The boy lay sprawled across a forsaken expanse, where desolation gnawed at the marrow of a deserted, dystopian scar on the earth. Warm, arid sand whispered through the air, its dust settling like a shroud upon his face as he rested, unconscious, on the cracked desert soil, a silent vessel adrift in oblivion.
Around him loomed the skeletal remains of a broken city, its rundown spires clawing at a sky bruised with the weight of decay. No living thing stirred in this hollowed wasteland, except them. The Soul Thieves, as the defiant named them, were beings born of nowhere, a plague that bled humanity's numbers dry.
They wore human faces, spoke with human voices, yet their black tongues betrayed them, etched with odd, unknown markings that pulsed with a disturbing, alien intent.
Their method of slaughter was deceptively simple, yet autopsies revealed no cause of death, just an empty husk where a soul once thrived, earning them their chilling moniker: Soul Thieves.
They slunk through the ruins in their true forms, hunting survivors with a predator's patience, until one stumbled upon the boy, a lifeless prize in the dust. The creature's lips parted, its tongue flicking as saliva dripped onto the boy's face, a cold herald of doom, yet he gave no reaction.
A low grumble rolled from the beast's throat, a growl of anticipation as its jaw stretched wide, yawning to half the boy's body in a grotesque display. Teeth like knives, jagged in the pattern of chainsaw blades and sharper than the sharpest sword, gleamed with hunger.
A guttural roar shattered the silence, the beast poised to feast... when a slicing echo reverberated against the city's hollow shells. The creature's head slid from its neck, a clean severing, its body crumpling into the dirt.
A woman emerged from the shadows, her average height belied by a muscular frame, short-cut black hair brushing her shoulders, her face veiled by a scarf stained with the grit of survival. She seized the boy's limp hands, dragging him from the kill zone's grasp.
"Come on, we don't have much time." She grunted, her voice a fractured shard of urgency, as she slipped into a crumbling building.
Her fingers punched a special passcode— 980289 —into a concealed panel, the numbers searing into the boy's unconscious mind like a cryptic pulse, a whisper of fate. The elevator arrived with a shudder, its doors parting to welcome them.
She hoisted him, his left arm slung around her neck, her right arm bracing his waist as his feet dangled, scraping the tiled elevator floor with a faint, hollow drag. The descent was swift, the machine delivering them to an underground sanctuary—a vibrant city where life pulsed in defiance, where peace held sway, a haven the Soul Thieves could not breach.
Yet, in this thriving refuge, the boy remained an outsider, a fractured piece that did not belong.
-Prologue End-