The graveyard had gone silent again. No whispers. No tremors. Just the low hiss of wind through dead grass — as if the world itself were holding its breath after what it had just witnessed.Draven Kaine stood at the edge of his shattered grave, the dirt still fresh beneath his boots. The mark on his hands pulsed faintly, silver veins crawling up his wrists like living chains.For a long time, he simply stared at them. A necromancer’s mark. A god’s curse. A lifeline and a leash all in one.“You look like someone who’s regretting their resurrection,” Lucen drawled from behind him. The ghost hovered lazily, faint light flickering around the edges of his form. His voice was dry, sardonic — the same tone Draven remembered from years ago when Lucen used to mock him in the barracks.“Regret requires the illusion of choice,” Draven muttered. “Fair point. But you still might want to start thinking about survival. Death-gods don’t hand out second chances for free.”Draven crouched to pick up wh

The sun had climbed high over Veilmoor, but Draven cast no shadow.Every step he took left the ground bare, as though light refused to acknowledge his existence. The absence followed him — mocking, unnatural, wrong.Lucen drifted beside him, face pale even for a ghost. “I’ve seen a lot of cursed things, Draven, but this? This is different. You don’t even feel right.”“I noticed,” Draven muttered, voice rough. His fingers brushed the mark on his palm — the new one, dark red and pulsing faintly. The edges were still burning, the sigil twisting like a living thing.Lucen frowned. “It’s feeding on you.” Draven didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. The energy from the mark throbbed in rhythm with his heartbeat — and every pulse left him colder.The streets of Veilmoor were still silent, filled with those eerie, hollow statues. The city of the dead, once ruled by necromancers, had become a mausoleum of its own making.Draven moved carefully, scanning the fog that hung low over the cobblestones

The storm outside the catacombs had passed, but the silence that followed was far worse. A stillness so heavy it pressed on the bones of the dead — and on Draven’s heart.He moved through the lower crypts with a torch in hand, its golden light casting eerie shadows that danced across the coffins stacked into the walls. The deeper he went, the colder it became. The air smelled of iron and dust and something faintly sweet — decay, old and patient.Behind him, Lucen’s spectral glow flickered weakly. “You’re pushing yourself too far,” the ghost murmured. “The curse feeds on your energy. You keep using necromancy like it’s not eating you alive.”Draven didn’t slow down. His boots echoed softly on the stone. “If I stop now, we lose everything we’ve gained.” “Gained?” Lucen’s voice sharpened. “You’ve raised the bones of men who can’t rest. You’re hunted by Death itself, and the veil’s thinning every hour—how is that gain?”Draven ignored him. His hand brushed along the coffin lids as he pass

Draven awoke to the taste of ash.He lay on cold stone beneath a crimson sky. The air shimmered with heat, and above him hung a moon split in half — one side burning red, the other black as soot. It bled light across a shattered wasteland, painting everything in the hue of old blood.Lucen hovered a few feet away, his ghostly form dim in the heat haze. “You still breathing?”Draven pushed himself up, every muscle aching. The air was thick here — alive with whispers, faint echoes of laughter and weeping that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. He knew that sound. Souls. Unbound and restless.“Where are we?” he asked.“The second realm,” Lucen said quietly. “The Blood Moon Gate. It’s where condemned souls wander until they lose themselves.”Draven dusted his hands on his torn cloak. “Then we’re in hell.”Lucen smirked. “If hell had a sense of humor, maybe.”They stood on the edge of a black plain littered with bone fragments and shards of mirror-glass. Far in the distance, a ruine