Dawn breaks over a tranquil beach, pale light seeping across the horizon where sea meets sky. Gentle waves lap at the shore with hypnotic rhythm, each retreat pulling sand from beneath your splayed fingers. You open your eyes to a world washed in soft pastels—pink-tinged clouds, pearl-gray skies, and sand the color of aged parchment.
Yet something is wrong with how you perceive it all. The colors appear muted, as though viewed through clouded glass. The world seems drained of its vibrancy, hollow somehow. Like you.
You lie half-submerged in shallow water, the tide slowly receding. The dawn's growing light reveals your condition—skin ashen and dry, cracking in places to reveal blackened tissue beneath. When you attempt to rise, your limbs refuse to cooperate. It's as though you've forgotten how to move, your body an unfamiliar vessel you're struggling to pilot. Joints creak like rusted hinges long unused, each motion requiring conscious effort where instinct should suffice.
The struggle to stand sends tremors through your desiccated form. Water drips from tattered remnants of clothing you don't recognize. There is no memory of how you came to be here, no recollection of what preceded this moment. Worse still, there is no memory of yourself—no name, no past, no purpose. Only a gnawing emptiness where something vital should be.
The beach stretches in both directions, curving gently to follow the coastline. To your left, it eventually meets a rocky promontory that juts into the sea like the prow of a great stone ship. To your right, the sand continues until it reaches the mouth of a small river that cuts through the landscape, emptying into the ocean. Beyond that river's mouth, distantly silhouetted against the brightening sky, stands what appears to be a settlement—or what remains of one. A few structures are visible, including what might once have been a lighthouse or watchtower, now partially collapsed.
A dull glint catches your eye. Half-buried in the sand beside you lies what might generously be called a sword—a rusted excuse for a blade, pitted and corroded by saltwater and time. The hilt's wrapping has long since rotted away, leaving bare metal that would bite into living flesh. Your hand moves toward it, driven by some faint, buried instinct. Your fingers close awkwardly around the grip, the sensation alien and wrong. Though something whispers that you should know how to hold such a weapon, your body disagrees. The sword feels unwieldy, too heavy in some places and too light in others, balanced all wrong for your frame.
After several clumsy attempts, you manage to stand fully erect, the decrepit sword dangling awkwardly from your grasp. You become aware of a presence nearby. A figure sits upon a large piece of driftwood several paces away—a hunched crone wrapped in layered garments of faded blues and grays that mirror the sea and sky. Her face is partially concealed by a deep hood, but you can feel her gaze upon you. When your hollow eyes meet hers, she doesn't flee as any sensible creature might upon seeing such a desiccated form as yours. Instead, she tilts her head, studying you with unsettling intensity.
"Another one," her voice carries across the sand, a sound like shells rolling against one another that seems to echo from somewhere far away. "Curious." She continues to examine you, head tilted like a bird eyeing something shiny and unexpected. "So unremarkable, yet... remarkable. Hmm... The Mourning Gate lies inland. Follow the river." She pauses, almost to herself, "I wonder..."
A disturbance in the dunes behind her draws both your attentions. Sand cascades downward as a figure emerges that might once have been human. Its limbs are unnaturally elongated, skin stretched tight over malformed bones. But it is the eyes that seize your attention—black, oozing sockets that leak a viscous ichor down hollow cheeks.
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The crone disappears between one moment and the next, there and then simply gone, leaving only a depression in the driftwood. The creature lets out a broken, gurgling sound that might be a cry of hunger or pain, then lunges forward, moving with desperate purpose. Toward you.
You try to raise the sword in defense, but your arm responds sluggishly, the motion uncoordinated. The rusted blade wavers in your grip as the thing closes the distance with alarming speed. Its grasping hands reach for you, fingers too long and too numerous, tipped with cracked yellow nails.
Your first swing is wild, missing completely, the momentum spinning you half around. The creature seizes the advantage, crashing into you with surprising weight. Both of you tumble to the sand, the sword nearly slipping from your grasp. Panic—an emotion that feels strangely detached—courses through you as bony fingers rake across your chest, tearing through rotted fabric into desiccated flesh beneath. There is pain, distant and muted, like an echo of what should be agony.
The creature pins you, its black ichor dripping onto your face as it lowers its maw—a lipless hole ringed with jagged fragments of teeth. You thrash beneath it, movements desperate and uncoordinated. Your left arm is trapped, but your right still clutches the rusted sword, now pressed awkwardly between your bodies.
Something inside you recognizes this thing—recognizes what it is, if not who. It had been human once, before something tore away what made it so. Now it is hollow, empty, driven by base instinct alone.
Like you. But not like you. Something is different. Lesser. More feral.
As the creature's teeth descend toward your throat, some buried reflex takes over. Not skill or training, just the primal drive to survive. You twist violently, creating just enough space to angle the blade. The creature's own weight drives it down onto the rusted point. The impact jars your arm to the shoulder, but the sword holds, piercing through the thing's chest.
A strangled sound escapes its gaping maw. It thrashes once, twice, then goes still. Something extraordinary happens. From the wound blooms a small wisp of gray mist—not luminous or bright, but dull and tainted, barely visible in the morning light. Rather than dissipating into the air, the wisp is drawn to you. You have no control over this process, no way to resist as it flows into your chest like water finding the lowest point.
With this tainted essence comes a flash—not a memory of your own, but something else:
Fishing nets heavy with silver catch. Salt spray on the face. A woman's voice calling a name—Thaddeus. The warm firelight of a cottage near the shore. The memory fractures, tainted by darkness. Pain. Hunger. Endless, maddening hunger.
The vision fades as quickly as it came, leaving you gasping on the sand, the creature's now-truly-lifeless body crushing you with its weight. With effort, you push it aside and rise once more to your feet, staring down at the empty husk. Whatever fragment of Thaddeus had remained is gone now, consumed by you in some inexplicable way.
The tainted soul essence settles within your hollow form. Though small and corrupted, it nonetheless fills some infinitesimal part of your emptiness. Your movements feel marginally less alien, as though the absorbed essence brings with it some minor understanding of how to inhabit a body.
You look toward the river mouth and the distant settlement beyond it. The Mourning Gate, the crone had said. A name that holds no meaning for you, yet it is the only direction you have in a world without context.
Rusted sword in hand, you begin to walk along the shoreline toward the river. Your gait remains awkward, but each step comes slightly easier than the last. The sun continues its ascent, casting your long shadow before you on the sand—a silhouette that seems somehow more substantial than your actual form.
Somewhere in the back of your hollow mind, a new understanding forms—recognition that what you absorbed was merely a fragment of something... a soul, and a tainted one at that. Yet, with it, a piece of your own self came. Could there be more out there?
What awaits you at the Mourning Gate? Who were you before this moment? And what did the crone mean when she wondered about you?
The answers, if they exist at all, lie ahead in the settlement on the horizon, now gleaming faintly in the morning light.
Who you are - These choices reflect on who the Soulseeker is, and will have subtle effects on events and interractions.
What you do - These choices reflect the next course of action, and the result will be shown in the following cchapters.The next chapter will come a few days after the poll is closed.
Who you are: Which of the following would you rather have?
