The darkness had always been Sorin’s companion.
Not the kind that merely swallowed sunlight, but the kind that moved like smoke through the cracks of a soul. The kind that seeped into the marrow of men’s bones and whispered to them in their sleep. It didn’t scream. It didn’t plead. It simply was a presence.
Sorin had long ago ceased to fear it.
He was forged in its furnace, molded in its silence, trained in its merciless logic. The kind of darkness that turned hesitation into death. The kind that stripped a man of identity and left behind only obedience and precision.
That darkness had raised him.
That darkness had named him.
That darkness now guided his every breath.
He crouched low beneath a gnarled pine near the edge of neutral territory, the moss under his knees thick with dew a
