The virus spread through the rain and infected most living beings. No one knew where it came from —it simply happened. One summer afternoon, the rain fell without warning: silent, corrosive, cursed. It turned crows into savage mutants, melted the flesh from animals, and transformed humans into frenzied creatures, driven by a desperate urge to devour others, indifferent to the pain they caused. 

Water was the only cause, tainted by a radioactive element that had appeared without warning. It was slow, insistent, lethal. And so, the dominant species on Earth began to fall, one by one. 

The world no longer belonged to humans. 

A cure was never found.

The uninfected sought shelter wherever the water couldn’t reach… but no living being can survive without it.

Yet, for reasons no one could explain, one survived. 

One who, against all odds, stayed ‘pure’.

Leonard lay on a filthy mat in the darkest corner of a cabin, or at least, that’s how it seemed. His eyes were half-closed, his breathing steady —but he wasn’t sleeping. He was pretending. As he did every night.

The place was simple, almost empty. A box with a few belongings sat next to a worn-out suitcase. In the kitchen, only a rusted sink, a wood-burning stove, and a small cupboard held a few cans of food on the verge of expiring. 

Around his wrists, thick, aged bandages, sometimes stained with his own sweat, sometimes with the blood of Rainbanes who had tried to attack him. A desperate act that masked another truth.

Leonard was broad-shouldered, with a thick beard that covered most of his face and unruly, tangled hair that barely let his striking eyes show —eyes of a strange, vivid mix of turquoise and aquamarine. Those eyes were the only thing that still seemed alive in him, that beautiful gaze.

Outside, the silence began to break. A distant growl at first. Then louder, closer. It was a violent, deranged voice:

“I know! You're there! I can smell it! I can feel it!”

A Rainbane was prowling. It was tall and thin —almost skeletal— with strange claws protruding from its mouth. Its wings that flapped violently, and instead of legs, a tail like a mermaid's. It circled the cabin like a beast maddened by the scent of Leonard’s fear.

The man opened his eyes. Slowly, he slid his hand under the pillow. A gun was there. Always ready to fight back.

“Not again…” he murmured, dragging the words as he shifted beneath the window above the mat —now entirely boarded up with thick wooden planks. “There are more of them every day.”

“COME OUT!” the creature roared. “I WANT YOUR BLOOD, HUMAN!”

Leonard's heart pounded. Not with fear, but with resignation —exhaustion, even. This wasn’t the first Rainbane to find him… and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

In the tense silence that followed, his mind was pulled into the past. A memory sealed by time but still raw like an open wound.

All he knew was that three years ago, he had woken up in that very cabin. Alone. With no memory of how he got there. He only remembered his name: Leonard Engel. Maybe he was thirty. Maybe older. He couldn’t recall anything after he turned eighteen. He didn’t know what had happened to his parents, his classmates. No one. But among those fragmented memories, his mind clung to someone —enigmatic, complex.

Vincent Lyon, his best friend. 

The last clear image of his youth was of him. The last time he saw him —and of the state he was in.