The Fortress of Framat – where light never reaches the end of the alleys, and dreams are forever shackled by the chains of reality.
Atop a crumbling granary, deep in the western slums—where adventurers no longer risk anything but survival—there lay a shattered rooftop, open directly to the sky. No doors, no walls, only wind, rotting straw, and damp, moldy wood.
There, in that frigid void, two children lay curled beside each other. Their tiny bodies wrapped tightly in a blanket as torn as a spider's web, each thread a trace of trembling hands that had patched it through the years. The night wind slipped through, lifting strands of the girl's white hair like winter grass, while the boy remained silent, his red eyes glowing faintly in the dark.
"Elen, do you think... the Black Continent is real?" Mira asked, her voice hoarse from the cold, but her eyes shining like starlight reflected in a black puddle.
"If it's not real, then why would people die trying to reach it?" Elen replied, his hand gripping her wrist as if letting go would send him falling into a chasm deeper than the one beneath the fortress.
They lay on dry straw turned ashen gray, so decayed that a mere movement stirred dust into their eyes. Every night, rats came to gnaw at the corners of their blanket. Every morning, cold droplets from the rotten roof gathered and froze on their cheeks.
Mira looked up at the sky. In Framat, people called the sky the "torn skin of the stars." The stars didn't shine evenly—they flickered in scattered patches, as if clawed apart by invisible talons. A child once asked her mother, "Why is the sky torn?" The mother only shook her head—and killed herself in the corner of their home three days later.
But Mira was different. She wasn't afraid of the torn sky. Not afraid of monsters. Not afraid of death.
She only feared dreams buried by time.
---
Ten years later.
Framat was still the same—filthy, cold, and stained with dried blood.
But Mira was not.
She stood before the main gates of the Adventurer's Academy, where the rich and noble trained in magic to seize resources in the great expeditions. Mira did not belong among them. She was a "reverse delver"—formally known as a backtrack explorer.
Instead of exploring new lands, she was hired to return to places where others had died, to recover bodies, document anomalies, retrieve erased memories. A dirty job, high-paying—and no one expected to live past thirty.
She didn't care.
She had a goal.
Elen.
She made her way to the mid-tier magic academy behind the main halls, a place light never touched—the facility for special biological experiments. The guards here didn't need a reason to beat you. Students weren't allowed to ask why someone was imprisoned. The screams from the lower floors were known as the "soundtrack of progress."
She pulled out a round, rusted key—something she had stolen from the administrator. Her hands trembled—not from fear, but because the past was about to take shape in flesh and blood.
The iron door creaked open.
The sound echoed like chains falling from the heavens.
The stench of rusted iron and dried blood hit her face.
A small room. Cold stone walls. No windows.
At the center sat Elen, tied to a wooden chair nailed with iron spikes. His body was bound by countless magical restraints, piercing his skin like thorns. Surrounding him were ancient torture tools, many of them stained black with old blood.
His left eye was covered by a white cloth.
Yet blood still seeped through, dripping onto the floor in strange eight-petaled patterns—the mark of the Eight-Armed Demon, a creature once responsible for eradicating humankind during the Dark Soul dynasty, now nearly extinct.
He looked up as Mira entered.
"You came... Mira."
She said nothing. She simply approached him and began undoing each magical lock. Her own hands started to bleed. The spell-bindings bit into the flesh, and each release echoed with a faint shriek—like the cries of imprisoned souls.
"They said I'm part demon. That I can't live outside. That I'd kill you."
Mira leaned down, pressing her hand to his chest—just like ten years ago. The same place. The same trembling heartbeat.
"If you turn into a demon, I'll be the first to face you. But before that happens... run. Run with me. To the Black Continent."
Elen smiled.
His teeth stained with blood. His eyes red and blurred.
But he smiled, truly.
"I dreamed of it…
A land where the earth breathes, where the sky devours flesh, where time is trapped between two layers of reality..."
Mira nodded. The dream had begun.
And from that narrow doorway of the Framat Academy, two souls bearing shattered fragments stepped out—toward a place no map had ever dared to draw.