From Cursed Scum to Supreme Sovereign

Whispers of the Curse

The beast’s fangs hovered inches from Kael’s throat, ivory daggers catching the torchlight as if eager for his blood. The creature did not lunge… it savored, lowering its jaws with cruel patience, breath hot and fetid with the stink of graves.

Pinned beneath its weight, Kael could not move. His chest barely rose. Every attempt at breath stuttered shallowly, and his limbs might as well have been carved from stone. Only his eyes worked, forced to stare upward at the slow approach of death.

Is this it? The thought crawled up through the haze of panic. Is this how a dog dies? Spat on, forgotten. Ripped apart for their joy.

The crowd answered him with thunder.

“Kill it!”

“End the blight on House Draven!”

“Let the cursed blood soak the stones!”

A thousand throats screaming, a thousand hands pounding. The square itself seemed to shake with it. Kael had lived nineteen years beneath those voices… mockery, jeers, eager laughter at his suffering. He knew each cadence like a cruel lullaby.

Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the world would be lighter without him.

The beast’s mouth yawned wider, strings of saliva trailing down to spatter his cheek. The stuff burned against his skin, sour and stinging, as if even its spit knew he did not belong.

And then… something stirred at the edges of his vision.

Not light, not shadow. Something deeper, like ink poured into water, rippling out until the arena blurred. Within it, shapes coiled… symbols older than memory, runes that slid away whenever he tried to grasp them. They throbbed with meaning he could not name, a half-glimpse of power, of change, of awakening.

“What…” The whisper caught in his raw throat, more breath than sound.

And then the voice came.

It was not heard so much as placed within him, threaded directly through his mind, silk over steel.

“Suffer. Endure. Rise.”

The words landed with the weight of centuries, yet they carried something else too… grief. A sorrow vast enough to ache through his ribs.

Kael’s heart jolted. A woman’s voice. Timeless. Watching. Waiting. It bled with the loneliness of one who had seen whole ages crumble into dust.

“You are not alone, child of shadow. You have never been alone.”

His lips shaped a sound, cracked and trembling. “Who…”

“I am Elyndra, last guardian of the fading light. And you… You are the key to everything.”

Tears broke loose, cutting through the grime and blood on his face. Not for the wound in his chest or the beast’s weight crushing him. But because, for the first time in his life, someone had spoken to him without venom. Someone had looked through the curse and seen more than ruin.

His trembling hands lifted, pressing feebly against the beast’s jaws.

“No.”

The word was nearly lost to the roar of the crowd. Yet the beast hesitated, red eyes narrowing.

“I said no.” Louder this time. His voice cracked like a boy’s, but something else flickered beneath it… an edge hammered hard by nineteen years of scorn, ready to cut.

“Look at that!” a man jeered. “The wretch thinks it can fight!”

“Pathetic,” another spat. “Just die already!”

But from his gilded seat, Lord Aelric leaned forward, gold brows tight with a flicker of unease. “What is it doing?”

The beast, as if insulted by the pause, snapped back its head and struck. Claws slashed downward, ripping fabric, ripping flesh, until bone jarred against bone.

They cut across the mark.

The Eclipse Mark. The scar burned into his skin since birth.

Pain detonated through Kael’s body. Not the sharp flare of torn flesh, but something older, deeper… like a door, sealed since the world’s first dawn, was being ripped off its hinges.

And then it erupted.

Black fire spilled from the wound, flames without heat, only weight… the crushing intensity of collapsed stars. The Mark blazed against his chest, its jagged lines writhing, reshaping, alive with a power that had slept too long.

Silence slammed into the arena.

Even the beast reeled back, its red gaze wide, confusion shading into something close to fear.

“Demon flame!” shrieked a woman.

“The curse awakens!” another cried. “We’re doomed!”

“Guards!” Lord Garrett bellowed, half-rising. “Get us out! It summons the shadow!”

But none of them moved. No one could look away.

Kael lay at the eye of it, black fire writhing around him like a crown of broken stars. Each throb of his heart drove the flames higher, the Mark burning brighter, until it seemed his chest was a forge of midnight.

On the temple steps, High Hierophant Malrick froze, pale eyes caught in the blaze. For the first time in Kael’s memory, the priest looked shaken… not by doubt in his god, but by the loss of control.

“Impossible,” Malrick breathed. The words trembled, swallowed almost whole by the panicked murmurs. “The seals were meant to hold for decades yet.”

The beast edged backward, claws scraping stone, head jerking as if to fling off a nightmare it could not wake from. Even its corrupted instincts recognized that fire, and it wanted no part of it.

The power coursed through Kael, filling the hollow places where pain had lived. It burned away weakness, burned away fear, burned away the boy they had taught him he was. It left only the shape of something new. Something vast.

Elyndra’s voice threaded through the storm, low and tender, yet unyielding as the night sky.

“Now, child of shadow. Now you begin to understand what you are.”