He came from the womb of war.

From the cries of dying kings and the rust of forgotten steel. When he first drew breath, the world was already bleeding, and so he learned early that to live was to kill, and to love was to wound. His cradle was the battlefield; his lullaby, the clash of swords.

They said he was born under an eclipse, when Radiance turned its face from mankind. The midwives whispered that he was cursed—a breaker of oaths, a devourer of suns. Yet his eyes, when they opened, were not cruel. They were the eyes of a man who had seen too much even before he began.

He became a wanderer, clothed in rags of shadow and armor of scar. Upon his back he carried a sword far too large for any mortal hand—a weapon that sang in low, mournful tones when drawn. That blade was not forged by any smith. It was hammered from hatred, quenched in grief, and bound to him by the will of something older than Radiance itself.

He did not remember who had given it to him. Only that when he touched it, he felt the world recoil.

He hunted monsters, but he himself was hunted by things far worse. Each night, the sky split open and spilled its horrors—beasts made from memory, angels twisted into bone and ash, the faces of those he’d failed. They came for him endlessly, drawn to a mark carved into the flesh of his neck—a brand that bled whenever the stars watched too closely.

And every night, he fought.

And every night, he lived.

And every dawn, he cursed himself for surviving.

For survival was no mercy. It was endurance—endurance of loss, of the endless laughter of Radiance, of the knowledge that all things he touched would rot into ruin. He bore that burden alone, because love had become a luxury too costly for him to afford.

Yet once, long ago, he had loved.

A woman of light, whose laughter was softer than dawn. She had believed him human, and for her sake he had tried to be. But Radiance is a jealous god, and it punished love that defied its design.

On the night of their parting, the heavens opened, and the ground swallowed her whole. He tried to follow her into the abyss, but the sword would not let him. It clung to his hand, whispering live, even as his heart turned to stone.

Since then, he wandered.

Through lands without names, through ruins where angels hung by their wings, through dreams that stank of blood and memory.

He fought for no cause.

He prayed to no god.

He hoped for nothing—save perhaps one final battle, one final wound that would not heal.

But the world would not release him.

It needed its monster still.

And so the legend of the Black Wanderer grew. Children whispered of him in the dark, the man who carried his own grave upon his back. Temples called him blasphemer. The dying called him deliverer. To the Radiant, he was a reminder that their light cast shadows too long to escape.

One night, as he crossed the red desert where even time refused to tread, he came upon a dying knight impaled upon a spear of glass. The knight’s armor shone faintly with the fading gleam of Heavenly fire. He looked upon the Wanderer and smiled—a smile of pain, and of terrible understanding.

> “You bear it well,” said the knight. “The curse. The Radiance within you… it hates you, doesn’t it?”

The Wanderer said nothing.

> “We are kin, you and I,” the knight whispered. “Fragments of what was once whole. Tell me—do you think salvation still lives?”

The Wanderer raised his head.

And for the first time in an age, he spoke.

> “No. But damnation still bleeds.”

With that, he drew his sword and granted the knight mercy.

The stars shuddered. The desert howled. And for a moment—just a heartbeat—the Radiance flickered, uncertain.

For in that instant, it remembered what it had lost: a man who had loved too fiercely, fought too long, and refused to die quietly.

And as the Black Wanderer vanished into the horizon, dragging his shadow behind him like a shroud, the earth whispered his epitaph—

He was the mercy that the gods could not bear.