Love, that's all I've ever wanted. To love and be loved and to be treated nicely. Dain was that man at first, the man I thought I have been blessed with.
He was loving, gentle, understanding and everything good you could ever think of for your dream man. But everything changed after I started living with him.
He is the complete opposite of everything good I've ever thought of him, he smokes, drinks ..no, he's an alcoholic, he spends all his money partying and there's literally no plan of his other than doing this crazy stuff.
I thought I could change him at first, I thought our little be would make him want to be someone better but the more I kept staying and hoping, the more things turned out to be actually hopeless.
And it completely shattered when I caught him cheating on me, and when I wanted to get angry at that fact, he beat me up like I wasn't supposed to talk. Like I was only supposed to hear him and accepted whatever.
Toxicity, that I've been running away from ever since a child. I grew up in a place I once called it home, until it was completely destroyed by alcohol which my dad fell victim to and became an addict and domestic violence...the case he beats my mom up every time.
I've been hoping to never date anyone like my dad, I was being careful, very careful and didn't see how it all came to this.
And now, I can't face it anymore. I want to walk away, I have to and walking away needs me to confirm my emotions for him.
That's why I let Tavian in, agreed for him to be my one night stand. The deal was, if I could pull through with him for the night, that would mean I'm over Dain and strangely, I did.
Now, I am sure and certain of what I want. And leaving Dain is what I'd do.
As I stood there, still held back against the wall, all my attention was on Tavian still in shock.
"Who are you to tell me what to do?" Dain snarled.
"I'm someone you don't need to know" Tavian said, still not letting go of Dain's hand.
Dain turned to me, "is he....you slept with him?"
Panicked rushed down my spine, I was scared but I knew I must face my fear.
"He did, do you have a problem with that?" Tavian didn't make matters easy for me.
"Answer me, Damnit, did you or did you not?" Dain roared.
"Uh, I did and so what? Why does it seem to pain you like you didn't do the same with Mark? Or do you think you are the only one allowed to cheat in this relationship? No, Dain, I can too, I can do whatever I like" I was being tough and strong, but only God knows how scared and broken I was inside.
On normal occasions, I will run into hiding but I knew I had to face this and not run away else it will never end.
"You bitch" Dain attempted to hurt me but was kicked away by Tavian when he went falling.
"I won't tell you again to leave," Tavian warned.
I saw panic in Dain's eyes as he stood up and retreated, "it's not over, I will make sure it's either me you're with or no one else"
He ran away and I let out a sigh of relief. Tavian's voice pulled me out of my head and I faced him.
"Why did you do that?" I demanded.
He raised a brow, "do what?"
"Why did you tell him we spent the night together?"
"Shouldn't he know about it? Thought you intended to chase him away, that's the best way of" I cut Tavian off
"Best way my feet, do you know what you just did now will be way more harder to deal with? Have you any idea what he can do? And with what he said, do you think he was simply bluffing? Well no, he wasn't and thanks to you, I'm in deep shit now" I turned and began walking away.
True, I wanted Dain to know I slept with someone but I didn't want him to know the person I slept with. And now that he knows, I don't know what a psycho like him will do.
I need to end this, but how?
"But, I was only trying to help" Tavian reached out to hold my hand but I jerked him away,
"I never asked for your help, did I?" I was lost at what to do.
He nodded, with a sad expression on his face.
I felt bad for being too harsh but I didn't apologize. If this is what it will take to get him off my tail, then I will do it.
"Then please, leave...we agree for it to be a one night thing, you should act like you don't know me and so will I.... don't make this too hard on me...I've got a lot on my plate already " I turned and walked away.
Maybe he was trying to say something, but I didn't care and I didn't listen. All I know is I have to leave and not get anyone involved in my mess.
For a moment, neither moved.The world seemed to hold its breath. Only the wind dared speak — curling through the ruins, winding between broken archways and the hollowed bones of temples, whispering secrets too ancient for mortals to remember. Dust drifted like pale ghosts between them, glittering faintly in the strange twilight that bled from the torn sky.Soren’s knuckles whitened around the hilt of his blade. His pulse echoed the hum of the steel — steady, sharp, desperate. Across from him, Kaius stood like a shadow carved from grief and fury. Their eyes met, and in that silence lay the weight of everything they had once been — brothers in oath, defenders of a dying light.Now, they were the remnants of a shattered creed.Soren could see it in Kaius’s gaze — not only rage but hesitation, a flicker of the boy he once knew beneath all that armor and bitterness. Once, they had knelt side by side before the Sanctum’s altar, hands bound in pledge beneath the gaze of the old gods. Once,
The ruins stretched endlessly across the horizon.They weren’t just remnants of stone — they were bones of a forgotten age, an ancient carcass left to rot beneath a sky that no longer remembered color. Shattered marble columns rose from the mist like the ribs of some colossal beast, their fractured edges slick with moss, their crowns still smoldering faintly with the memory of divine fire. Between them lay slabs of obsidian carved with runes so old they bled light from their cracks, whispering to the silence that had taken their place.The air was thick, heavy not with smoke or ash, but with memory. Every gust carried the faint scent of old blood and the ghostly echo of prayers that had never been answered. The ground itself hummed — a low, mournful vibration that trembled through Soren’s bones, as if the world were breathing in its sleep.Soren stood in the heart of it, his boots sinking into the damp earth, eyes wide and hollow. The silence here was unnatural — not absence, but awar
When Soren woke, there was no sky.Only white — endless, merciless, and blinding. It stretched in every direction, without shape or horizon, as if the world had been stripped of color and meaning. The air shimmered faintly, cold yet heavy, carrying neither wind nor echo. It felt like existence itself had been scrubbed raw — a blank canvas after the gods had erased their first mistake.He didn’t remember falling. Only breaking.There was a weightlessness to his body, a strange dissonance where sensation used to be. His bones didn’t ache, yet something deeper did — a hollow ache in the part of him that used to pulse with another heartbeat. That ache was Travian’s absence, vast and consuming, like silence after music.He tried to breathe, but the air was dry and brittle. His voice cracked as he called, “Travian?”Silence folded around him. Then, faintly — not through sound, but through pulse — came an answer.I’m here.The voice vibrated inside him, resonating in the marrow of his bones.
The fire dwindled to embers by the time dawn reached the mountains.Its glow, once fierce and alive, had shrunk to a trembling pulse — a fragile heart beating inside a ring of blackened stones. Every now and then, the wind brushed through the ashes, scattering dying sparks into the air like fading constellations.Soren hadn’t slept.He sat beside the dying light, his cloak drawn tight against the cold, his fingers blackened with soot. The smell of char and iron clung to his skin. He stared toward the horizon, where gold met gray — where the new sun climbed slowly out of a sea of mist that still veiled the world below.The valley was unrecognizable. What had once been green and breathing now lay broken and burned. Trees bent like soldiers who’d forgotten how to stand. The ground was a scar of cracks and smoke, thin tendrils rising like the ghosts of what had been. The storm that tore through the night had left nothing untouched.And yet, amid the ruin, there was silence — too perfect,
The wind howled as Soren stood before the Gate.It wasn’t just sound—it was a living force tearing through the mountain’s bones. The storm had swallowed the peaks whole, reducing the world to a blur of ash-gray clouds and jagged light. Lightning clawed across the heavens, its veins carving furious patterns through the sky, while thunder followed like the growl of something ancient and vengeful awakening after centuries of silence.Yet none of it mattered.Soren saw only the shimmer before him—a rippling wall of pale light suspended in the storm, a wound carved between worlds. The Gate. It pulsed like a heart, slow and steady, and in that rhythm he felt something deeper. Beneath his skin, the same pulse answered—a faint echo, fragile but alive. Travian.He took a step forward, boots sinking into the rain-soaked ground. The taste of iron and ozone coated his tongue.“Soren.”Lucien’s voice drifted from behind him, smooth and low, cutting through the chaos with a deceptive calm. He sound
The light swallowed them whole.For a breathless instant, Soren felt himself dissolve—body, thought, soul—until even the memory of pain slipped from his grasp. Then came the quiet. A vast, eternal quiet, too immense to belong to any mortal realm. When he opened his eyes, the world was gone.Only the sky remained.It stretched endlessly in every direction—blue, gold, and black all at once, like dawn and dusk eternally colliding. Stars pulsed beneath his feet as if he were standing on the skin of the cosmos itself, each flickering ember whispering fragments of forgotten hymns. The air vibrated with a sound that wasn’t quite music, not quite language, but something older—something that remembered creation before memory was even born.Beside him, Travian shimmered. His half-formed body glowed brighter with each breath, blurring the line between man and light. The edges of his being wavered, translucent, like a candle caught between life and extinction.“This is the First Light,” Travian m