The beats of war were loud and booming, a grim drum that echoed across the continents. Slowly but surely, the rhythm of violence enveloped the world, like a sickness passing through blood.
The Land of Wind had blamed its neighbors for its scars — and instead of seeking apology, it sought blood to quell its fury.
Armies marched. Treaties shattered. Old grudges, never forgotten, ignited once more like dry leaves catching flame.
And far away from it all, hidden behind stone walls and crumbling monasteries, Raghoul had no idea that the gears of destiny were turning, that fate — as they famously said in the Land of Earth — was a dirty little bitch, and her games spared no one.
Raghoul did not care for fate.
Raghoul trained to crush it under his heel.
---
It was still before dawn, and the mountains surrounding the Monastery of Dying Echoes lay draped in heavy mist, like old men slumped over in grief. No birds sang here. No beasts roamed. Only the distant roar of waterfalls, like the world itself groaning in its sleep.
At the very top of a shattered plateau, where even the air tasted of stone and silence, Raghoul moved.
Barefoot, shirtless, the cold wind slicing across his dark skin, he danced a brutal, solitary ballet.
Every movement was precision. Every breath was a weapon.
His long, dreaded hair whipped around him like a lion's mane, wild and untamed, framing his face in a savage halo. His catlike eyes — pupils grey as ancient ice — watched his own body with ruthless detachment, calculating, dissecting.
He was fifteen years old.
He stood 5'11, built lean like a predator — sinew over bone, strength forged not by comfort but by constant battle with the world itself.
And from his hands bloomed fire.
But not the warm, golden fire of the sun.
Not the playful crackle of hearth and home.
Blood-red fire.
Cold to the soul, but so scaldingly hot to the flesh it peeled skin from bone in an instant.
When he struck forward — a jab, swift and vicious — a lance of red flame shot from his knuckles, hissing as it melted the frost in the air.
When he spun low, sweeping a leg out in a cruel arc, a trail of blood-colored fire slithered after him, burning the stone black.
He didn't think of the "art" of it.
He thought of how it would cripple, disembowel, eviscerate.
Raghoul had no romanticism about power.
Power was the right to survive.
Power was the right to destroy what would destroy you first.
The Abbot had once called fire "a gift from the heavens."
Raghoul thought otherwise.
His fire was a curse — and he would wield it like a butcher's knife.
---
High above, the rotting bones of the old Abbot watched from a crumbling parapet, wrapped in his moth-eaten robes, prayer beads that were eaten by the wind.
Raghoul ignored it.
The old man had taught him the basics — how to harness chi, how to mold the flames — but the tales he told were useless. Legends of heroes, saints, monks who had tamed their rage and become one with the spirit of fire.
Raghoul didn't want to tame his rage.
He wanted to sharpen it.
The world outside would not greet him with honor or mercy.
The world outside was a blade pressed against the throat.
He would meet it with blood and flame and death.
No mercy. No hesitation. No forgiveness.
---
He closed his eyes, feeling the inferno building inside his chest, his bones vibrating with raw, ugly energy.
He inhaled — a slow, rattling breath — and the world sharpened around him. He exhaled, and the blood-red fire poured from his mouth like a dragon's roar, shattering the stone before him into molten slag.
The plateau trembled.
The mist recoiled.
Raghoul stood at the center of the devastation, heart pounding not from exertion but from savage satisfaction.
He was growing stronger.
And he would need every ounce of it.
---
Inside his mind.
Raghoul remembered the whispers the Abbot tried to drive from him.
The fragments of dreams he couldn't shake.
Memories that weren't his.
Blood on the leaves.
The scream of a woman with no face.
A child's laughter turning into choking sobs.
Images flickering at the edge of consciousness, like half-forgotten nightmares.
They are not yours, the Abbot had said.
They belong to the blood inside you. Old pain. Old rage.
Raghoul didn't care where the memories came from.
If his blood cried out for vengeance, he would give it a thousand corpses to drink.
---
Hours passed.
His skin split in places, scorched by his own unholy flames.
The flesh of his palms was cracked and bleeding, blackened by the unnatural heat.
He didn't stop.
Pain was irrelevant.
Pain was weakness dying.
When finally he collapsed to his knees, the stone around him was blackened, the air thick with the scent of ash and burnt stone.
He knelt there, fists clenched, breathing like a wounded animal, fire still flickering in the corners of his mouth.
---
--Flashback--
The Abbot shuffled toward him, leaning heavily on his gnarled staff.
"Enough for today, boy," he croaked.
Raghoul didn't move.
The Abbot sighed, lowering himself painfully to sit across from him.
"You think strength alone will save you," he said, voice as brittle as dead leaves. "But strength without wisdom is just a slow death in a dark place."
Raghoul finally lifted his head.
His eyes — those monstrous grey slits — locked onto the old man with a gaze so cold it burned.
"I'll carve wisdom into the world myself," Raghoul said. His voice was a low, dangerous rumble, like the prelude to an earthquake.
The Abbot flinched slightly.
Good.
-- End of Flashback --
Raghoul rose, joints cracking, the blood-red fire dancing lazily around his fingertips.
Without another word, he turned and stalked back toward the ruins that served as his home — a shattered monastery, abandoned by gods who had grown bored of humanity's suffering.
---
Later that night.
The sky was a heavy black dome, pierced only by a few sickly stars.
Raghoul sat alone on the rooftop of the monastery, staring into the void above.
His thoughts were cold. Sharp.
"I will leave this place."
"I will not live and die as a forgotten name in a forgotten monastery."
"The world will know me."
He flexed his fingers, feeling the fire coiling inside him — a living thing, hungry, insatiable.
Somewhere, across the endless miles of stone and sand and blood, the real world waited. Cities teeming with thieves and murderers. Villages crushed under the boots of armies. Great clans warring in the name of pride and vengeance.
He would carve a place for himself among them.
Not through honor. Not through peace.
Through dominance.
Through fear.
Through the kind of power that made even monsters look away.
---
Midnight.
The fire within him refused to sleep.
He descended into the monastery's underground catacombs — a labyrinth of collapsed halls and forgotten tombs. The air was thick with rot and old prayers.
Here, where no one could see, he trained again.
He faced the tombs of forgotten monks and practiced new techniques, his blood-red fire slicing through the darkness.
He invented his own forms — wild, vicious movements that the Abbot would have called blasphemous.
He crafted killing strikes, flame-whips that could sever limbs, bursts of fire that froze the soul before they scorched the body.
Not art.
Not beauty.
Only destruction.
---
As he moved, a simple thought grew and hardened in his mind:
"If I meet the world kindly, it will devour me."
"If I meet the world ruthlessly, it will kneel."
---
By dawn, Raghoul was a silhouette against a sky of blood and gold, the fire still burning around him, whispering promises of conquest, of revenge, of survival at any cost.
And in the distance, unseen and unnoticed, the first tremors of the new war rolled across the land.
A storm was coming.
And Raghoul — child of fire, child of destruction — would meet it head-on.
With blood.
With flame.
With no mercy.