The rain had not stopped all day.
It fell without mercy on the streets of the wretched city — heavy, relentless, trying to wash everything clean. But it never could. It never managed to scrub away the filth, the despair, or the rot that clung to every corner of this cursed place.
Once, in older legends, the city had been called Urania. Now it was nothing more than a festering heap of crumbling tenements, crooked alleys, and leaking rooftops — a place where the dregs of society gathered to wait for the world to finally end.
The rain hammered the earth and pooled in dirty mirrors that reflected the weak, trembling light of candles bleeding through shattered windows. The air was heavy with the smell of wet soil and mold seeping from split walls. This was a city of ghosts. And Lonir was one of them.
He was a young man in his early twenties. He moved through the dark without hurry, searching for the place where everything could finally stop.
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He sat on the cold, wet ground inside the graveyard, directly before his mother's headstone.
The cracked stone was slick with rain. Dead weeds swayed in the wind as if sighing at the cruelty of the world. The cemetery itself was long abandoned — ringed by rusted iron fences, crowded with old grave markers buried under moss and grime. No visitors at this hour. Only the wind rattling the skeletal trees, and the rain tapping the stones like a funeral hymn that refused to end.
His mother's grave was simple: a broken slab of rock bearing a single name carved in fading letters.
Laura.
A quiet reminder of days when life had been slightly more bearable.
Lonir pressed his face into his hands. Then, after a long moment, he pulled a small mirror from the worn bag at his side. His reflection looked back through the rain-smeared glass. An ordinary face — black hair plastered wet against his forehead, grey eyes dull as ash, lips cracked from the cold. Not ugly. Not handsome.
Just nothing. The face of someone who had long since stopped believing he mattered.
"Hideous," he whispered.
But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't true. His face was simply too ordinary — painfully, humiliatingly ordinary. Yet his mind, drowning in despair, had been turning the word ordinary into something monstrous for years now.
His mother had given him this mirror long ago. He still remembered her smile as she pressed it into his hands.
"Always look at yourself, my son. You are the most beautiful thing in this universe."
Those words felt like mockery now. The sharpest kind.
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The graveyard held its silence. No birds. No whispers. No footsteps. Only him, the frozen earth, and the grave of the woman who had chosen to leave — years ago now — and left behind a hollow in his chest that nothing had ever filled.
He remembered those long nights in the filthy public hospital, where the doctors barely glanced at the poor. His mother had been groaning in agony after drinking poison — the poison she had chosen herself, because the suffering had become unbearable. Her frail body had withered day by day while the physicians treated her as something less than human. Lonir had worked as a servant back then, scrubbing floors and swallowing the contempt of arrogant nobles, scraping together coins for medicine that never helped.
It had all been for nothing. She died in his arms. Her last whispered words: "Don't do what I did, Lonir."
But despair had become his only companion after that.
He lost his job — he could no longer endure the daily humiliations from the nobility. He lost his room — the landlord was greedy and found a reason to throw him out. He ended up in the streets, eating from refuse, sleeping on curbs, kicked awake by city guards who saw him as vermin deserving to be crushed.
Every day, the world had grown tighter around him. As though the sky itself wanted to grind him to dust.
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Lonir felt the despair pressing on his heart — dense, heavy, eager to reduce him to ash.
He had tried everything. Searched for any work that preserved a sliver of dignity. Begged. Even stolen small things when the hunger became unendurable. But this city showed no mercy to the weak. Old friends had drifted away, frightened that his misfortune might be contagious. He had watched the rich pass in gilded carriages, laughing as though he were invisible.
"Why me?" he had asked himself, again and again. "Why must I suffer like this?"
The only answer was silence. And the rain, which kept falling, as if the sky itself was weeping for him.
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He raised his old knife and pressed it to his throat.
He paused long enough to look at his reflection one last time. The blade was rusted, the wooden handle worn smooth from years of use — a gift from his father, who had vanished.
He was not afraid. Not even hesitant. He had simply been searching — for anything that could pierce through this merciless world.
He imagined the end: the blood flowing, the body going cold, the soul finally at rest.
And yet, something small inside him still wanted something else. Something unnamed. Perhaps the ability to change this fate.
Then, without warning, a strange awareness crept over him.
Someone — or something — was watching him in that final stillness.
No shadow. No sound. No face. Only a heavy, suffocating pressure against his soul, whispering that every movement was being observed.
He lifted his head and scanned the dark. The cemetery remained empty. The wind picked up, shaking the dead trees. The rain intensified, as though trying to stop him.
But Lonir did not move. He did not speak.
He raised the knife again, closed his eyes, and gave himself to that savage moment —
And cut his own throat.
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He sat there gurgling, blood pouring hot down his chest and soaking the rags he called clothing. He closed his eyes and accepted his fate while tears mixed with rain on his face.
The deep wound was not the end.
Pain detonated through his body. The blood was warm on his skin. The world spun wildly. He collapsed onto the earth, gasping like a dying animal, waiting for the eternal dark.
Instead, a strange energy erupted inside him — like cold fire burning through his soul. Reality flickered.
Then he woke — standing upright.
But he could no longer feel the cold, wet ground beneath his feet.
His ruined clothes had changed.
A heavy black robe of fine, unfamiliar cloth now covered him — far too elegant for a gutter rat of the streets. Silver threads, like cracks in ice, ran through the fabric. A wide gold belt encircled his waist. And hanging from that belt...
A black card.
Rough to the touch, the size of a palm. Its edges looked burned and frayed, yet felt strangely metallic beneath the faint moonlight. Unreadable letters twisted across its surface in script that radiated dread and mystery.
He reached out and touched it.
The moment his fingers made contact, a crushing weight drove itself into his soul — as if a piece of him had frozen forever.
A name appeared in his mind, blazing:
[ THE BLEAK ]
The word resonated like a distant cry, carrying visions with it: abandoned graveyards, desperate faces, endless days of isolation.
Then more cards flickered across his consciousness.
Strange images. Names. Shapes. Colors. They appeared and vanished like ghosts.
Some glowed faintly — like [ The Forgotten ], a grey card showing a figure dissolving into shadow.
Others were dark and heavy — like [ The Burned ], where black fire devoured everything in silence.
He could not touch them yet. He did not understand their meaning. But he felt with certainty that they were real — pieces of a power now bound to him, fragments of an agreement with something that had never been spoken of before.
Then came the voice.
From the card at his hip itself. Deep. Calm. Carrying a terrible, immovable authority.
"I am... the God of Despair. You have chosen despair. This is your first card: The Bleak."
"You will see your cards in your mind, but they will not manifest in reality until you have earned them from me. Or... you may die now, and your suffering ends as you wished."
The voice rolled through his skull like distant thunder, flooding his mind with visions: ruined cities, shattered souls, power born from pure emptiness.
Lonir felt terror mingled with a sick thrill — as if something buried inside him had finally woken.
The moment the voice finished, it was gone.
He stood there, clutching the black card. The other cards shimmered in his mind like passing hallucinations, impossible to grasp.
Everything else fell silent.
He looked around. The cemetery appeared unchanged. Yet it now felt like an extension of himself — as though despair had become his only ally.
Lonir did not know what to do next. He did not fully understand what The Bleak meant. But he felt a hellish power flowing through his veins, making the cold bite deeper and gnaw at his bones.
He knew one thing with absolute certainty:
The world he had known ended here.
He took his first step out of the cemetery. The filthy streets were waiting.
But he now carried a new power — obscure, dangerous, and burning to be tested.
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