Chapter Text
October 31st, 1999 A.D.
The storm rages like a wounded beast across the remote island of Ebonspire as midnight approaches.
11:59:59 PM JST.
Queen Luna and her empire walk through the dark deserted wastelands that border the royal palace, the island, and the walls.
Rain soaks her silken gown, and the wind howls through the trees.
Ebonspire was silent, almost unnaturally so a silence with anticipation and fear.
As she steps deeper into the wastelands, her lantern’s glow reveals a nightmarish sight.
Her breath hitches.
She stumbles upon an ancient blood-soaked blackwood tree infested by crows who were feasting human guts.
From out of something was a cocoon.
It pulses faintly.
What made her blood run cold was the source.
The cocoon had erupt from the womb of a dead woman who is now just a skeleton hanged beneath the tree’s branches.
The air trembles.
With a grotesque squelch, the cocoon bursts open.
From it falls a creature of alien birth, an infant swathed in dark red and bright green blood, its black and crimson skin etched with glowing markings that pulsed like a heartbeat.
A living cape draped its back, rippling as if breathing.
Its eyes burn a sickly green, casting an unholy light into the storm.
Queen Luna’s hands tremble as she steps forward.
Despite the horror before her, a strange maternal warmth wells in her chest.
This creature, no, this child was something both terrifying and beautiful.
But its form was incomplete.
It could not survive in this world as it was.
Without hesitation, Luna seized a medical syringe from the trembling hands of her husband, Latos, who had followed her.
She filled it with the mystical serum, an elixir created from divine and infernal essences.
The needle pierces the alien’s flesh.
A ripple of green blood sweeps over its smkin.
Its black and red skin begins to shift, knitting together beneath translucent membrane.
A second layer of flesh forms as soft, pale, and more human-like.
The horns flatten into poofy, spiky hair that is shaped by Queen Luna to be like fins.
The claws dull into tiny hands.
What lay before them now was a human baby…
But he wasn’t entirely human.
King Latos steps back in disgust.
Latos growls through his clenched teeth.
“It’s an abomination. We should end it now, before it grows into something worse.”
Luna clutches the baby close to avoid Latos hurting it, her voice trembling.
“He’s still… just a child.”
The king’s answer was a scream of rage, then the sound of steel, by slitting his throat with his sword.
Then he hangs himself on the tree, with Queen Luna tripping and hanged on a noose by accident, accidentally committing suicide.
And then two lives ended beneath that blackwood tree, with their blood mingling with the stormwater.
When the alien newborn opened his eyes for the first time, he cries.
A sad, empty expression paints his face as if he already understood sorrow before life had begun.
He was born without a name.
A vagabond from the first second of existence.
The newborn wanders, by crawling through the ruins of the wastelands into the outskirts of the island.
He could not speak.
He could only cry for help.
His voice was buried deep within the void, a place where no one could ever reach.
And yet, he endures.
On the banks of a flooded street, he found clothes.
A longcoat with two collars, spiky shoulder pads, a hard-shelled armor etched with fanged emblems, fingerless gloves, and modified baby size dark black and gray Nike Air Max Plus boots with a bleeding gray logo encircled by fangs.
The coat bore a name stitched in fading thread: “The Womb of Ashes.”
He dressed himself in silence.
The goggles slides down over his eyes, shielding him from the world.
He crawled, weak but determined… until his small body slips through a broken grate in the cracked rocky terrain.
Falling in the sewers down below….
The rushing sewer water swallowed him whole.
As the storm roars above, the nameless child floated through the darkness, eventually bumping against a half-sunken coffin.
It creaks open, and his frail body slumps inside.
And beneath the island, in the black water of the sewers, the journey began.
For days, he finds leftover baby food; eats it with his bare hands.