Vendro, France 1919

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A year after "peace" was declared, and this place is still a shithole. Hell just changed its uniform. Here in Vendro, peace smells like rotting garbage and ash. The cannons are gone, replaced by the goddamn deafening silence of a civilization bleeding out. Buildings are just skeletons scarred by bullets. The fields? Nothing but scorched earth and dead sprouts. The sky is a permanent, gray sheet; sunlight doesn't exist here. And the hunger... Christ, the hunger. It's a parasite eating everyone from the inside out, leaving behind walking skeletons with hollow eyes.

My name is Aaron. I'm holed up in a corner of an old trench—my own private fortress now. Ten years in the special forces taught me one thing: how to not die. The world's brutal truths hammered one lesson into me: Selfishness. Look out for number one. In this shithole, nobody's coming to save you. You save your own ass.

I watch the pathetic mob outside, scrambling and fighting over a single rotten potato. Disgusting. They're weak. They deserve this. I smirk and pat the pistol on my hip—the only law that still means a damn thing.

"Aaron!"

John. His familiar voice cuts through the gloom. I met the old bastard in the final years of the war; he's an interpreter, brought in to decode secret messages from the "Rats." Heard he just got back from Paris. He scrambles toward me, his eyes full of that stupid, naive hope. He's better off than me, cushy life, but he still hasn't accepted the simple truth: This world is fucked. It's doomed.

John drops into the trench, his face lit up with a weird excitement, completely shattering my thoughts about his delusions... His shirt is torn at the shoulder, but his eyes are burning like fire.

"I found something," John hisses, his voice shaky, like he's afraid of breaking the silence. "In the old command bunker... It... it's not like anything I've ever seen."

Right. In his hand is some bizarre... clump of dried mud. I almost laugh, thinking, "Has this fool lived too soft for too long? Showing off a piece of dried mud like it's gold."

I sneer, wiping sweat from my face.

"What is it this time? Another piece of shrapnel? A moldy old book for your useless poetry?"

"No." John brushes off the grime, revealing a box that looks ancient. After fumbling for a bit, he pulls out an object.

It's a complex, fist-sized polyhedron. Made of some dull black metal that seems to just drink the light, creating a cold, dark spot around itself. On its surface, faint, pale blue veins pulse weakly, like a heart beating deep in the earth. It's hauntingly beautiful. And dangerous as hell.

-"Scrap metal," I mutter, but my eyes don't leave it. A sick curiosity rises in me.

The thing is radiating something weird. It makes my skin tingle, like a thousand tiny needles jamming into my bones. Instinct tells me to throw the damn thing away, but greed and curiosity hold me back.

"I feel it... it's calling me, Aaron," John says, his voice dripping with that naive, trusting bullshit, holding the polyhedron out to me.

"I think it might be the key. A power... to save everything, to rebuild..."

"Or the thing that ends us all faster," I sneer, but my hand reaches out anyway, fingers trembling slightly as I touch its freezing surface. "You've always been a dreamer, John. This world doesn't need saving. It needs to be cleansed."

That idle threat... it was like a trigger. A magic word that woke the damn thing up.

Instantly, a blinding, violent blue light explodes from the device, ripping the cramped space of the trench apart. This isn't the light of life. This is the light of annihilation. A frigid wind—a cold so sharp I've never felt anything like it—slams into me, sucking every last bit of warmth from my core. The roar it makes isn't sound. It's the terrifying, absolute silence of... something... suffocating all other noise.

While I'm still dazed, I see John. His eyes are rolled back, mouth open in a silent scream. That naive excitement in his gaze is gone. Replaced by pure, absolute terror, mixed with a regret so deep it stabs me right in the gut.

This cold... a crazy thought flashes in my skull: "Ice Age." The words just appear, like some unavoidable, damned prophecy.

White frost explodes from the artifact, a fucking tsunami of ice. It crawls up my boots, an agonizing numbness that feels like my nerves are being ripped out. I try to pull my hand away, to lunge for John, but my feet are already pinned to the ground by the first layers of ice. Through my blurring vision, I can vaguely see John, his body already encased in crystal-clear ice. His eyes are frozen, staring right at me with a wordless question.

For the first time, I feel death breathing down my neck. An emotion I thought was long dead claws its way up: Pure hatred. Hatred for this world. I was going to die like a dog, without ever tasting real glory. The agony chokes my throat, forcing words out... "I'm sorry... I couldn't f-fulfill my... duty."

Covenant established... The last seeds...

A voice that wasn't a voice, a thought that wasn't my own, echoes in my head, as cold and empty as the ice binding me. W__ke... after a thousand years... On ___ ____ Eldoria... Absorb power... (The voice crackled, full of digital static.)

The blue light swallows me. The bone-chilling cold makes my consciousness fade. In the final moment, my vision tunnels. I see all of Vendro, the whole world, submerged in a deadly white. Everything, even the final screams, are frozen in an instant.

Then everything goes dark.

And then, in the very last second before the blackness takes me completely, I feel it.

A gaze.

Not from John, not from a human, and definitely not from God.

It's a cold, curious observance, from an entity somewhere out there, in the darkness between the stars, watching us—pawns in a game we didn't even know we were playing.

The end isn't death. It's a deafening silence. The promise of a powerful continent is no longer a hope.

It's a curse.

They sure as hell didn't want to save us. They were just... searching.