The first thing he felt was cold.
It was as if his body had been poured into a mold of ash, cast from the womb of time into the bowels of something resembling a cave... no... more like a breathing grave.
Damp earth beneath his skin, heavy air as if he were floating between a dream and a hallucination. His eyes were half-closed, his eyelashes trembling as if resisting the idea of being present.
Slowly... he raised his head.
There was no sound but his ragged breathing, as if everything else had been suspended.
Above him, there was... something.
A tiny opening in the rock ceiling, allowing a faint gleam of light to break on the dust. The light seemed gray, neither day nor night, as if the sky itself hadn't yet decided its weather.
His fingers trembled as he felt his body.
His ribs, as if they'd been rearranged.
His breath, as if it belonged to someone else.
When he looked at his left arm, his gaze steadied.
A tattoo... a dark, sooty crescent shape, wrapped around his bone as if formed from repressed sins.
The tattoo... pulsating.
Then, that feeling hit him...
Remembering.
One last, confused moment, a chaos of screams and blackness and cold... and then nothing.
And then this.
He muttered hoarsely, as if testing the tone of his loss:
"Have I... really come back from the dead?"
Aerial view of a large, dilapidated wooden house, resembling the remains of a church emptied of faith and repainted with oblivion. Its roof was eroded, its windows covered with dust, and its interior... was cold despite the morning.
Here they were placed: children without parents, without names, and without a future.
A small window was shaking.
A gray crow was pecking at the glass with its beak as if warning of something... or recalling an unforgettable past.
Inside the room, among the rows of beds, a boy was sitting on the edge of a bed.
His name... Mayoth.
He was absorbed, drawing a tense image with his black-stained fingertips: a cracked moon, slits emitting from it like a mouth swallowing the light.
His face wasn't disturbed... but rather frozen, as if he had grown accustomed to this feeling for centuries.
Under the bed, a piece of black cloth.
He carefully pulled it out and wrapped it around his left arm, very tightly. As if he wanted to strangle something, or prevent him from breathing.
All the children were asleep, lost in a world of dreams—or nightmares—but he didn't sleep.
Sleep was a lost habit for him.
Or… a luxury no longer allowed.
As dark sunlight filtered through the windows, he stood quietly, grabbed a small bag, and emerged from a side opening in the wall, emerging from the orphanage like a wisp of smoke.
He fled. Again.
He knew every corner of that forgotten place; he had lived there since he could only cry.
He was told that his parents had died of hunger and disease.
He was told… and he never showed them.
To him, the past was a blank page, and the future… a smudge of ink that hadn't yet dried.
The place he called an "orphanage" was nothing more than a factory of child hatred.
Rotten food, unjustified violence, the looks of a maid who wished everyone would disappear.
So Mayuth would sometimes escape, for a few hours, to breathe.
Or... to remember that he was still alive.
He left the neighborhood, walked through the crumbling alleys, where the walls whispered memories of old crimes.
He passed by the river—its water murky, like broken mirrors reflecting an image no one wanted.
He knelt down, washed his face, and felt a disconnect between his skin and the water, as if his body didn't recognize him.
Then...
The man appeared.
He was riding a black horse, his dark coat streaked with crimson ribbons, a red scarf wrapped like fire around his neck.
Short gray hair, eyes that shone like the edge of a knife.
He walked by, didn't say a word, but his eyes... recognized him.
--
Mayoth said nothing, but he felt something boiling inside him.
He continued walking to the popular market.
The carts swayed, the screams rattled, the feet scurried, people selling their illusions in vegetable boxes.
A fruit merchant sat on a street corner, screaming at life.
A barrel of apples fell. He bent down to retrieve them.
At that moment, Mayoth moved.
He stole two apples, a bunch of grapes.
He slipped like a shadow behind the wall of congestion.
But the merchant caught sight of his shadow.
He shouted, "You thief... come back here, you tramp!"
Mayoth... laughed.
A quick laugh, but a real one.
"Sorry, but I haven't eaten anything for two days..."
Then he ran.
With the lightness of a cat raised on ruin.
After hours of escaping and reaching the outskirts of the village, he climbed a dry tree in the silent forest.
He sat on its highest branch, contemplating the sunset.
At that moment...
The whispers began.
Voices that weren't human.
A language not meant to be understood.
But they whispered inside his bones.
He untied the fabric from his arm.
The tattoo... grew. It expanded. It pulsed as if it were an independent heart. It became a dark crescent with cracked borders.
The whispering letters... repeated.
Every week, the same sounds.
The same cryptic sentences.
But he began... to understand.
One evening, he crept into an old library, located on the edge of the neighborhood, where dust covered books like a shroud covers bones.
He was searching.
In a leather notebook with torn edges, he found something.
A partial translation, written in a hybrid language, difficult to read, with distorted letters.
But between the lines...
A single sentence stood out:
> "Life... ends for them... because death... is not death."
He read it in a low voice.
And the tattoo... trembled.
?