> "Every star in the sky has a witness. Every death in the village has a reason."
— Elder Kumatar, Year 3457 of the Beast Calendar
---
The wind whispered lies that night.
It wasn't the kind of breeze that cooled the skin—it sliced it. Cold, sharp, and soaked in the scent of blood yet to be spilled. The moon, bloated and sullen, hung low like it was ashamed of what it had to witness.
The villagers of Eldwen danced anyway.
The Festival of Three Nights had returned, as it always did, marking the rare alignment of the Forgotten Stars. For three nights, time fractured. Reality bent. The dead stirred, and the living… changed.
They called it celebration.
But it was survival.
---
Adam stood near the outer bonfires, eyes wide, heart a metronome of fear. A boy no older than ten, yet his soul had known hunger, fire, and dreams that refused to stay dead. He was the only child born in decades to a dying village. His hair was pale, not from genetics—but from something else, something old that slept within him.
Beside him stood Grandma Adams, hunched but unbroken. Her hands, knotted from age and power, gripped a carved cane—a staff more than a support.
"Tonight," she whispered, "you see them for who they truly are."
The fire roared louder as her words dropped like stones.
All around them, villagers began to change.
Some grew wings made of shadowy feathers. Others shed their skin to reveal scales that shimmered like liquified moonlight. Antlers cracked through skulls. Eyes split into thirds. The mystic forms had awakened.
Each soul here bore a secret ancestry. Beastfolk. Undead lineages. Forgotten titans and hybrid banshees. The festival exposed the truth.
Adam had no such change.
He remained painfully human.
---
Drums began to pound—slow, ritualistic. Not music. A heartbeat. The village's. The world's.
"Why am I not changing?" Adam asked, his voice small, throat dry.
Grandma didn't answer.
Instead, she stepped into the firelight.
The heat should've killed her—but as the flames licked her wrinkled flesh, something impossible happened: her body straightened. The cane fell.
And she became young again.
Hair flowing silver like waterfall threads. Eyes luminous with ancestral frost. Skin firm, her presence commanding. The villagers dropped to their knees—not in worship, but in fear.
"She's reverting…" Elder Kumatar murmured from the shadows. "Her final form."
Adam watched in horror and awe.
The woman who raised him was now a stranger carved from ancient myth.
---
But the joy in her eyes cracked.
She began to cough.
Not once. But violently.
Blood poured from her mouth—not red, but pink. It glowed. It hissed. The flames around her bowed as if ashamed to touch it.
"No…" Adam took a step forward. "No, not now…"
Grandma turned, smiled softly. "You must not cry."
Then she fell—no, she crumbled—into the dust like a sand sculpture being erased by cruel wind.
A gust swept through the bonfires.
It wasn't wind.
It was her—her essence, her soul—dispersing in thousands of floating specks.
They rose into the air like glowing fireflies… forming a shape…
A stag. A symbol of purity and silent rage.
Then it burst into black flames.
---
Adam screamed.
It wasn't a human scream.
It was something older, broken from time and reborn through pain.
Every villager froze.
The festival stopped.
The stars pulsed once.
Then Adam vanished.
No portal. No magic circle. No chant.
Just gone—like a soul dragged by an unseen predator.
---
[System Interlude: Elder Kumatar's Witness Log]
> "One second he was there, screaming.
The next… emptiness.
Only a black scorch mark where he once stood.
The ashes of his grandmother spiraling upward.
I saw the boy's shadow leave in the wrong direction. Not west. Not east. But toward somewhere not meant for children.
We should have stopped the festival this year.
Now the Deer Witch is dead.
And the boy…
Something in me says he's no longer Adam.
He's becoming something else."
— Filed into Eldwen Archives, Restricted Section, Locked Until Judgment Day.
---
Somewhere far away.
A skyscraper flickered in and out of existence.
The CEO of a pharmaceutical company poured wine as alarms screamed across the building.
He felt a tremor in his chest—not fear, not illness.
Something… primal.
His wine turned to blood.
And a boy appeared in his office, eyes like voids, trailing the last remnants of pink-glowing dust.