Write Your Story
in Blood and Gold

You open your eyes to nothing.

Not darkness — nothing. The kind of absence that suggests the world hasn't decided what to put here yet.

Then slowly, cruelly, it does.

Cold stone against your cheek. The smell hits you first — damp earth, rust, and something sweetly wrong underneath it all. You become aware of your hands. Then your legs. Then the ache behind your eyes that feels less like pain and more like something was removed.

You sit up.

Torchlight — barely — from somewhere ahead. Enough to see the walls closing in on either side. Enough to see the floor.

Enough to see them.

They sit where they fell, or perhaps where they were placed — you can't tell. Seven of them. Eight. Bones that were people once, wearing armour that tells you nothing and everything. On one wrist, a bracelet with a name scratched into it. You don't recognise the name.

You don't recognise anything.

Between them, as though left deliberately, three things catch the torchlight.

A sword. A bow. A staff.

Somewhere deeper in the cave, water drips with the patience of something that has never needed to hurry.

You are alive. You don't know why. You don't know who.

But your hands — you look at them again — your hands feel like they remember something your mind has forgotten.

What do you reach for?