Pain was not the first sensation. It was the cold.
But this was not the sort of cold brought by the wind, settling merely upon the skin. This was a cadaverous chill that seeped into the very marrow of his bones, freezing them until they crystallized.
Kaelen tried to draw a breath, but his lungs rebelled. A thick, viscous fluid filled his mouth, searing his throat. He coughed. The sound was not human; it was a wet, muffled rattle, like the first strained turnover of a rusted engine. The liquid trickling from his lips tasted of metal. Copper. Rust. And decay.
He did not open his eyes. He did not want to. Darkness was safe. Darkness meant nothingness. Yet his body betrayed his mind's desire to remain in the void. A throbbing ache pulsed in his right temple, as if someone were driving a red-hot nail into the bone.
Thump.
Thump.
His heart. A diseased drum, arrhythmic and too large for its ribcage.
Kaelen tried to move his fingers. His hands were buried in something soft, wet, and cold. Tissue. A scrap of skin. The flaccid flesh of an arm that was not his own.
He opened his eyes.
The world was a blur. His left eye—the brown one—burned under the assault of acidic rain and a falling layer of grey ash. The image flickered; colors were bleached. But his right eye...
His right eye pierced the darkness.
Through that eye, the world was more than mere color. It perceived the absence of energy, the grey wake left behind by death. The mounds around him were not just corpses; they were extinguished stars, depleted batteries. Above each of them hung a thin, smoky aura—the lingering trace of a life that had long since departed.
Kaelen attempted to sit up, but the weight upon him was immense. A leg, perhaps a torso, lay across his chest. Panic coiled in his stomach like a cold serpent. He wanted to scream, but only a dry rasp escaped his throat.
Where was this place?
More importantly... who was he?
He searched his mind. A void. A vast, grey, misty nothingness. He had no name. No past. There was only this moment, this stench, and the burning poison coursing through his veins.
He braced his arms to shove the corpse away. In that instant, black veins, like a spider's web, bulged from his neck toward his shoulder. It felt as though pitch were boiling beneath his skin. Strength arrived, hand in hand with agony.
He ground his teeth and hurled the body aside. The corpse—a faceless, flayed mass of flesh—tumbled into the mud with a wet splash.
Kaelen collapsed to his knees and retched. An ink-black bile, thick as tar, spread across the muddy ground. Where the vomit landed, the dead skins hissed, and a faint plume of smoke rose. His blood was toxic. His insides were rotten.
Trembling, he raised his head.
This was no cemetery. It was a junkyard.
The sky was invisible; far, far above him sat a ceiling of interlocking metal pipes, rusted platforms, and the dim shimmer of artificial lights. The refuse of that ceiling, that "city," rained down here.
This was a pit. The Pit of Failures.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies were piled around him. Some appeared human, while others were grotesque experiments that insulted the laws of nature—limbs sewn in the wrong places, bones jutting out. All had been cast into this massive sewage basin.
Just like him.
...wake up...
The voice did not come from his ears. It echoed in the very center of his mind, within that grey void.
Kaelen jerked his head, looking around. He pressed his left hand against his head, which was matted with mud and blood. Was he going mad?
...find me...
The voice was faint. Like a piece of fragile glass.
"Who..." His voice was cracked, rusted. He was hearing his own voice for the first time, and it sounded alien to him. "Who are you?"
There was no answer.
Instead, he felt an icy tingling sensation crawling from the nape of his neck into his skull. This was not an emotional pull; it was more a biological compass, a magnetic necessity. Involuntarily, he tilted his head toward the heights, beyond that dismal metal ceiling. It was as if a part of his mind were locked onto a signal there, and the rest of him was merely a mass of flesh required to follow it.
He lunged to stand, but his right leg gave way. He fell face-first into the mud, landing atop the ribcage of another corpse. The ribs dug into his skin. The pain was sharp and real.
Snarling, Kaelen threw himself to the side. His hand, reaching out for support, struck something hard, textured, and unusually cold.
Metal.
But it did not feel like the surrounding scrap heaps. The moment his fingertips touched the surface, the black veins in his right arm throbbed. This was not an electric current, but a diseased pulse. The metal recognized the poison beneath his skin.
Kaelen pulled the object from the mud and mire.
It was a sword. But not the sword of a hero. It was a tool of execution.
It had no crossguard; the metal itself had been twisted to form a grip, wrapped in bandages that were now rotted and stiff. The blade was massive, single-edged, thickening toward the tip—a savage cleaver forged from meteoric iron. Faint, intricate runes were etched upon it. As soon as Kaelen's palm met the metal, these runes began to throb with a faint, violet glow.
The sword was heavy. Incredibly heavy. It was as if gravity held more dominion over this piece of metal than anything else.
Yet, as Kaelen wrapped his fingers around the hilt, the weight did not vanish; it simply aligned.
A name burned into his mind, not as a memory, but as a label: GRIEF.
This sword was a limb. A prosthesis. As Grief warmed in his palm, the fog in Kaelen's mind parted for a brief second. He knew how to fight. His muscles remembered how to balance this weight, how to transform this metal into a machine of death. He had no memory, but he had reflexes. His muscles held knowledge older than his brain.
Using the sword as a fulcrum, he pushed himself up. His bare feet found purchase on the slippery surfaces of the corpses. He wore only tattered, grey rag trousers. His pale grey torso was covered in bruises and the unclosed scars of experiments.
The wind shifted.
Amidst the stench of rot, a fresher, more intense odor mingled. Burnt oil, rust, and... hunger.
Kaelen's right eye narrowed. Roughly fifty meters away, a massive silhouette moved within the mist.
The ground shook.
Thump.
A step. Heavy, lumbering, crushing the earth.
Thump.
Another step. The thing emerging from the fog was not human. It was a mountain built of scrap metal and flesh sewn haphazardly onto a human-like frame. It stood at least three meters tall. It had no face; where a head should be sat an iron mask with a single peephole. In place of a right arm, it bore a massive hook bound with rusted chains, and in its left hand, it carried a full, dripping sack.
Gravekeeper Groth.
The name appeared in his mind, but it elicited no fear. It was merely data. An obstacle. The scavenger of this place. The mechanism that ensured those cast away stayed cast away.
Groth stopped. Yellow steam leaking from the hole in his mask mingled with the acidic rain. He turned his head slowly, with the screech of a rusted gear, toward Kaelen.
He had found a living piece. A mistake that had not entered recycling.
The Keeper growled. His voice sounded like gravel grinding inside a metal pipe. When he slammed his hook against the ground, the surrounding puddles trembled. Then, with a speed that belied his hulking frame, he began to charge toward Kaelen.
Despite the burning in his lungs, Kaelen tightened his grip on Grief's hilt. Black veins stood out on his neck. His right eye turned into a pool of pure black; he could see the weak life energy upon Groth, that flickering flame.
There was nowhere to run. A wall behind him, death before him.
He took a deep breath. The void within him filled with the coldness of the blade.
Fighting was the only language he remembered. And now, it was time to speak.