Leir did not remember walking back into the heart of the ruins.
One moment he was standing at the edge of the collapsed chamber, breath uneven, fingers still curled around the twisted black ring. The next, he found himself deeper within the skeletal remains of the ancient city, guided by something softer than a voice and heavier than instinct.
The air had changed.
It no longer felt abandoned.
It felt occupied.
A low hum vibrated through the stone beneath his feet. Not loud. Not even constant. It came in intervals—like a sleeping thing shifting in its slumber. The artifact in his hand answered it with faint pulses, each one slipping under his skin and settling somewhere behind his ribs.
He should leave.
That thought surfaced clearly.
He should run back to the slums, back to the familiar cruelty of boys with stones and empty stomachs and predictable pain.
But the idea felt distant. Small.
Irrelevant.
The corridor ahead narrowed into a throat of cracked pillars leaning toward each other as if conspiring. At its end stood a circular platform half-buried in dust and debris. Strange carvings lined the floor—fractured symbols spiraling inward toward a shallow indentation at the center.
The size of the ring in his hand.
Leir stopped breathing.
The hum grew stronger.
The whispers returned—not words exactly, but impressions pressing into him. Belong. Fit. Become.
His pulse quickened, but not from fear. Fear had edges. This had none. This was something deeper, heavier—like gravity bending toward him.
He stepped forward.
Each footfall felt deliberate, as if the ruins measured him with every movement. Dust shifted unnaturally, sliding away from the carved platform in thin trails, revealing more of the spiraling symbols beneath.
They were not decorative.
They were wounds.
Cuts in the stone.
And suddenly, he understood without understanding how: this place was not built to worship.
It was built to bind.
The ring in his hand throbbed once—hard enough to sting.
A sharp heat flared across the small cut on his palm where his blood had first touched it. The wound reopened. A thin line of red slid down his fingers and dripped onto the carvings below.
The reaction was immediate.
The blood did not spread.
It sank.
The symbols ignited with a faint black glow—not light, but absence of it. A darkness that swallowed the air around it.
Leir staggered back, heart hammering now for real.
The hum turned into something sharper. Focused.
The whispers aligned.
Desire.
The word did not sound in his ears. It formed inside him.
His chest tightened.
He did not know what to do.
But he knew what he wanted.
He always had.
To matter.
To not be small.
To never kneel in dirt while others laughed above him.
The platform reacted.
The shadows around the chamber peeled away from the walls like wet ink lifting from paper. They converged slowly toward the center, drawn not to the ring—but to him.
His breath became shallow.
The ring slipped from his grasp and dropped into the indentation with a sound too heavy for its size.
The instant it settled, something tore through him.
Not pain.
Recognition.
His vision fractured.
The chamber stretched into impossible proportions. The ceiling disappeared into a sky of shifting black currents. The carvings on the floor expanded into a vast circular sigil beneath his feet, lines spreading endlessly outward like veins.
He was no longer in the ruins.
Or perhaps he was inside their memory.
Before him, a throne formed from shadow and fractured stone. It rose slowly, constructed from absence rather than matter.
It waited.
A voice—calm, vast, and disturbingly intimate—spoke without sound.
What do you seek?
Leir tried to answer.
Nothing came out.
Because the question was wrong.
It already knew.
The throne shifted.
Scenes unfolded in the darkness around him.
The boys from the slums—kneeling.
The soldiers who laughed as they pushed starving people aside—bowed.
The city itself—silent beneath his shadow.
Power.
Recognition.
Control.
The visions were intoxicating.
But beneath them, something colder pulsed.
A condition.
The shadows tightened around his arms, his legs—not restraining, but weighing.
Desire defines you.
The voice deepened.
Desire binds you.
The throne extended long tendrils of darkness toward him. They did not touch.
They waited.
Leir's heart pounded violently now. He felt exposed, peeled open, every buried resentment and silent wish laid bare before something immeasurably older than him.
And yet…
It was not judging him.
It was choosing.
Or perhaps measuring whether he was worth choosing.
His mind flickered back to the morning.
The dog.
The stones.
The laughter.
The way he had swallowed everything, as always.
Something inside him cracked.
Not gently.
He stepped forward.
"I want…"
His voice trembled.
Then steadied.
"I want them to feel small."
The chamber went still.
The throne responded.
The shadows surged—not violently, but decisively. They pierced through him without breaking skin. Cold flooded his veins. His heartbeat synced with something larger, older.
The sigil beneath his feet flared.
The ruins returned.
He collapsed onto the stone floor, gasping.
The platform was quiet.
The carvings dim.
The ring lay in the center once more, unchanged.
But he was not.
His body trembled uncontrollably. A sharp ache spread behind his eyes. The world felt heavier, louder. Every distant sound echoed with unnatural clarity—the shifting of rubble, the faint cry of a bird far above, the scraping of stone settling.
He pushed himself up slowly.
The shadows did not move unnaturally anymore.
They obeyed him.
Not fully.
Not perfectly.
But when he reached out his hand toward the nearest wall, the darkness at its base thickened slightly—subtly responding, stretching toward his fingers before retreating.
A test.
A proof.
His breath caught.
This was not imagination.
But neither was it control.
The power felt raw. Unstable. Like holding the edge of a blade without knowing how sharp it truly was.
A sudden spike of pain tore through his skull.
He dropped to one knee.
Blood trickled faintly from his nose.
The whispers returned—but fractured now.
Limit.
Measure.
Cost.
His vision blurred.
For a terrifying second, he felt himself slipping—like the throne was pulling him back into that endless dark expanse.
He clenched his teeth.
"No."
The word came out hoarse.
The pressure eased.
The shadows loosened.
Silence returned to the ruins.
Leir remained kneeling for a long time, shaking, breathing hard. Whatever had happened had not been free.
It had answered him.
But it had also marked him.
When he finally stood, the world looked the same.
Broken pillars.
Dust.
Ruins.
Yet everything felt slightly misaligned—like reality had shifted a fraction of an inch.
He retrieved the ring.
This time, it did not pulse wildly.
It rested against his skin like it belonged there.
He did not smile.
He did not laugh.
But deep in his chest, beneath the ache and the lingering tremor of power, something had settled.
The world had not noticed him yet.
But something far greater had.
And next time…
He would not ask so gently.