Volume 1: Path — [Awakening Arc]
Chapter 3: Caelus Throne
Cael, upon witnessing the scene before him, felt every thread of strength unravel. His knees buckled and crashed against the cracked ground—thud—the sound sharp against the silence. His mouth hung open, but no breath escaped. There was no more running, no more fighting. How could anyone escape this place?
The sky above was not a sky anymore. It was a canvas of despair, drowned in writhing shadows. Thousands... no, millions of butterflies swirled above, their jagged, rune-laced wings slicing through the air like spectral blades. They blotted out the heavens, turning the world into a dome of fluttering darkness.
His body trembled. His hands lay limp at his sides. The will to survive hadn't just vanished—it had been swallowed.
As if sensing his presence, the closest butterflies shifted. Their wings twitched—flick... flutter... hissss—and then turned.
All of them turned.
Their glowing red eyes locked onto him.
And then they descended.
Like a cursed blizzard, they dove toward him in a silent, terrifying storm. The air rippled with the pressure of their descent—fwshhhhhhh!—as their wings created a vortex of screaming wind and shadow.
Cael let out a broken gasp, his mouth wide open in shock, staring helplessly at the crimson sky. That was all it took.
They flooded into him.
Not just a few but hundreds. Thousands.
Schlup! Skrrrch! Their barbed legs clawed down his throat, wings tearing the tender flesh as they forced themselves inward. His body convulsed violently, hands scraping against the ground in a frenzy of survival instinct—but there was no air, no sound, just agony.
They clawed into his mouth, nostrils, ears, even his eyes—his screams were silent now, swallowed by the tide of living nightmares burrowing into him.
Pain wasn't a sensation anymore, it was reality. Every inch of his throat was shredded. His stomach swelled unnaturally as creatures forced their way deeper, laying ruin to his insides. It felt like his organs were being chewed apart.
The swelling didn't stop. It grew, grotesquely, like something was gestating inside him. His belly bulged outward, stretched far past its natural limits, round and taut like a grotesque imitation of pregnancy. The skin pulsed—throb... throb...—as if something inside was trying to be born.
He tried to move, to claw them out, but his limbs barely responded. His body spasmed like a puppet whose strings had been severed.
And then—crrk... SPLAT!—his stomach split open.
From the torn cavity, drenched in blood and bile, something slithered free, a formless blob of pure shadow. It pulsed and shifted like liquid darkness, taking on the vague shape of a baby, yet lacking eyes, mouth, or skin. Its surface writhed like black oil atop boiling water, humming with a cold hunger.
The creature twitched once. Then again.
And then, it moved.
Not away—but toward him.
Like a newborn seeking warmth, it crawled across the shredded remnants of Cael's torso and pressed itself against his face. In an instant, it began to consume him—shhhhllrrrp...—not by tearing flesh but by unraveling his very soul.
Piece by piece, memory by memory, it drank him whole.
And with its final suckling breath, everything vanished into the dark.
He saw it with barely functioning eyes before everything faded. No resistance. No desire. Just a single, collapsing thought:
Just let it end.
And then darkness.
...
"Huff, huff..."
"What the hell was that?"
A boy wiped the sweat from his face, breath still shallow, heart pounding.
"Why... am I sweating so much?" he muttered, staring at the soaked sheets beneath him.
"I'm already sixteen. If anyone walks in right now, they'll think I pissed the bed. Ugh... I need to clean this mess before she comes in, otherwise she would tease me all day."
He swung his legs over the side, intending to stand, but the moment his feet touched the floor, his knees buckled—thump!—sending him crashing down. His legs trembled uncontrollably.
"The hell...?" he whispered, palms pressing against the cold ground. He didn't know why.
His legs were trembling violently, quaking as though some unseen terror had wrapped itself around his bones. The muscles refused to obey, spasming like they still remembered a nightmare his mind could no longer grasp.
Only sweat, shivers, and a hollow pressure sat heavy in his chest—an echo of dread from somewhere far beyond memory, like he'd returned from a place no one was meant to survive.
He suddenly felt a warm liquid trickling from his nose. Before he could raise his right hand to touch it, the drop had already fallen—landing on the carpet beneath where he knelt.
He noticed the color through the rays of sunlight sneaking in from a window corner, dimmed behind a drawn curtain.
He wasn't shocked. He knew he was sick. But today, something felt worse. Normally, he could walk, move, and do everything except withstand the constant weakness inside his body that seemed to grow worse each year.
He didn't know what illness he had. Even the doctors had no answers. No name. No known condition across the globe matched what he was going through.
There were times when he thought of giving up. But the one friend he had the only one who had never left his side kept pushing him forward, urging him to live. Since that day, he promised himself that he would live fully, not in sorrow, but in defiance. He didn't want to see his friend sad due to himself.
His parents had died under unknown circumstances. He couldn't remember how. In truth, he had no memory of the day they died at all.
They only left him a million credits of money with the last name Thorne.
So, his full name is Caelus Thorne.
He'd searched. He'd tried to find out what happened. But now? He didn't care. He believed that thinking about the past was worthless. If it couldn't be changed, then clinging to it served no purpose. That was the foundation of Caelus's beliefs.
He lived for the present.
He prepared for the future.
And the past? He left it to decay.
The only thing one can do by thinking about the past is to learn from the mistakes made—but for Caelus, he'd lived a careful, almost mistake-free life, so he saw no reason to dwell on it.
Using all the strength he could muster, he groaned as he pushed himself up from the floor, staggering slightly before making his way to the shelf located to his left, just beside the bed. The shelf was built into the table above it. He pulled out the top drawer and found two items inside: a large pack of cotton and a bottle of moisturizing lotion.
He took out the cotton, wiped away the blood from his face, then grabbed another piece and gently inserted it into his right nostril. His right side was his dominant side—and also where the mysterious illness had taken the strongest hold. His right nostril was hypersensitive to smell, and the entire right side of his body was unusually sensitive to touch.
As he completed this, knock knock—a sharp rapping echoed from the other side of his bedroom door.
"Fuck, she already came," he thought bitterly, snapping his head toward the wall-mounted clock directly across from his bed. The red digital numbers glared back at him: 7:05:44 AM.
"Why the hell is she so early today? She comes every day after seven-thirty in the morning."
"I need to clean my bed quickly," he muttered to himself, dragging his tired body toward the bathroom. Click... hisssss... The shower knob turned, releasing a stream of water that echoed against the tiles.
Raising his voice just enough to be heard through the door, he called out, "Wait for ten minutes! I'll be out soon, I'm in the bath right now."
Caelus didn't step into the bath after turning on the shower. Instead, he pivoted quickly, his feet making soft tap tap sounds against the cold tile floor as he crept silently back into his room, careful not to let his footsteps echo.
His bed sat just a few steps away from the bathroom entrance, pressed against the right-hand wall. The dark wooden frame was slightly raised off the floor, and his soaked sheets clung damply to the mattress. Without hesitation, he reached for the corners and tore them free with a frantic shff... shff, balling the linen in his arms. With brisk, precise steps, he returned to the bathroom.
In the corner beside the sink and under a mounted shelf was a small built-in cabinet housing the laundry unit. He lifted the lid of the compact washing machine with a dull clunk, shoved the soaked sheets in, and slammed the lid shut with a heavy thump, pressing the cycle button without even checking the settings.
On the second shelf, just above the laundry unit, sat an assortment of supplies: lotion, extra towels, a first-aid box and a sleek can of room spray. He grabbed it with a quick snatch, turned, and hurried back to his bedroom.
Once at the foot of the bed, he clicked the nozzle, spraying a generous cloud—pssst! pssst! pssst!—over the bare mattress. The air quickly filled with a crisp, floral scent meant to mask any trace of sweat.
Only then did he return to the bathroom. The mirror was fogged faintly from the still-running shower. He stripped quickly and stepped into the shower. A steady hissss... drip drip... hiss... echoed in the enclosed space as water ran down his body, cooling his tense skin. The entire process lasted barely six minutes before he stepped out again, towel around his waist.
"Damn, forgot to brush," he muttered and grabbed the toothbrush from a cup beside the sink. The toothpaste tube sat in a tray just above it.
He quickly brushed with hurried strokes—scrub scrub... rinse... spit...—then returned the brush to its place beside the faucet. Then, lifting his gaze, he looked into the mirror before him.
As the fog cleared from the bathroom mirror, Caelus's reflection slowly took shape. His face was ethereal in its stillness, a portrait of both elegance and illness. His skin, pale as porcelain yet touched with faint bruising beneath the eyes, bore the weight of sleepless nights and silent pain.
His eyes were the most jarring with vibrant red, not simply glowing, but burning, like garnets infused with wildfire. They were intense, unsettling, and ancient in their stillness, framed by long lashes and half-shaded by slightly tousled bangs.
His hair, thick and raven-black, fell in wavy strands around his face, messy but somehow refined. The locks shimmered subtly under the bathroom light, streaked with faint white highlights near the tips like static frozen in time or stress etched into strands. It gave him a ghostly charm, like someone stuck between the living and something far beyond.
He wore a loose, black tee layered under a lightweight gray jacket that hung just past the waist, casual yet sharply styled. The tee, while simple, clung faintly to his frame, emphasizing the subtle rise of his collarbones. The jacket draped over his shoulders in gentle folds, its sleeves slightly pushed up near the elbows, revealing a few faded bandage lines from previous treatments.
His bottom half completed the look with dark, tapered cargo pants, form-fitting but practical. They rested just above his ankles and were cinched at the cuffs, showing the tops of worn, black urban sneakers with red-streaked soles. A loose side strap hung from the left thigh pocket, fluttering slightly as he moved from the mirror towards his bedroom.
When he came to his bedroom, he saw a girl sitting on his bed.
[End of Chapter 3]