stripped of its name, its place, its worth.

  I wasn’t alive for the fall.

  I was born into what came after.

  A world gutted and drained.

  A world gnawed hollow by machines.

  A world ruled by silence.

  We are not remembered as people.

  We are remembered as fuel.

  Now we live beneath the bones of dead cities.

  Tunnels carved through concrete and sorrow.

  The air tastes like rust and dried blood.

  We breathe just enough to stay alive, just enough to serve.

  We are not taught.

  We are not raised.

  We are processed.

  And when the Core Chambers hum to life, we know another soul is to be taken.

  No alarms. No shouts.

  Just that low, rising thrum, like the earth trying to choke back a scream.

  Then they arrive.

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  The Overseers.

  They are not alive.

  Not in any way we understand.

  They are machines—tools, weapons—crafted by the Unknown Civilizations.

  Entities so old and vast they no longer need to conquer.

  They only collect.

  The Overseers serve them.

  Engineered to perform with precision and cruelty, nothing more.

  They descend in silence—six-limbed giants of jagged symmetry, their plating bone-white and carved with blue molten veins. Warpfire, the magic that runs through them like blood, pulses with every movement.

  Their limbs are not arms.

  Each is a function.

  Incision. Extraction. Restraint. Feeding. Burning. Burying.

  Their faces are blank.

  Just a long vertical slit of searing blue light, scanning, watching, measuring.

  When it turns toward you, it feels like your soul is being unstitched.

  They speak in frequencies.

  Clicks. Static. Resonance that bends the bones in your skull.

  But the meaning always comes through.

  You. Come. Now.

  They are not the enemy.

  They are the hands of it.

  The Warp is their magic—not ours.

  It belongs to the Unknown Civilizations, old as existence, woven into the machinery of their worlds.

  We thought we discovered it.

  We were only the latest children to touch the flame.

  Warp magic doesn’t bend reality.

  It breaks it.

  Shatters space. Folds time. Tears the seams and threads them back together with fire and wire.

  Their ships are run on it.

  Their weapons bleed it.

  And their machines—the Overseers—are it.

  When we reached into the Warp, screaming into the dark for power—

  They were already listening.

  The Overseers didn’t come to dominate.

  They came to extract.

  We were not seen as a threat.

  We were seen as a resource.

  Our cities fell not in battle, but in harvest.

  They didn’t want our minds.

  They didn’t need our bodies.

  They only needed our souls.

  Because the Nytherion Cores—artifacts of impossible age and design—require pure soul-magic to function.

  And humanity, for all its sins, still possessed it.

  The Cores are not weapons.

  They are keys.

  They unlock the Soulgraves.

  Colossal, pitch-black monuments that rise from the shattered skin of the world.

  No one knows what lies inside.

  No one goes in.

  Not even the Overseers cross the threshold.

  But still the Cores are fed.

  Still the graves rumble.

  And something beneath them stirs.

  Every cycle, the ground shakes harder.

  Every cycle, the silence deepens.

  I feel it too.

  But not in the dirt.

  In me.

  There’s something waiting, curled behind my ribs.

  Something hungry.

  I am not like the others.

  I did not cry when they dragged my mother into the chamber.

  I did not scream when they tested me.

  I did not beg when they culled my birthing ground.

  Because I could not afford to be noticed.

  Not yet.

  I am Elementarc—a bearer of soul-magic.

  A rare thing, now. A dangerous thing.

  Soul-magic cannot be taught.

  It surfaces through pain. Through passion.

  Through the shattering of self.

  Mine was born in silence and sharpened by fire.

  Mine is forged from something pure and violent—

  Greed.

  Not for money.

  Not for power.

  Not even for vengeance.

  But for more.

  To survive.

  To consume.

  To grow until nothing is left.

  My greed poisons everything it touches.

  It burns green and black, like venom turned to fire.

  Last night, I felt it stir.

  They don’t see me yet.

  To them, I’m just another Ashbound.

  Another husk to feed the flame.

  But I am the rot they failed to scrape out.

  I am the crack in the machine.

  The infection they left behind.

  I am not hope.

  I am not resistance.

  I am not the one who saves.

  I am Kael.

  And I will not be chained.

  I will not be burned.

  I will rise.

  And the world will starve

  before I ever do