Vathis: Ashes of the Forsaken

Vathis was a world of devouring gods and forgotten graves, a place where the sky never knew true light and the earth whispered with the voices of the damned.

It was in this world of hunger and madness that Aeron Velorian was born.

The child of a priest and a heretic.

A child that should never have been.

And the gods would make sure he suffered for it.

---

The Priest and the Heretic

Aeron's father, Malik Velorian, was once a man of unbreakable faith.

He had been a High Inquisitor of Ozrath, the Sleepless Tyrant, the god of chains and eternal judgment. He had burned cities in the name of faith. He had hunted those who defied order, crushed heretics beneath the weight of divine justice, and brought empires to ruin for daring to question the will of the Old Gods.

But the world had changed.

The gods had begun to disappear, their voices fading into silence. The New Gods—the ones born from mortal desperation and chaos—had begun to rise, spreading their influence like a disease.

Malik had been there when the last of Ozrath's Templars of Order fell. When his fellow priests were torn from their cathedrals and fed to the beasts of the abyss. When the laws of the gods themselves began to crumble.

And he had not accepted it.

"Faith is not given. It is proven," Malik would whisper, his fingers tightening around Aeron's wrist like a shackle. "The weak pray for mercy. The strong endure without it."

That was the foundation of Malik's belief.

And it was the foundation upon which Aeron would be built.

---

Aeron's mother, Elira Velorian, had once been a scholar of the Forbidden Library, a woman who had seen the truths the gods tried to bury.

She had once believed in knowledge above all else. That power was something that should be stolen, not given.

That was before she was caught.

Before the Librarians of the Old Gods stripped her of her name.

Before she was marked as a heretic.

They had not killed her. No, the gods did not grant mercy so easily.

Instead, they had cast her into exile, into the festering pits of Hollow's Reach—the slums of the forsaken, the city of the damned, the place where even the gods did not tread.

It was there that Malik found her.

And it was there that Aeron was born.

---

A House of Chains

Aeron did not grow up knowing kindness.

His world was a cage of stone and silence, built upon the bones of the faithless.

His father was a man of cold belief, a man who saw strength as something that had to be forged in agony.

"A man is only as strong as the suffering he endures," Malik would say.

And Malik made sure Aeron endured.

His training began before he could walk.

Cold water at dawn. Prayers to a god who no longer listened. Bare feet on broken glass. The Pit—a hole beneath their home, where the unworthy were left to starve, to rot, to break.

"Three days." That was the command.

Three days in the dark.

Three days of hunger gnawing at his stomach like a rabid beast.

Three days of whispers that were not his own, of things in the dark pressing against the edges of his mind.

Three days before his father pulled him out and whispered:

"You are not yet strong. But you will be."

Aeron did not understand.

Not at first.

But understanding was forced upon him.

---

The Heretic's Fear

His mother was different.

Where Malik saw strength in suffering, Elira saw something else—something terrifying.

She saw the truth.

Aeron was not like other children.

There was something inside of him, something old—something wrong.

She had felt it the first time he had cried, the first time he had looked at her with those golden eyes, the first time the air around him had shifted without cause.

She had seen it in the way shadows bent toward him, in the way his whispers carried weight, in the way Malik looked at him like a prophet waiting to be shaped into a weapon.

She had spent years hiding it.

But Malik had noticed.

"He is strong," Malik had said, his voice thick with zealotry. "Ozrath has blessed him."

But Elira knew better.

She knew what happened to those who bore gifts the gods had not given.

She had seen what happened to the ones who were too powerful.

The ones the gods feared.

And so, she made a choice.

A choice that would damn them both.

---

The Sealing

The night before Aeron's sixth birthday, his mother took him from their home.

She did not explain.

She only ran.

Through the streets of Hollow's Reach, through the ruins beneath the city—the graves of the Forgotten, where even the priests of the Old Gods feared to tread.

"I love you, my son," she whispered, pressing her forehead against his. "And I will not let them take you from me."

And then she sealed him.

The spell was a carving of runes into his flesh, a brand upon his soul, a shackling of something vast and unknowable within him.

It was pain beyond pain—his bones turning to ice, his breath burning in his throat, his very existence shrinking into something less.

He screamed.

And when it was done—

He was empty.

The power that had once whispered beneath his skin was silent.

He was nothing but a boy.

"Forgive me," his mother sobbed, pressing a kiss to his forehead. "Forgive me for what I have taken."

But Aeron did not understand.

He only knew that something was missing.

Something that had once been a part of him was gone.

And he would never know what it had been.

---

The Betrayal

She should have run.

She should have left him behind.

But she had waited too long.

The priests had followed them.

His father had followed them.

"Elira," Malik whispered, his voice like the crack of a whip. "What have you done?"

She pleaded.

She begged.

But Malik was not a man of mercy.

And the gods did not forgive.

The last thing Aeron saw before the chains wrapped around his throat was his mother's body breaking beneath divine fire.

The last thing he heard was her screams turning to silence.

And the last thing he felt—

Was nothing at all.

---

The Hollow Child

He never spoke of what happened that night.

He never asked why his father never looked at him the same way again.

He never tried to remember what it felt like before the seal.

Because there was nothing to remember.

His mother was dead.

His father had taken him back.

And he was not special.

Not anymore.

He was just a boy.

A boy who had once held something vast inside of him—

And had been left hollow.