Fredozy
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Chapter 2: Riven Tharos
🕑 Added 2025-09-04 14:24:58 +0000 UTC'They say the world was broken long before I was born. That when the first Corridors split open and vomited chaos into our skies, humanity was nothing more than prey scrambling in the ruins of its own arrogance. Perhaps that is true. But I was not born into a world of helpless preys. I was born into a world sharpened by survival and carved by war.
Ten years ago, when I was six, a calamity struck the left wing of the Archetype continent, Vorath the forge-city. My home.
Vorath was a place of fire and iron with the hum of sky-docks, the shriek of industrial cranes, the glow of furnaces bending ore into weapons powered by Lumenis. Here, every child grew up knowing two truths. First was that the Corridors would open again. And the second was that when they did, it might fall to us to hold the line… or so we thought.
That day began like any other. The sky was copper with smoke, airships moved over the docks, and the clang of hammer against steel echoed like a heartbeat. Until the heartbeat abruptly stopped.
The world split.
A seam opened high above the city, an unnatural fracture of light and shadow tearing through the heavens. It was not a Corridor in its stable form, no. This was much worse. It was a fractured maw one of the few ever recorded in history capable of belching chaos unchecked.
From it came a wave of deviants. The first shape that descended blotted out the sun. Towering, skin like blackened stone cracked with molten veins, its eyes burning with feral hunger. For a heartbeat, the city froze in silence with thousands of people staring up, paralyzed. And then it screamed.
The sound was not merely heard. It split marrow, shivered stone and shook the soul of all those who heard it. A scream like the memory of the world's first predator echoing through every living thing.
A Tier Three Deviant.
Then the silence broke.
"Deviant! A Deviant has breached!" someone cried.
"Get the children underground! NOW!" another voice bellowed. Sirens howled. Towers flared red with warning sigils.
And then the swarm poured out. There were dozens, no, hundreds of lesser forms, grotesquely human-shaped, flesh warped and stretched, claws dragging sparks as they landed on the rooftops and tore into the streets below.
I remember my mother's hand gripping mine so tight it hurt.
"Riven! Don't let go you hear me, whatever happens, don't let go!" she shouted, dragging me through the chaos as screams ripped through the air.
The first explosions shook the city. The Lumen batteries detonated where deviant claws struck them. Soldiers, Awakened, anyone with a weapon was already in the streets. Blades of radiant steel clashed against black claws. Shouts mingled with agony.
"Hold them back! Evacuate the sector now! Get the children to the vaults!"
But Vorath was an industrial hub, not a fortress. For every deviant cut down, five more slipped through the smoke.
And then the Federation mobilized.
From the east, airships streaked in, with the banners of Eryndor, cannons sparking with contained Lumen fire. Titans of war descended on burning streets and the deviants, armored warriors wielding glaives crackling with radiant energy. Orders barked, ranks shifted. The battle line began to form.
Among them was my father, Aureon Tharos. I saw him in the chaos an imposing figure in Federation armor, helm torn off in the rush, his face streaked with sweat. He looked at me and mother once through the smoke and then turned back to the battle.
"Selena! Get him clear!" he roared to my mother without turning back, before charging headlong into the tide.
But no army could stop the calamity immediately. The Tier Three tore through districts like wet paper, smashing towers with sweeps of its limbs. Two days that's how long it would take. Two days of unending battle to bring it down.
I remember the moments in fragments.
Awakened collapsing in the streets, crushed under rubble. My mother dragging me through alleys, her breath ragged and my lungs burned as I struggled to stay conscious.
"Stay with me, Riven, stay awake just a little further."
"Mom, I'm scared"
"I know, baby. But you'll live. You'll live."
And then like a domino that came in the moment, the monster's roar split the air again as it crushed into the sector we fled through. Buildings shuddered. The walls cracked, One tower groaning above us gave way. My mother shoved me forward, shielding me before I saw the world fall. And I was hurled away.
When the dust cleared, I was crawling from the wreckage, blood in my mouth, ears ringing and my mother was buried. I screamed, clawing at stone, my small hands useless against the weight of a world collapsing.
Her last look was burned into me. Her lips moving without sound. 'Survive'
That was the last time I saw her alive.
The battle raged for two days. Reinforcements came from all three continents. The Archetypes, the Arcanum, even warriors of the Sigils. Hundreds fell before the beast was weakened. And when the city's hope was on the edge of collapse, the Monarch of archetypes himself descended, cloaked in radiance. His duel with the wounded Deviant shook the skies with loud cracks of sound.
When it ended, Vorath was half-ash, half-ruin. My mother was gone. My father lived but at the cost of an arm, severed in the fight.
And I… I woke in a hospital bed, alone.
The smell of antiseptic welcomed me along with the silence of loss. The weight of blood on my skin that was not my own. I wept until my throat broke.
But in the years that followed, I would learn a harsher truth.
"My name is Riven Tharos," I whisper to myself now, "and I carry a lineage of survivors. My ancestors lived through the First Great Catastrophe, through the collapse of continents, through the birth of the Concord of Dominion. Blood remembers what history forgets and mine remembers every scream."
My mother's scream. The blaze that devoured Vorath. The stone torn from the earth when the Deviant clawed its way through our streets.
At ten, when tested like all children for their affinity with Lumen, I learned I was a Defective. My spark was faint and unstable unlike what others had. I was called a failure. But my father did not.
"No son of mine will break to weakness," he told me, his voice hard like steel. And so he trained me. Through pain, through exhaustion until my body gave out and through the brutal grind of a man who had lost everything but his will.
And so began the path that would make me who I am.
