…

…

…

Ascendants, my whispers belong to you, and you alone.

Humanity's shackles released,

Through the power of Soul you transcend death,

To rear the visionless is our duty,

We, the sole arbiters of the tapestry.

∟[The Hidden Hand]

──────────────────

…

…

…

Shacktown was lawless and forsaken.

An inhumane prison of a slum, given nothing but the barest of minimums.

Those who transgressed the Stratan empire, serving the crime of low birth, were shackled to Shacktown.

Yet, they were never outright killed. They were forced into a life of survival.

People were a valuable resource.

There was no substance more valuable than Soul.

But in the eyes of the people of Strata, Shacktown was nothing but a tumor, only existing within their walls as a mercy.

Shacktown residents were the lowest of the low. Less than dogs. Rats.

In the dingy alleys of Shacktown, one young man of 16 years bled out, his life ceasing.

The slick piercing of a knife straight through the gut.

His eyes slowly glazed over.

The young man with long, shaggy brown hair, hazel eyes, and a thin frame all too common in Shacktown…

Died.

──────────────────

…

[Young rat,]

[Ascendant reincarnate,]

[A peculiar existence,]

[Devoid of true purpose,]

[Yet hungers to survive,]

[The injustices of life,]

[The last shrivel of empathy pleads,]

[I will allow you to right your wrongs,]

[I must intercede,]

[Apostle of my will,]

[Accept my breath,]

[You shall breathe once more,]

[Yesterday is no more,]

[Reborn with equity,]

[Reshape the world in your image,]

[Blank canvas,]

[Be filled with color.]

──────────────────

"HUAHH…"

Jett jolted awake with a wheezing inhale. A storm of confusion pulsed through his mind.

He couldn't think properly; an empty and hollow feeling, as if he wasn't himself.

A few blinks wet Jett's dry eyes as he scanned his surroundings.

He was in an alley—smothered between two dingy wooden structures—laying upright against the kingdom's walls. Walls that stretched up to the clouds.

Standing up, a sharp pang struck his mind.

"Agh…!"

The shaggy boy stumbled forward to the ground, his hands and knees digging into the viscous mud.

Information flooded his head like a grand revelation.

Jett now knew of the Mound, the Valley, the Ridge, and the Abyss. He knew of the kingdoms, the common facts surrounding them, and the different races that roamed this world.

He knew the alphabet, how to read, how to articulate his feelings. He knew that the kingdom intentionally made the barrier around Shacktown weaker than the Upper, Middle, and Lower Cities.

He realized the injustices that forced him into a fiendish and savage lifestyle.

And above all, he realized more about the strange and mystical power of Soul; more than the Shacktown folk stories told prior.

Jett realized that he had become complete. Uplifted.

No, he had always realized this. While his past was foggy, Jett knew he had always been this way.

Now he was no longer a husk, but the same as any other normal citizen of the Kingdom of Strata—in terms of knowledge.

The last puzzle piece of his being had been fitted. And now he could become more.

Best of all, he could finally form coherent thoughts. His eyes no longer glazed, but were focused.

'Where am I?'

Looking down at his abdomen, there was a bloody puncture in his filthy cloth rags.

Touching it revealed normal skin. Blood seeped and stained his skin, but there was no wound.

'Did I… die?'

He had no recollection of ever being stabbed, though it seemed quite apparent.

Jett stood up, walking out of the alley and onto the main muddy avenue of Shacktown.

The streets were entirely devoid of people.

The roadside looked like a chaotic painting made by a reckless child. Ramshackle huts, and stalls made from materials of varying absurdity, bone, and vile filth littered Jett's vision as he wandered with a confused curiosity.

On one side of town were massive, dark grey walls that encompassed not just Shacktown, but the rest of the Reformed Kingdom of Strata. They brought down massive shadows onto the town, even with the sky being encompassed in clouds.

Above the walls, the dome-shaped barrier looked like a white glass pane, blending in with rapidly intruding mist that poured over the walls and slowly sunk onto the streets like a noiseless flood.

Jett continued his wandering until he inevitably saw another person in the middle of the muddy road.

It was one extraordinarily slim, naked, old man, his neck bent to directly stare at the sky.

His outstretched hands attempted to envelop the sky upon which he gazed, a wicked and raspy cackle reverberating through the empty town.

Laughter echoed through the white mist.

"Fate! Oh, my dear mistress, you have come! Rid me of this place! Take me to your dominion! Please grant me your benevolence…"

The sickly man continued a long spree of crazed rambling.

'Old bastard must have broken.'

An all too common phenomenon in Shacktown. Such a place was poison to the mind.

Jett wondered if he would ever break like that. He couldn't say for certain how he hadn't broken by now.

His entire life had been dedicated to survival. Perhaps the strong instinct to live dulled his mind to the horrors.

But after his revelation, his future became clearer. He yearned for something. Desired. A foreign feeling.

The wind began to ramp up, tossing Jett's filthy hair and robbing him of his heat. In Shacktown, even nature itself was a thief.

White mist began to obscure his surroundings; a small rumble shot up his body through the mud.

The old man disappeared into the enveloping white, though his hollering persisted.

'The Storm…'

His mind became clearer as his instincts took hold.

Jett peeled off from the avenue and onto a side street. Increasing his pace, relief began to overshadow his fear.

He found a familiar source of salvation

A pimple of earth. A mud mound with pleasant curvature jutted out of the flat ground. It secured a wooden vault hidden underneath.

The circular, wooden door that protruded from the earthen hill was still unlocked, though not for long.

Jett stepped into its dim embrace.

***

"You wanna fucking die, roach?"

Jett had heard this all too many times throughout his life in Shacktown, but threats of violence were actually few inside the Shacks.

In a large, empty wooden room sat dozens of filthy men, women, and children, all relatively young; the old and feeble usually didn't survive.

The whole putrid-smelling wooden building viciously rumbled and shook.

Everyone was in silence. The few yells came out as whispers amidst the loud rumbling of the Storm.

Shacktown was lawless, yes, but the miscreant residents upheld one tacit law: preserve the sanctity of the Shacks.

Despite being filled with mentally ill, broken, and otherwise terrible criminals, Shacktown residents understood that maintaining the Shack's integrity was in their own best interest.

The alternative was to be torn apart by the monstrous force outside, which battered the Shack; even the lowest of fools knew better than to cause chaos inside.

"I'm fucking talking to you," a hoarse boy's voice called out.

"Hmm?" Jett looked up as he chewed his nails, snapping out of a daze.

A large, square-like boy slightly older than Jett angrily glared at him, a few arm's length away, sitting crisscrossed.

"Give me my moss back before I kill you, fucker," he yelled with a slobbery drool, which sounded like a whisper.

"Why would I take your moss?" Jett yelled back.

"To eat it. That's what you do with moss," the boy slowly pulled out a shiv made of sharpened stone and wood. "Now give it back."

"I could just get my own damn moss after the storm you…" Jett looked around as the boy got on his knees and approached.

He pointed toward a random person off to the side. "That guy right there, I saw him take your moss."

Along the wooden wall was a young man, somehow sleeping despite the raging storm shaking his entire body.

His face was covered in muck, soot, some amalgam of mud and filth. He radiated a certain tranquility foreign to the lawless land.

It was the closest thing to a Shacktown art piece; a statement about humanity's beauty persisting through a vicious storm in a hellish land.

Now on his knees, Jett backed up with his hands raised, one pointing at the sleeping boy, an awkward smile on his face.

Jett took a deep sigh of relief as the boy waddled over to the sleeper, knife in hand.

'He believed me? Fool.'

Jett quickly returned to his previous nail-chewing stupor.

...

That was before he was interrupted once more.

"MURDER! MURDER IN THE SHACK!"

'What?'

Jett looked off to the side.

In the throat of the sleeping boy was a stone shiv.

Now awoken, the wide-eyed youth desperately clutched at his neck in a panic, dark blood seeping out of his hands.

His futile screams came out as disgusting gurgles.

The boy's eyes bulged with the purest form of fear, followed by a tired acceptance, and then a complete deprivement of life.

With all eyes now on the pair, the killer stood, pointing and shouting at Jett who sat right next to the fresh corpse.

"That brown-haired boy right there! I saw him commit murder! He did it!"

A mob of people rose. Unbridled bloodlust, greed, and savagery fueled their intense gazes.

There wasn't a more justified kill than a grown male breaking the one law of the lawless land.

Not that justification was of much importance.

Life was the most valuable commodity after all.

If given the opportunity, anyone would seize it in an instant.

'Oh shit.'

Bolting to his feet, Jett struck the killer square in the jaw, who tripped over another person, tumbling to the ground.

'The door!'

With a burst of speed, Jett maneuvered through the sitting crowd, circumnavigating the standing mob who began to surround him.

Swarms of hands reached out at Jett, taking hold of his legs and pulling him back.

Yet his momentum carried him through their weak holds.

He kicked the face of another pair of hands after his speed died, releasing their grip.

Jett finally reached the door, with older men and women alike quickly closing in behind him.

'I have to take the chance… I'll die here!'

Tossing the wooden bar aside and flinging the door open, Jett ran outside…

Into the clutches of the devastating Soul Storm.

…

No one followed…

Not that Jett could even tell.

Everything was entirely clouded with white wind, stained grey with debris.

In the next instant, the ear-piercing wind swept Jett off his feet and into the air.

Dirt flooded Jett's eyes as the wind began to toss him in every direction like a ragdoll.

Foreign air snaked its way through his nose and deep into his lungs.

He could not hear, breathe, see, or scream.

'This is it.'

Flying in the endless and all-encompassing tornado, Fate held all the cards.

Jett's life was now thrown up to chance.

It was greater than his previous chances of survival inside the Shack, albeit minuscule in scale.

Jett gritted his teeth, closing his mouth and eyes, with his arms and legs fully spread out in the hopes of something, anything.

The least life could do was to throw him a bone. Especially now, of all times.

He could feel his organs sloshing around, his body contorting to the brutal force of nature as he spun and spun.

'All I wanted was to live a life worthy of a human. Damn this whole world!'

Jett became lost in the storm. An odd burning sensation filled his innermost depths.

'I suppose it was my fault in the end. I underestimated human foolishness.'

Robbed of his senses, Jett was alone in the storm with nothing other than extreme pain to guide his consciousness.

Then, he gave up.

For the first time in his life, Jett let go of his primitive will to survive, surrendering to the powers at be.

***

You, who possessed nothing, shall acquire all.

∟[The Whisper of Fate]

***

...

...

...

...

...

Fate was unkind to the vermin of Shacktown.

Though maybe such a belief would be better reevaluated.

Jett soon realized that he could still think, and move.

'Everything is quite… comfortable. Perhaps I should've died sooner.'

In his delirium, Jett guessed he had entered the afterlife.

But the afterlife was quite dark. Much darker than he had anticipated.

'Maybe it's purgatory? I never really did anything wrong. I killed only to survive. I promise, deities, I was only trying to live!'

Then Jett opened his eyes.

A stone ceiling above. Below him, a thin, cloth cot.

'The afterlife is a little different than I imagined. Still, quite otherworldly…'

These delusions didn't last long. As Jett sat up in the cloth cot, he could feel a burning pain throughout his body.

'I actually lived through the Soul Storm... How?'

His torso was covered in bloodied bandages. But most importantly of all, he had real pants on. They covered even more wounds over his legs.

Standing up, Jett's bare feet touched the cold and coarse surface of the stone. Fortunately, he could still somewhat walk despite his injuries.

'Where am I?'

The cramped stone room had nothing but the cloth cot which he sat upon, as well as a hole in the corner.

On one side of the small room was lined with a metal-barred gate. Below the gate was a tray, with a wooden bowl of unknown slop.

Jett hobbled over, picking up the bowl, sniffing, inspecting, then downing it.

And with that, he had been convinced.

Jett had made it to the afterlife.