The shattered bedrock beneath them had grown cold.
Morgath's consciousness did not simply fade into nothingness; instead, the physical world began to blur and peel away like charred parchment. The blinding golden brilliance of Rehan's sovereign aura dissolved, replaced by a hollow, ringing silence that dragged his dying mind backward through the river of time—past the wars, past the dark ages of demonic rule, back one thousand years into an era where demons did not yet walk the mortal plane.
In that forgotten epoch, there were no four-armed sovereigns or necrotic mantles.
There was only a frail, sickly mortal boy named Morath.
Born in the famine-stricken village of Oakhaven at the ragged edges of an ancient kingdom, Morath had known cruelty before he even learned to speak. He was born with weak lungs and pale, brittle bones—a child who coughed blood under the winter frost and could barely lift a blacksmith's hammer. In a harsh world governed by agrarian toil and iron-fisted feudal lords, weakness was not pitied; it was treated as a curse.
The villagers avoided him like a plague. To them, a child who could not plow the fields was merely an extra mouth consuming stolen grain. His mother had succumbed to consumption when he was barely four winters old, leaving him alone with a father whose grief had curdled into bitter, violent resentment.
"Why couldn't you have been born strong?" his father would mutter, reeking of cheap barley wine as he struck the frail boy with a hardened leather strap. "Look at the neighbor's sons! They carry logs! They build roofs! And you... you just sit there, trembling like a dead leaf!"
Morath never cried out. He learned very early that tears only invited harder blows.
Whenever the beatings ended, the bruised boy would drag his aching body past the edge of the village, limping into the desolate, moss-covered woods where no one dared to follow. There, hidden beneath the roots of a weeping willow, stood an ancient, half-buried stone altar.
It was an forgotten shrine dedicated to the Lord of the Pale Threshold—an ancient, archaic deity of Death from forgotten folklore. The idol carved into the stone was grotesque and weathered by centuries of rain: a seated figure with hollow, pupil-less eyes, holding a crude, stone-carved scythe in one hand and an offering bowl in the other.
To the rest of the world, a Death God was an omen of terror.
To Morath, it was the only presence in the entire kingdom that did not demand strength from him.
"You don't ask me to lift stones, do you?" young Morath would whisper, wiping dirt and dried blood from his swollen cheeks as he placed a handful of wild, bitter berries into the stone offering bowl. "You don't care if a man is strong or weak. You take everyone the same in the end."
Morath would sit by the cold stone idol for hours, finding solace in its motionless, hollow gaze. The stone face was carved with an eternal, solemn stillness—a quiet promise that beyond this agonizing life of weakness and scorn, an absolute stillness awaited.
Years dragged on like heavy iron chains. Morath grew taller, but his frail frame never developed the broad shoulders of a warrior or the thick hands of a laborer. When the winter famine struck the valley, the village council made a quiet, merciless decision: grain would only be distributed to families with able-bodied men.
Morath's father, denied an extra ration because of his "useless" son, pushed Morath out into the blizzard one freezing midnight and barred the heavy wooden door.
"Go die in the snow!" his father snarled through the wood. "You've brought nothing but ruin to this house!"
The frost bit into Morath's bare feet. His weak lungs burned as the blizzard tore through his ragged tunic. He crawled on his hands and knees through the blinding white storm, his fingers freezing blue, driven only by a single, desperate instinct.
He didn't crawl toward the village square. He crawled toward the weeping willow.
When he finally reached the buried shrine, he collapsed at the base of the Death God's idol, his cheek pressed against the freezing stone. His breath grew shallow. His vision began to dim into gray static.
"Is this it...?" the boy murmured, a single frozen tear clinging to his eyelashes. "Am I too weak... to even live?"
Just as darkness was about to claim him, a warm, woolen cloak gently wrapped around his trembling shoulders.
Morath forced his heavy eyelids open.
Standing above him in the howling snow was a young girl holding a flickering oil lantern. She had wild, dark hair, soft amber eyes, and a breath of mist escaping her lips as she knelt beside him.
"Hey..." her voice was softer than the falling snow, warmer than any hearth he had ever known. "Don't sleep here. You'll freeze."
Her name was Sarya.
And for the very first time in Morath's miserable, unloved existence, someone had looked down at his weakness—not with disgust, but with tears in her eyes.