This chapter is drawn from Zyphar Chronicles I: The Becoming, where the boy once called Animas—who would one day be known as the Slayer—had already lost too much to still believe in mercy.
What followed was not salvation.
It was something older—something only the Lord Himself could authorize.

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Nobody care what happened to me. They didn’t even blink. None of them stopped to ask how a boy raised without hunger for power could be punished for not holding any. So I went to her—the only one left.

She welcomed me with sympathy. But she, too, had boundaries. Her family didn’t want her thrown into the sea.

That’s how they said it. Not a warning—an image.

And I wondered: Was I the sea they feared?

I had never seen the sea.

I didn’t even know what it looked like.

But somehow, they had seen it in me.

And within what felt like a single season, everything I thought mine was gone.

I stood alone. In the dark.

I was just…sitting in the dark—alone, vulnerable—outside the door I had once called my home, the place I had grown into with memories and small hopes I didn’t know I’d built.

I had knocked on every door I could find—tried every alley, every promise, every shoulder.

None of them worked. And by then, I had stopped expecting.

There was no point in repeating failure when the silence had already answered. I was thinking that maybe I should move to another city tomorrow.

No plan.

Just the desire to walk until the past no longer recognized me.

I must have fallen asleep, not from rest, but from exhaustion—the kind of collapse that only comes after the soul gives up waiting for its name to be called again.

And then—I woke up.

It was past midnight. The street was dead.

The light was gone.

And in front of me—three faces.

Horrible. Unfamiliar. Almost inhuman.

I felt a fear I can’t describe.

The kind that makes the body prepare to run before the mind understands why. But before I could stand, they spoke.

They said they had been sent. By the Lord.

And for a moment—

just one wild, aching moment—I thought, finally.

Finally, He remembered.

Finally, He would repay something of what He owed, even if it was small. I was ready to hear anything. Ready to follow.

But what they said next—destroyed that thought completely.

They told me the Lord still did not recognize me.

That I was not owed anything.

That I was not even counted.

But—in a rare gesture of something they would not name—

He had decided to give me a chance.

Not favor. A chance.

And so, He had sent His finest teachers.

The first came forward, face sharp and sunken.

He said, “I’m Hunger.”

The second—thin, with eyes like ash—spoke after.

“I am Emptiness.”

And the third, who seemed the quietest but whose presence hurt the most, said only this: “I am Heartbreak.”

I didn’t know such teachers existed.

No one told me pain could wear names and speak with dignity.

But I had no options. Nowhere else to go.

Nothing left to protect.

So I nodded. And without ceremony, I accepted their lessons.

The teachers were tough—so strict and harsh it sometimes felt cruel, and I couldn’t tell if they were helping me grow or just breaking me down.

They didn’t use any scrolls, and never explained what they were doing or why. It didn’t feel like education—it felt like execution under the guise of instruction.

They seemed more like doctors than teachers, but not the kind who heal. They were more like harsh surgeons, trying to see if my heart still beat like a real man’s. They didn’t explore gently—they cut deep, without any kind of anesthesia.

There are no words clean enough to describe what it felt like.       

I was breaking—not once or twice, but every day.

I watched myself torn into pieces so small even memory couldn’t name them, and then I was told to gather those pieces, without guidance, without grace, and rebuild myself again by hand.

It was a kind of brutality that touched both body and mind at once—leaving me hollowed, exposed, and somehow still breathing.

I was left in hunger not for a moment, not even for days, but for months that blurred together until I forgot the shape of fullness.

I was left in shame that lasted not as a feeling, but as a condition—placed in front of every eye in the city as though my ruin were a monument they had been waiting to see.

I was made naked, not just in form, but in essence.

They put me in front of the world with no name and no story, letting people throw their hate at me like I deserved it.

I wanted to die. Every morning I woke up and questioned whether it was still worth breathing.

But the teachers, in their unflinching rhythm, never let me fall too far. They kept me alive, not out of mercy, but because suffering, to them, was a necessary continuation.

And each night—after the day’s tearing, after the lesson carved into me had finished bleeding—they returned. They stood at my side, one by one, and asked, without emotion—

If I wished to file a complaint to the throne of the Lord.

Every night I said no.

And every morning they returned.

Beginning again as though the refusal had never been spoken.

This continued—not for weeks, not for seasons, but for years.

Years without clarity. Years without reward.

Years without the comfort of purpose.

Only repetition. Only the sound of my own pain, echoing between the blades they held.

I don’t know how much time had passed by then.

At some point, I had stopped counting.

Days blurred into years, and years folded into silence.

There was no measure left—only the pain and survival.

One morning, like any other, I rose from the ground and walked toward the teachers, expecting the day’s lesson—whatever form of punishment or erosion they had designed next.

But they didn’t greet me the same way.

There was no demand.

Instead, one of them stepped forward—the one who had first called himself Hunger—and said, “Boy of Animas, we believe the teachings have run their course. The time has come for testimony.”

I didn’t speak. He continued.

“Consider this your internship. Before we speak of graduation, before we allow you the right to a name of your own, you must take what you’ve been given and walk it through the world.”

“If you survive it. If you carry it with precision, you may return not only with a name, but perhaps a title.”

“Maybe even one worthy of remembering.”

I didn’t understand all of what he said.

Their words were always layered—part instruction, part prophecy, part threat.

But it didn’t matter.

I wasn’t being offered a choice.

So I agreed.

And without ceremony.

Without blessing or explanation.

They opened a door.

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If this story moved something in you—if the silence, the fire, or the forgotten boy felt like they were yours too—
you can continue the journey in Zyphar Chronicles I: The Becoming.

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The fire was never meant to rest in a chapter. It was always meant to lead you somewhere deeper.