Cairen, the spectator, was imrsed in the nightmare of his own childhood, a ghost forced to witness the ticulous construction of his ruin.
The vision stabilized in the early years of the church. He saw himself, at eight years old, being housed in the ’Eastern Building.’
It was a vast and gloomy warehouse, with rows of mats on the floor, sheltering dozens of children and a few desperate adults.
All shared the sa look. A mixture of lingering fear and a faint spark of hope. Hunger, his constant companion on the streets, had been miraculously driven away.
Three als a day. Without fail. Bread, soup, and sotis even a piece of fruit.
For young Cairen, this new place was a paradise after days on the streets. A roof and food. He did not question it. But now, Cairen the spectator watched with a tightness in his chest.
Not from longing, but from retrospective horror.
He saw with clarity what his childish mind had refused to process. The clinical precision of that operation. They were not being saved, they were rely being fattened. Prepared.
The church was a cattle pen, and hunger, a trap that kept them from questioning their prison.
His mind, which had buried so much of that period, was now flooded by suppressed fragnts.
The sound of muffled crying at night, the silent disappearance of familiar faces that no one dared to comnt on.
The constant sll that sothing bad was happening in that place.
Ti in the vision accelerated. A year passed. Young Cairen was no longer a skeleton dressed in rags. His cheeks had color, and his limbs had gained a healthy shape. He was strong. Whole. The daily food had done its job.
And then, the change ca.
Without explanations, he was taken from the Eastern Building and led to the ’Western Building.’ The environnt here was radically different.
Fewer people, rooms that looked more like individual cells. Silence. And a coldness that did not co from temperature, but from the atmosphere of the place. Hope, that stubborn weed, began to wither from that mont on.
At nine years old, Cairen made his first visit to the underground of the place.
Cairen, the spectator, saw his younger self being dragged by two n with empty expressions. They were not priests or n of the church like in the Eastern Building.
But guards. The descent down rough stone stairs seed endless. In the underground, the air was cold and heavy, slling of strange herbs and tal. Impassive guards watched reinforced doors.
The vision beca a succession of nightmare fragnts. Many of which had been completely erased from his mory.
Cairen saw himself forced to ingest murky liquids that made him vomit black blood. And he saw himself locked in darkness for days, until the whispers of his own mind beca his only companions.
He saw other faces he had briefly known in the Eastern Building and new ones who arrived at the Western Building. All were taken into rooms, never to return.
One withered away until he was little more than skin and bone, another went mad and silently banged his own head against the wall.
And through it all, young Cairen survived by every ans.
He grew sick but did not die. He went mad with fear, but his sanity always found a thin thread to cling to. To Cairen’s eyes, watching from above, it was truly terrifying. It was not resilience, it was sothing more sinister, as if the very existence of that little boy refused, rejected his death.
Then, the vision focused on a more specific point. A boy from his cell, older, perhaps eleven. His eyes were full of a foolish, stubborn brightness. In a rare mont of the guards’ carelessness, he whispered to young Cairen, confiding his impossible dream.
"When I get out of here..." the boy said, his eyes fixed on sothing beyond the stone walls.
"I’ll enter the Capital Academy. That’s where all the strong and important ones go. I’ll beco a royal knight. Or a court scholar."
Cairen, the spectator, felt a shock.
That face, that na, which he hadn’t heard in years. No, he hadn’t even rembered the existence of it until that mont.
’Leo...’ His brain, which had erased so much of that pain, now returned to him the mory of that friend.
And with it, a painful truth, the desire to enter an academy, a dream he thought had been his, had, in fact, been an echo. Sothing placed in his mind by soone else, a mory long forgotten.
A few days later, Leo was taken. This ti, young Cairen witnessed it. He saw the guards dragging the boy, who struggled and scread about the academy. The underground door closed. Leo never returned.
And then, Cairen, the spectator, saw the reaction of his nine-year-old self. The boy did not cry, did not scream. He made no sound. He just stood. Motionless, his empty eyes fixed on the closed door.
That was when it happened. While watching the boy’s back, Cairen saw. Through the thin fabric of his clothes, the mark.
Half of an eye. It was not new, it was not appearing. It was already there, pale. Like an old scar. But at that mont, after Leo’s death, the mark seed to grow. The outlines beca sharper, as if black ink had been injected under his skin.
It grew slightly in size and beca darker, more real, and more present.
"How!?" The question echoed in Cairen’s mind, a cry of pure incredulity.
"That’s the mark of the Fallen! How can it be there? Before everything? How is this possible?"
The vision then blurred. The colors drained away in a whirlwind of shadows. The last thing to disappear was his own mark, which now seed darker.
Darkness claid him, leaving behind only the echo of a truth he had no idea about.
He had not beco a Fallen at the mont of his death. Even before that, the mark already existed in him, at least a part of it.
At that mont, the true mark on his back burned. And then Cairen awoke from his long dream. He rose suddenly, gasping, as many forgotten mories took over his mind.
Before he could think of anything, a sound awakened him.
’Ding!’
{Traces of the past have been absorbed}
{The Original Bloodline: ’Fallen Human’ has strengthened}
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